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Enneagram Typing

Each of us comes into the world embodying essential qualities such as joy, love, curiosity, and compassion. Our personality is a necessary survival strategy, layered on top of our essential self and largely driven by our unconscious mind. The more challenges we experience, the more entrenched the patterns of personality become as we struggle to employ our survival strategy to overcome these challenges. As a result, the personality layer can become so thick that we can experience disconnection from our underlying essential self. The Enneagram is a sophisticated, widely accepted, and tremendously useful tool that helps us understand and successfully manage our personality. It is useful not only for self-understanding but also identifies particular strengths, challenges, self-deceptions or myths associated with our personality type. It provides a wide range of developmental material specifically designed for emotional advancement of each type.

The Enneagram helps us:

  • to understand what motivates and drives our behavior,
  • to understand the behavior of others in our lives,
  • to be more effective in our interactions with others,
  • to be more successful in managing our thoughts, feelings and behaviors,
  • to understand specifically how our personality is a coping strategy,
  • to tap into the totality of who we are by loosening the constraints of our personality,
  • to be a more effective parent through understanding our children’s personality types,
  • to be a more effective manager by speaking the motivational language of those we supervise, and
  • to be more compassionate and effective in dealing with challenging people of all walks of life.

Dr. Franklin utilizes the Enneagram in Individual, Couples and Group therapies and has had hundreds of hours of training with the leaders in this field including Dr. David Daniels, Helen Palmer, Richard Riso, Russ Hudson, Richard Rhor, and Thomas Condon.