Question: Can Trauma Affect or Change your Enneagram Type, Tritype®, or Subtype?

Katherine: Trauma does not change your Enneagram Type, Tritype®, or Subtype, as they are inborn and govern how you perceive, defend, and manage your reality.

Trauma can, however, cause conscious and/or unconscious emotional patterns of distress such as fear, anxiety, anger, shock, sadness, and/or grief. These emotional patterns can be reactive and excessive, emotionally flat and shut down, and/or everything in between. These reactions or lack thereof can mask your inner motivations or make it difficult for you to recognize the defense strategy you are using and why you are using it. This is largely due to misidentifications.

These misidentifications can happen with or without trauma. Having said that, trauma is known to cause extremely painful memories that can be triggered by events that appear to be similar to the early traumatic event(s).

Each Enneagram Type, Tritype®, and Subtype will manage trauma according to the idealized image, core fears, passions, fixations, and convictions of the defense strategies. The strategies of each Enneagram Type in the Tritype® merge to create a more specific view.

If you have suffered a painful sense of loss, you know what it means to feel emotionally highjacked. Painful memories can change your outlook on life and change your identification. Every experience you have had, whether joyful or tragic, has impacted your sense of self and your sense of well-being.

What you may not know is that your Enneagram Type, Tritype®, and Subtype governed the way you managed the pain then and are still in charge of the way you manage that pain and suffering now.

Trauma:
What is trauma? In simple terms, trauma is a shocking, deeply upsetting disturbance or event that caused you to feel fear, anxiety, pain, distress, and suffering. Sometimes it can lead to long-term suffering whenever you experience similar events.

The Enneagram:
In the human condition, we all have a unique personality that includes our instinctual drives, our ego, and our higher, more spiritual “essential” qualities. The Enneagram is a 9-point personality system that is a sophisticated yet easily understood typology that identifies nine distinct personality types, each with its own view of reality, inner motivations, and sense of integrity.

Subtype:
In the context of the Enneagram, three instinctual drives govern the more primal strategies for survival known as the Instinctual Subtypes: Self-preservation, Social and Sexual. The subtypes reveal the most unconscious aspects of personality and relate to three key domains of life-how we take care of ourselves, relate to others, and create personal, intimate bonds.

Tritype®:
Tritype® is a 27-point personality system that is based on the theory that an individual uses three Enneagram Types, not just one. These three types occur as one in each of the three centers of intelligence: head (5,6,7), heart (2,3,4), and gut (8,9,1) and are used in a preferred, continuously oscillating, descending stacking order, which create a “new" type unto itself with its own worldview, coping mechanisms, and defense strategies. One of these three types is dominant and is in charge of your Tritype® defense system.

Truetype and Trauma:
The Enneagram Types, Tritypes®, and Subtypes combine to create a powerful defense system that is a result of your inborn nature. Traumas, on the other hand, are a result of the painful experiences and circumstances you have encountered in your life, as well as the way in which you did or did not receive nurturing when you needed it or in the way you needed it.

Your defense strategy is an amazing tool designed to safeguard your survival at all costs, whether real or imagined. And it does indeed do just that …but depending on your understanding of your Enneagram Type, Tritype®, and Subtypes, it may not feel like it is much help.

What you may not know, however, is that when understood, you can work with your defense strategies to create and sustain more meaningful and lasting relationships as well as a greater sense of well-being.

Enneagram Types, Tritypes®, Subtypes and Trauma 5-Week Masterclass:
During this interactive 5-week intensive, Katherine focused on the dynamic relationship between defense strategies, coping mechanisms, and traumas. The concept of trauma is relative to the degree to which you suffered as a result of the traumatic event(s). She has found that naming and tagging early experiences creates the opportunity for a “deeply felt” insight that can lead to a marked change in perspective.

With these insights, people can work with old patterns in a new way. Using all three centers: your head type (thoughts and preconceived ideas), heart type (feelings and emotions), and gut type (sensations and convictions), in the right balance, at the right moment in time, you can tag and release rigid beliefs, negative emotions, and self-defeating behaviors. With these insights, you will naturally feel lighter, more relaxed, and clear-minded, often feeling emotionally touched and physically transformed.

More on Tritype® here:
Katherine created a test that has been programmed to pick up particular patterns that the types use.
Take the Test here: https://enneagramtritypetest.com
General Information: www.katherinefauvre.com/tritype
YouTube: Katherine Fauvre | Creator of Tritype®