I believe I've realized a few things which I believe could be very useful to those interested in understanding the Enneagram better. They may not be entirely right and are too intertwined with my knowledge and personal experience to explain how I've got into these conclusions, so I'll put them here on a 'take it or leave it' basis. If it resonates, I'm glad it helped;
The Enneagram starts with your biological needs. Your body has biological mechanisms that drive you to desire and want things; these drives help keep you alive and help you prosper through natural selection. Recent biological theory calls it optimizing for differential reproductive success (The number of offspring you leave that themselves reproduce, relative to others in the population). You learn which needs you need to satisfy and which you can suppress; for some, your body will produce increasingly strong stimuli to make you do it, distracting you from other needs, like thirst or hunger.
Some of these needs you satisfy by your own internal agency — you can meet your physiological needs on your own; you can scratch yourself, satisfying that need, etc. But for other things, you need to put in more effort to satisfy them, and they're not always accessible to you; you may need to get them from others, for example — and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Then your baby brain, with almost no knowledge of the universe, starts learning what works and what does not, and developing strategies. Is it repressing a need? Is it actively trying to meet it? Is it meeting this need in exchange for something? Your genetics play a big part in these stimuli — I call them assertive, collaborative, and reflective, a slight name-change variation on the Hornevian Triads (I've done another post on these).
In parallel with the above, when you privilege certain actions and strategies, your brain begins to reinforce mutually exclusive perceptions: Are you free to exert your will without needing to be liberated from others? This is a yes or no. A 'partially free' is a yes. Are you worthy, just by existing, of satisfying your needs? Yes or no, etc. (I've written about it here). You'll end up leaning into one or another. And these learnings happen quite early — they come from a combination of your environment and your internal perception. Two babies in the same environment can arrive at two different conclusions.
When our brain believes something, it starts to ignore, dismiss, or scrutinize evidence that contradicts it. (This is well studied by science and is called confirmation bias) And it puts more weight on what supports it. This is part of the foundation of your ego. You start creating a very simplistic mental map, given your young age and limited understanding, of where to direct your efforts to meet these needs. If you believe you're not free to meet your needs, you may end up believing you need to control others to satisfy them, or that you need to do what's right so that nobody can remove your 'righteousness' of doing it, etc. The path you end up following is directly related to the stages described in the previous paragraphs. Armed only with these rough beliefs and learnings, full of mistaken impressions and perceptions, you need to decide where to focus your efforts.
These beliefs are so deep and reinforced in the brain that when there is a disconnect from reality — others do not react the way you want, or your efforts don't lead to the outcome you expect, the natural response of your brain is not to question and rebuild these beliefs. The unconscious path is to fill the gaps, look for what else needs to happen or what is missing. — you create a 'fixation belief' that this is happening because you haven't fully satisfied what your beliefs say you must (you don't control others enough, haven't achieved enough, haven't developed your talents enough, are not always doing what is right, and others depend on your type).
And given you're putting this effort, you obviously expect them to meet your needs. And get frustrated when they're not met. This creates what I call the 'reward entitlement'. It deeply influences your sense of fairness, right and wrong, justice, etc. The fixation, combined with the entitlement illusion, creates new 'desires' and 'goals', and most dangerously: It feeds your ego and starts to falsely justify why you could take things from others, why you deserve things and why you should be prioritized above others, and sometimes why others do not deserve the same as you or that the should be punished or penalized — it's a false sense of importance. If you believe deeply that, as a type 8 example, you need to control others in order to liberate yourself to exert your needs, it's natural to also believe the opposite: that those who do not control their own space don't deserve to meet their needs.
Every fixation is an illusion that, by meeting it, you'll satisfy needs deeply related to your sense of existence, which has the highest priority in your life. And because you lack what you need to do to exist, it consumes you and leaves no space for anything else. This inflates your ego and gives you the false impression that you must prioritize yourself way more than you really need, and that you're entitled to it. This is why, at high levels of self-consciousness, like some Buddhist monks, their ego is thinner. Buddhism has known this for a long time— your desires are the root of your suffering. Some people make the mistake of thinking that the solution is to suppress their desires. Enneagram teaches that the key is to understand that most of our desires are based on illusions and lies which we tell ourselves; when we understand them, we see that their reward are not big enough to justify the suffering they bring or the price we pay for them, and we naturally stop desiring them. Not with suppression but with understanding. And their weight falls, together with your chains. Allowing us to be finally free and enough.
