The Enneagram for Relationships By Suzanne Dion and Sean Palmer
Salepage : Suzanne Dion and Sean Palmer – The Enneagram for Relationships
Break cycles of conflict and strife by using the wisdom of the Enneagram to interrupt the reactivity that derails your relationships — creating deeper compassion, lovingkindness, and healthier communication.
Master viable emotional literacy tools that help you compassionately intervene in the stress-response system — and consciously communicate with others.
Are you ready to open yourself to the true intimacy and healing that can be found in higher living, loving, and relating?
It has been said that your personality is what shows up when you don’t.
That to live a life enriched by openness, connection, and love is to allow the defensive parts of self to fall away, inviting your deeper essence to emerge in all that you do.
Too often, however, it’s our defense systems that are communicating instead of two open and heartfelt people.
Personality coaches and Enneagram experts Suzanne Dion and Sean Palmer teach that these dialogues happen because our personalities are inherently designed for self-preservation and self-protection.
It’s not that the defense systems of our personalities are trying to sabotage us, they say. Creating distance between ourselves and others is how they protect the purest parts of who we are until we’re ready and able to graciously show up in life as we really are.
Suzanne and Sean use the Enneagram, an ancient personality typing tool, to illuminate the path that leads us back into wholeness — and into the confidence to share the purest parts of ourselves with each other and the world.
During this intensive skill-building course in intrapersonal healing, you’ll use the emotional wisdom system of the Enneagram to disarm your own defense mechanisms and those of others — and learn how to intervene in the stress-response system in order to pause, regulate, and consciously engage with others.
You’ll harness these insights to liberate your true self, funneling deeper understanding, healing, presence, and compassion into every facet of your life.
In doing so, you’ll give your personality and those of others permission to relax their defenses, bridging the gaps between you and those you love and those you work and interact with on a daily basis.
You’ll explore how each Enneagram type gives and receives love and deals with the sting of rejection. With this background, you can glean deeper insights into the cognitive, emotional, physical, and spiritual survival responses… and master the gifts underlying your triggers to create healthy coping mechanisms that alleviate reactivity and make room for greater connection and love.
You’ll learn from others who share your same Enneagram type, Center of Intelligence, Harmony Triad, and/or Harmonic Triad about how to consciously solve or cope with conflict — and build healthier, more stable, and more loving relationships.
Ultimately, Suzanne and Sean will teach you how to leverage the nuances of your Enneagram type to be present for people in real-time with more confidence and trust in the many facets that make you who you are.
Are you ready to move beyond reactivity and the ripples of negativity and distortions that come with it?
Join Suzanne and Sean for this 8-week journey on deepening your emotional literacy to funnel understanding, healing, presence, and compassion into the core of who you are and your relationships.
What Is Emotional Literacy?
What Are the Basics of Attachment?
How the Enneagram Gives Us a Better Understanding of Relationships
As you expand your emotional literacy with the Enneagram, you’ll:
- Uncover the organizing principles of your personality using the Enneagram
- Expand your sense of self through your Enneagram type — a divine expression with a unique set of gifts, skills, and personal attributes that are needed in our world today
- Explore your attachment style and the impact attachment has on your stress-response system and capacity for wellbeing
- Learn how the 3Fs reflexes of system overwhelm — flight, freeze, and fight — and the fourth, more regulatory and cerebral fawn response, relate to type
- Master the 5As of the Universal Growth Process for Self-Mastery to alleviate reactivity and help you develop the skills to intervene in the stress-response system in order to pause, regulate, and have a response-choice
- Discover how and why your cognitive, emotional, physical, and spiritual survival responses drive your entire defense system — and why they deserve compassion and appreciation
- Explore the most common defense mechanisms — and the 9 often co-opted by the Enneagram types
- Deepen your understanding of how you handle surface, secret, and source pain
- Learn how the Hornevian Triads and Harmonic Triads can be used to identify the way that you solve and cope with conflict — and leverage your natural abilities therein
- Explore how each type deals with rejection — and expands and expresses through love and connection
- Understand what it is generally like to work with a parent, love, or partner with these 9 particular type structures
- Gain deeper insights into how the complexities of Enneagram wisdom ties together and leads to living a fulfilled and authentic life with less unnecessary type-related suffering
- Explore real-world examples and experiences of relationships by type — which succeed more easily and which tend to struggle
What You’ll Discover in These 8 Weeks
In this 8-week transformational intensive, Suzanne and Sean will guide you through the fundamental skills and competencies you’ll need to deepen your emotional literacy with the emotional wisdom system of the Enneagram, funneling understanding, healing, presence, and compassion into the core of who you are and your relationships.
