Have you ever felt like you're on a perpetual quest to understand yourself? My name is Tabitha MacDonald, and I'm right there with you. I've discovered that the Enneagram isn't just a personality framework; it's a gateway to profound self-discovery and transformation. In a revealing episode, I recount the pivotal moments when the Enneagram shed light on my Type Seven tendencies, offering clarity during a tumultuous phase in my relationship. We'll navigate the complexities of our psyche, examining the role of childhood experiences in shaping who we become. It's a journey that promises to connect us more deeply with our inner selves and those we hold dear.
Join me as I integrate the wisdom of the Enneagram into my soma Tribe community, where we embrace the power of shadow work and celebrate the unique genius within each of us. In this heartfelt discussion, we'll uncover how our perceived faults can evolve into our most formidable strengths. I'm excited to guide you through the rich landscape of personal growth that the Enneagram unveils, illustrating how embracing our authentic traits can enrich our relationships and our understanding of the world. Let's embark together on this transformative exploration and unlock the full potential of who we are meant to be.
About Tabitha Tabitha MacDonald is an intuitive transformation coach dedicated to helping people overcome their pain as fast as possible so that they can have the love, freedom and purpose they truly desire.
Have you ever felt like you're on a perpetual quest to understand yourself? My name is Tabitha MacDonald, and I'm right there with you. I've discovered that the Enneagram isn't just a personality framework; it's a gateway to profound self-discovery and transformation. In a revealing episode, I recount the pivotal moments when the Enneagram shed light on my Type Seven tendencies, offering clarity during a tumultuous phase in my relationship. We'll navigate the complexities of our psyche, examining the role of childhood experiences in shaping who we become. It's a journey that promises to connect us more deeply with our inner selves and those we hold dear.
Join me as I integrate the wisdom of the Enneagram into my soma Tribe community, where we embrace the power of shadow work and celebrate the unique genius within each of us. In this heartfelt discussion, we'll uncover how our perceived faults can evolve into our most formidable strengths. I'm excited to guide you through the rich landscape of personal growth that the Enneagram unveils, illustrating how embracing our authentic traits can enrich our relationships and our understanding of the world. Let's embark together on this transformative exploration and unlock the full potential of who we are meant to be.
About Tabitha Tabitha MacDonald is an intuitive transformation coach dedicated to helping people overcome their pain as fast as possible so that they can have the love, freedom and purpose they truly desire.
Welcome to today's episode of the Mindful Love Podcast. My name is Tabitha McDonald. I am an intuitive and e-transformation coach, and this is part of a mini series on 12 gifts that you can give your future self for the coming year and, as we start 2024 off, I was thinking about a tool that really transformed and changed my life, and that's the Enneagram. I discovered the Enneagram back in 2018. And for those of you who have never heard of the Enneagram, it is an ancient personality test that has a lot of wisdom, and it also holds the key to personal transformation and development. So, for today, I'm really just going to talk to you about how it changed my life, and I'll go into more details about the Enneagram in future episodes, but for today, I just really wanted to introduce the concept to you so that you have an understanding of what it is and how it can help you. Basically, the Enneagram has these nine distinct personality types type one through nine, and then each personality type has three subtype options, and then they also have dominant wings on either side. What it is is a beautiful gift to help you understand yourself in a deep way, in a way that you might not understand yourself now. I would say that a lot of my clients, when they come in for the first time, don't really understand who they are or why they do the things that they do, and the first thing I say is let's get your Enneagram sorted out.
Speaker 1:
So how I found the Enneagram was back in 2018, I was in a relationship at the time and my partner and I were really struggling and I was a classic codependent. I kept thinking, oh, if she changes, then my life will be okay and fine. And you know, it's not really about me, it's about her. But on the flip side, I also had this kind of obsession with personal development work. So I was doing a lot of coaching programs, I was reading a lot, I was studying the development of self and I had tried counseling in the past and it didn't work for me. But I did know that I struggled with certain things like weight issues, bad relationships. I would go through periods of overdrinking or not drinking, periods of overspending or not spending. It was always like this pendulum of extremes. It was like I was either totally healthy or completely unhealthy. I never really knew how to balance the line in the middle, and so she had recommended my girlfriend at the time that we read this book together and it was on Buddhism and love and relationships. And so I thought to myself, sure I'll read it with you, because, one, I love personal development stuff and two, maybe if we do this thing together you'll change and then I'll be able to be happy, which is classic codependent motivations right there.
Speaker 1:
And so, as we're reading the book, the author says in the book, if there's one thing you want to do to create a healthy relationship, it's know your enneagram type and the enneagram type of your partner. And I immediately went on Google and researched the enneagram because it became obsessed with it, because I had never heard of it before and I was a pretty dedicated personal development junkie. So I was really shocked that I had never heard of the enneagram. So I took the test and it said I was a seven. And when I read the description of a seven, it was like somebody had crawled into my head and explained to me in writing the things that I could never explain about myself before to anybody.
