An Enneagram Nine Goes Looking for Home

I’m a pretty reflective and introspective kind of person. This isn’t some sort of declaration of my superb mental health or deep connection to my inner self; perhaps the complete opposite. My inner reflections often involve trying to understand why I feel the way I do without ever fully answering the question. It’s often a question of why, every time grief or sadness rises in my throat, some invisible force seems to immediately demand that any physical manifestation of grief, aka tears, be quickly and totally snuffed out. I imagine it's sort of like a tornado siren going off in the inner chambers of my soul, alerting the castle of my heart that sadness has approached its walls and anger has not yet shown up to mask the real feeling. Thus, the door to my heart begins to rapidly shut, and the tears waiting at the gate are forced to once again retreat to the dusty cellar.

The last couple of years have handed me an unwanted but needed opportunity to explore this phenomenon of my own emotional wellness or lack thereof. Traumatic events have a way of showing you that the tried and true coping methods you’ve developed are no longer going to be an option. My therapist described it as the moment when beauty is finally overcome by pain. If there is enough beauty, goodness, and hope to contend with the ugliness of life, then we lean on what we know. But when the things that anchor us to our sense of self, our peace, our sense of home, are taken away or blocked out by the reality of a really jacked-up world, emotionally frail coping strategies will falter.

There are several reasons I find it really difficult to cry outwardly, to express the physical manifestation of grief. The point of this write-up isn’t really to delve too deeply into that space; perhaps another day I'll let you tag along for that. As a brief overview, it seems to come from unprocessed childhood hurt, an identity that was forged in people-pleasing and peacemaking, the mold of an all-around nice guy. (Maybe we did just visit that space).

Nice guys, people-pleasers, peace-makers—we are generally pretty well-liked, perhaps even well-loved. But that comes at an intense price. That price is the cost of never discovering self-actualization or finding our true selves at the expense of others. In a way, I wonder if peacemakers, us Enneagram nines, are really just looking for home, for safety. So we create safety for others as much as possible but never really within the quiet of our own souls.

As I’ve sat with my therapist, as I’ve wandered the halls of my heart, I’ve been both terrified by what I’ve found there and cautiously excited about what it all means.

The tornado siren in the depths of my soul that goes off every time sadness or grief threatens my safety, my sense of stability, of feeling at home with myself, is a kind of canary in the coal mine. I think it tells me something about what it means to be at home with myself. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to create a safe world for myself, but more importantly, for the people all around me. This is the strength of the people-pleaser, of the peacemaker: the ability to make you feel at home in our presence. Above all, your ideas matter, your thoughts, your stressors, and your fears—they all matter. And I want you to feel safe when you are near me.

But, gosh, it's hard to feel safe when it’s just me and what I feel. And here is the great question I’ve had to come face to face with in the last couple of years: What if I went home? What if I went home to Matt?

Virginia Satir devised the phrase, “Peace within, peace between, peace among.” Simply put, it’s a way to understand our relationship with ourselves, interpersonally, and among the community we find ourselves in. Peace between and peace among make sense to me. Peace within is another matter entirely.

But I think that’s what my journey over the last couple of years has been all about. One conversation at a time, one reflection at a time, one small tear escaping the hatch and finding its freedom on my face.

And so the question I’m asking today is, “What if we went home?”

You are loved,

Matt