How We Stay Stuck in Our Styles: Schema Maintenance, Avoidance, and Compensation

How We Stay Stuck in Our Styles: Schema Maintenance, Avoidance, and Compensation by Jerome Wagner, Ph.D. Once we establish our personality styles or paradigms to help us apprehend and navigate around the world, we can either keep them pliant, flexible, accommodating, and up to date; or we can rigidly maintain them, assimilating everything into them, […]

A 3-V View of The Enneagram: Values, Visions, and Vulnerabilities by Jerome Wagner, Ph.D. When I was first introduced to the Enneagram, we got only the bad stuff — the distortions, fixations, compulsions, exaggerations, vices, bad breath, etc. When I, in turn, presented the Enneagram styles this way, people would ask: “Isn’t there anything good […]

At the heart of each person’s style lie certain strengths and capabilities that enable us to survive and thrive. We experience these energizers as values or ideals. While all of these strengths and values are virtually or potentially present in our core self and while we are capable of appreciating and actualizing all of them, temperamentally we […]

Integrating the Inner Polarities of the Enneagram Styles by Practicing the 4 R’s: Recognize, Reframe, Reown, Recycle Jerry Wagner, Ph.D. When we over-identify or over-idealize certain aspects of our personality, we tend to disavow any opposite attributes. For example if you think of yourself as right and exact, then you don’t want to consider yourself […]

A recently popularized typology which is moving into the mainstream in personal growth, therapy, spirituality, education and business arenas is the ENNEAGRAM (Any-a-gram). In Greek Ennea means nine and gram means point . The word refers to a circle inscribed by nine points which is used as a symbol to arrange and depict nine personality […]