Speaker 1:
And it was the first time I felt very seen and very vulnerable with myself too, and excited, because it was like all of these things that I had thought were wrong with me were all just constructs of my personality, which, in my mind, was relieving. So that meant other people were like me too and that it wasn't just that I was completely broken and had all of these issues. It was that there was this certain series of really common trauma triggers from your childhood that created your personality, the way that it is now, as an adaptive way of surviving, and it doesn't always have to be big traumas. It could be little things like getting picked on on the playground by friends who were supposed to be loyal to you. Those types of experiences create who we are, and we always think that they have to be these big, massive traumas like losing someone or abuse, but really it could be those micro traumas that have the biggest impact and the biggest shape on who you become. And so what the Enneagram does is it helps you take a look at yourself In a really honest way, because it almost puts it outside of you, and I think for a lot of us it feels a lot safer to start looking at who we are when we can take it and put it outside of us.
Speaker 1:
And that is the thing that really helps me with the Enneagram was it was like I was reading a book about myself written by someone else, so I had permission to see the shadows that I wasn't allowed to see before, not because there was an external disallowance, but because my own mind blocked me from knowing it. So, as we're going through the Enneagram, I started reading more and researching more and I'm a classic seven. I bought like every book that I could possibly find on it and I downloaded every podcast and took a bunch of tests to make sure it was right and it was. And the more I started getting into the Enneagram, then I realized there was subtypes and so I took a subtype test and it turned out I was a social seven. Social sevens have this tagline that says I will rid the world of pain. I started laughing. That was literally my mission statement at my Wellness Center at the time was to rid the world of pain and teach as many people as possible to do the same. It was just further affirmation that it explained me in such a beautiful way.
Speaker 1:
I started using the tools of the Enneagram to understand myself, to understand my relationships with other people, so that I could understand how other people thought, how they felt and why they behaved the way that they did so understanding their core motivations? Of course, because I'm very enthusiastic. I'm a seven. I had everybody I knew to take the test everybody in my family, my children. I had their friends take the test. I remember at one point my daughter's group of friends walked in and they were girls I hadn't met yet and they'd walk in and be like hi, my name's Gracie and I'm an eight, and I'm Peyton and I'm a seven. And I just started laughing because clearly it also had an impact on my daughter to help her understand her personality and the way that she was. It would just be kind of like this joke in my house. It was like who knows what's your number, basically, and not your phone number, like an old pickup line. You know what's your enneagram type, and the gift that this gave me was I mean, it's even hard to describe in words.
Speaker 1:
I never really knew myself before the enneagram and I believe that I knew myself by the expectations that I put on myself to achieve. I also knew myself as someone who was riddled with shame, but I didn't understand that it was shame because it was so familiar to me. It just felt like me and I just knew I was someone who lacked willpower and couldn't maintain weight loss or a financial budget or things like that for any length of time. I never really understood that. Those were all rules of belonging and parts and aspects of me that were created when I was a child, and so I kept getting really frustrated with not making progress on the things that I wanted to, mainly my weight, because that's always been number one weight in relationships.
Speaker 1:
And so I started doing some shadow work for the enneagram type 7. And in the shadow work course it said type 7, specifically social 7s, are the most likely to have repressed memories. And I thought, ah, that's not possible. My mind is like a wide, open canvas. I know exactly what's in there. And so I did this meditation and, interestingly enough, I had just read Vessel van der Korke's book the Body Keeps the Score, and in that book he talked about behaviors attached to certain goals that you had, and mine was centered around weight loss and relationships and how there were people in the world who had behaviors in alignment with abuse. But they didn't know, because the memories were stored in this pin-dorers box of your mind. And so I had just finished reading that book and was more curious than ever about why I couldn't shift certain behaviors. And then I was doing the shadow course on the Enneagram when they said that and I thought maybe there's something in there that I don't know about. And so I was also in this trauma course studying trauma and it was all part of I can look back now and see it was all part of this divine plan of awakening.
Speaker 1:
But I did this meditation to help me unlock the original event that was keeping me from shifting my weight and turns out it was pretty bad. I did not know at the time that I had endured some pretty significant trauma when I was little that I had never fully been aware of, and it was just that my behaviors and my life reflected it, but I didn't have any of the memories attached to it. So this meditation unlocked all of those memories and kind of set me down this path of personal transformation and faith in the universe and the fact that I would be okay, because it really shattered my perception of my life and it caused me a significant upheaval in the way that I saw life and how I responded to life, and it required a whole new level of strength and resiliency that I didn't even know that I had and I'm so grateful now, looking back at the experience and I know that most people won't have that experience when they go down the let me get to know myself journey but that was my experience. And, looking back, it was really the enneagram and understanding that my personality also held the key to my genius. But knowing that, when I was brave enough to walk through my trauma and the things that I thought were bad about me, and realizing that working through those traumatic memories actually unlocked beautiful gifts for myself gifts of having a deep understanding of who I am, the gift of presence, the gift of clarity on my life's purpose and what I want to bring into the world, and a level of emotional vulnerability and depth that I had no idea I was not even experiencing. And that is really my story with the Enneagram.
