Type 8 Stress Response
In this next Enneagram Workshop series, we are considering the stress response of each of the nine Types as they are pushed across the diagram to the lower side of their "Stress Number."
Prefer to listen to the workshop audio? For a more in-depth experience with the material, listen to the separate podcast audio post on the Enneagram Workshop publication in Substack.
Stress Response
Although we each have one dominant Enneagram Type, our numbers can look different in certain situations and settings. In this next Enneagram workshop series, we are going to spend time learning about what our Type looks like under stress. The internal lines in the Enneagram circle connect each number to two other numbers. One line is your Direction of Integration or Security, and one line is your Direction of Disintegration or Stress. For this series, we are just going to focus on your Stress number.
For every Enneagram number, there is a range of healthy to average to unhealthy levels that you can be in for your number. Most of us are at the average levels of our number, and when you experience moments that you react poorly to, you might dip down into unhealthy levels of your number and then come back up to average. These are the moments when you are behaving poorly out of the default habits of your Enneagram number.
Sometimes, though, we experience so much stress that we get pushed across the diagram to our “Stress Number” and start to exhibit the negative characteristics of that number. If we know what our default is in stress, we can recognize that our poor behavior is being caused by stress and start to ask questions about what is causing us to be stressed. Awareness of this pattern always invites us to pause in these moments. Rather than habitually reacting to the tendencies of our Type, we can instead move forward in a more balanced manner. If we aren’t aware of this pattern, though, the stress we experience will naturally push us to the lower side of our stress number. But if we realize we are stressed, there is an invitation to instead allow our stress number to be a resource & move to the high side of that stress number instead.
Stress Movement for Type 8s
When Enneagram Eights experience stress, first, they will exhibit unhelpful habits in their own Type structure. The gifts of the Type become excessive & imbalanced, so those tendencies become unhelpful. When Enneagram Eights experience stress & dip down into the lower levels of their number, they are:
