Introducing the Type 3 Part of You
I gave a session to a client recently, a deep dive of inner work.
I had told her previously that I work with parts of self and the Enneagram, so it started with her telling me some of the Enneagram parts she might want to work with during the session. She wanted to explore aspects of herself that would help her deal with deep-seated fears.
As I asked her to speak to what the fears were about, she mentioned fears related to her own self-worth and how she appeared to other people.
“Enneagram type 3” was not one of the types she had mentioned, but as she spoke, my intuition started to point me to that corner of the symbol.
As a side-note, I always follow my intuition in sessions, which always makes it interesting because I don’t know what I’m going to say beforehand. So I’m learning from it, too. At the same time, there’s a subtle feeling in the background, a sense that I am collaborating with some invisible forces beyond myself.
The Enneagram is a language and, in this language, Type 3 is a part in all of us that can tend to struggle with feeling good enough or worthy without “checking the boxes” of what other people, including the culture at large, have told us we need to check to be good enough, to be worthy.
At the same time, the 3 part of us tends to have an incredible amount of energy available for achieving things, and, at its highest potential, allows us to brightly shine our light to the world – to be a star – no matter our field of endeavor.
We started the more experiential side of the session with a little meditation and settling into the present moment, and I led her through the steps of getting the “ok” from all parts of herself to proceed. This is an important part of the process. If we were to “bulldoze” over the resistance that any part of her had, we would not be true to the spirit of parts work. The spirit is that all parts are welcome, all are part of the whole, and we are not going to ignore the voice of any part when moving forward with an agenda. The part that has resistance may be the most important voice to hear!
When we got to the point of bringing forward the type 3 part of her, this part of her felt very familiar, which was an indication she spends a lot of time in this part. Actually we spend most of our waking life identified with one Enneagram part or another. One of the cool things about Enneagram Parts Work is it shows us what we’ve been identified with. We suddenly become transparent to ourselves.
As we let the type 3 part speak, it revealed it had a complex formula to solve in order to cross the high bar of being good enough. Not only did it have to fulfill the external criteria of having career success, a nice car, and a hot body; those checked boxes wouldn’t be enough by themselves. This part also felt it had to meet the inner criteria of having all that while being wise, creative, admirable – displaying all those positive character traits. As a result, worthiness and happiness felt far away, like there were many hoops to jump through to get to this lofty goal.
Of course, we feel what our parts feel – they are us! So while I’m describing what this part of her felt, in truth, these are all things she felt as her own inner life.
One aspect of the work in this session involved bringing awareness to the toxic paradigm that the type 3 part of her had taken on from the culture at large. To believe that we have to acquire a long list of impressive possessions and attributes to become a worthy person sends a toxic message that we are not innately valuable as we are.
In parts work, we learn to be the spirit guide to our parts. Our parts take on things from the world, like this flawed paradigm, which don’t serve our well-being and human flourishing. This particular belief system, and the great pressure she felt to satisfy it, was actually creating daily stress and real, physical tension in her body. No surprise there: the burdens we carry in our mind and heart translate to the physical level, too.
As we approached the end of the session, I invited her to begin to build a loving relationship with this part of her. Normally, since we walk around identified with our parts most of the time, we don’t have the opportunity to love them. We can’t love them if we don’t consciously separate from them first — there’s no space. But when we make that space, then we have that opportunity to embrace them in love.
I don’t know of any more direct experience of wholeness and self-love than this: than consciously bringing our inner parts into the field of love and compassion we all have within us. Experientially, it feels like integrating — like bringing coherence and unification to what was cut-off and fragmented.
As we came to the end of our time together, she thanked me. I thanked her for giving me the opportunity to serve and to share what I am passionate about. I could say I am very passionate about Enneagram Parts Work, but that really is the vehicle for what I am truly passionate about: wholeness, self-love, and deep clarity about our unique path.
There is help to be found in the Enneagram for absolutely everyone, and Enneagram Parts Work makes it come alive in a way where we can not only have the clarity, but experience the transformation of loving ourselves more deeply than ever before. There’s more to all of us than meets the eye. In fact, the whole Enneagram is within us.