Speaker 1:
I continue to use the Enneagram for myself. I continue to use it with relationships, especially when I'm working with couples who are trying to understand each other, because when you have that clarity around how the other person sees the world, because we're a very self-focused society and just human beings are very self-focused, so we think people see the world the way that we see the world, but the truth is there's a whole bunch of different ways people see the world. Like when you're looking at the head types the sixes, the sevens and the fives we tend to use a lot more logic and reason and ignore the other senses, and we don't always communicate the best when it comes to being in the body or being in emotions and we think everyone does that too and it's just like when you're working with the heart types, especially like the twos. They're very emotionally driven and they think and they feel like everybody else's too, so they don't understand why people don't understand them. And so this is how the Enneagram can really help you in your life and in your relationships. It's almost like an instruction manual to your personality.
Speaker 1:
So we're just talking about one level of consciousness. We're talking about your personality, which is the part of you that was really developed and defined between the ages of about two to four and about eight years old, and this is when the main structure of your personality was really developed and defined by your life experiences. Most of us don't have clear memories of that time because it all got put into long term storage after about eight years old. So which is great, because that's actually how it's supposed to be. So I think what the Enneagram really does is. It helps us on that journey of self-discovery to say who am I, what are my beliefs, what are my behaviors and how do I operate. It's almost like having an instruction manual for your personality. The great thing is is that we need all of the different types on the planet and we all have a unique gift to express into the world.
Speaker 1:
But if you think that your genius is your greatest fault, it's really hard to act from your heart If you think something's inherently wrong with you. So if you really want to get to know yourself and are struggling to get past the kind of old definitions and stories and what you're allowed to see about yourself, the Enneagram is a beautiful place to start because it gives you a manual. It gives you a set of instructions that says hey, this is probably how your brain is working, so you know if you're a type one and you see everything as perfection. But then also you're not allowed to be perfect enough. When you start self-criticizing and procrastinating because things aren't perfect enough, then you'll understand oh, that's my egoic agenda trying to keep me distracted. So now I'm on to you, I've got an eye on you.
Speaker 1:
So it gives you like validation. It gives you tools and it gives you a path for your growth and the people around you to understand like if you're dating someone who's a type two or you're married to them and you understand that they need a little bit more time to externally process stuff and what they say at the beginning of the conversation and how they get to what they really think or feel at the end, and not nitpicking every word along the way and just allowing them to get there in the process. That works for them. That's a gift that you can give someone and it's also a gift that you can give yourself, because you're not hanging on every word, trying to make meaning out of it, and understand that that is their process to get to their feeling, and it's little tricks like that that have a huge impact on your ability to understand people, yourself and relationships work relationships, family relationships, romantic relationships all of the different types that we get to experience in this, you know, human journey of ours. So if you're interested in learning more about the Enneagram, I'm definitely going to be covering more of it on this podcast.
Speaker 1:
But the thing I would suggest is that you don't get obsessed with typing yourself and don't be in a hurry, because the journey of learning your Enneagram type is the experience you're after. It's the journey of discovering who you are. So you could go, take a million tests and ask somebody to tell you who you are, or you could go through the work of discovering it for yourself, because that is really the gift. It's going through the process of saying who am I, who am I really, and I love the fact that I took that journey and that I do understand how I operate in the world and that I also know that I have choice to create however. I want to be who I want, but also understanding that the core operating structure is always going to be a social seven, and I actually love that. Even with the challenges and the you know hardships of it, I still love who I am now and it's from a place of self acceptance and also seeing the bigger picture of why I had to go through all of those experiences to become the person that I am today.
Speaker 1:
So if you're looking for more tests, I do have some on. I'll put them in the show notes, some easy ones, the podcast, if you really want to take a deep dive into the Enneagram and have a really good, thorough understanding of it. The one I recommend is Enneagram 2.0 by Beatrice Chestnut and Eurani O Piazz. It's a great podcast. I love how they really go into the psychological side and the spirituality side of the Enneagram.
Speaker 1:
Some of the older religious texts that I had read about the Enneagram there was a little bit more shame thrown into how they described each type and I'm like I can't stand shame as a way of education and so I shy away from it, not shy like force it. I actually forcefully pushed it away from me. If I'm reading text that I feel is shaming, we have enough shame in our society. We don't need to add anymore. So I love that podcast.
Speaker 1:
I love the books that they've published about the Enneagram. I think they're very easy to read manuals. There's a lot of great content out there. You know. Find what resonates with you. In my course, soma Tribe, which is my monthly membership program, I include a lot of Enneagram training, especially when we're doing shadow work, because most of us don't understand how our personality operates or we think there's something wrong with it, instead of being able to see the genius of the way our mind is wired and to learn how to use it like the tool that it is meant to be, so thank you so much for joining me today. I am so excited to share information about the Enneagram with people, and I really I can't wait to hear about your journeys with the Enneagram and how it helps transform your experience of yourself. Until next time, my name is Tabitha McDonald, and thank you so much for joining me on the Mindful Love Podcast today.