The Power of Livestreaming Video
You’ll connect with Suzanne and Sean and experience their teachings through livestreaming video via any connected device. This connection is easy to use and will enhance the impact of Suzanne and Sean’s transmissions. Or you can listen to just the audio by phone.
(Can’t make it live? No worries! After each class, the video and audio recordings will be available for you to download or stream in a high-quality format at your convenience.)
Weekly Sessions Thursdays at 1:00pm Pacific
This course will feature LIVE teachings, interactive training sessions, experiential practices, and Q&A with Suzanne and Sean. Each session will build harmoniously upon the previous ones, so you’ll develop a complete holistic understanding of the practices, tools, and principles you’ll need to deepen your emotional literacy with the emotional wisdom system of the Enneagram, funneling understanding, healing, presence, and compassion into the core of who you are and your relationships.
Module 1: Where Your Story Begins — Deepen Your Understanding of the 9 Enneagram Types (June 30)
Becoming a human is no small journey. It is one of great mystery, neurobiology, DNA, parenting and caregiving, and a temperamental blueprint that directs your survival mechanisms.
Explore the divine story about how you came to be through the lens of the Enneagram and its nine fundamental types.
This immersive overview will take you deeper into the organizing principles of the Enneagram system and how each of us naturally aligns with a type… a divine expression with a unique set of gifts, skills, and personal attributes.
You’ll also discover the role that your attachment style, and your reward and stress-threat systems play in creating distortions of reality and/or helping you remain centered and confident in facing life’s challenges as they come.
As you explore where your story begins, you’ll:
- Uncover the organizing principles of your personality using the Enneagram
- Explore your attachment style and the impact attachment has on your stress-response system and capacity for wellbeing
- Learn how your early attachment experiences correlate with the qualities and adaptations of your Enneagram type and why this matters
- Discover your positive neurotransmitters and stress hormones — and how these systems are designed in accordance with your Enneagram type
- Expand your sense of self through your Enneagram type — a divine expression with a unique set of gifts, skills, and personal attributes that are needed in our world today
Module 2: Naming That Feeling — The Process of Emotional Literacy (July 7)
We all want to feel good about ourselves and get along well with others. But what exactly is personal wellbeing… and what does it take to get along well with others?
This week, you’ll gain deeper self-mastery by using emotional literacy as a viable tool for gauging your true emotional state and the emotional states of others — helping yourself and others become less reactive while maintaining equilibrium regardless of the situation at hand.
You’ll explore how the Three Aversive Emotional Systems — fear, distress-grief, and anger — are influencing the extent to which you are triggered and how you respond in emotionally challenging situations.
You’ll learn why naming your emotions, especially when distressed, is paramount to identifying and alleviating emotional triggers… and how this practice can help you fully recognize and experience true wellbeing even when you’re hurt, angered, or scared.
Suzanne and Sean will also share how the 5As method for emotional regulation — awareness, allowance/acceptance, appreciation, (right) action, and adherence — can be used to derail negative outcomes of the stress-response system and immediately alleviate reactivity.
As you learn powerful processes for mastering emotional literacy, you’ll also explore:
- The 3 Centers of Intelligence Enneagram Triads in accordance with the research of Affective Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp — and the 3 Aversive Emotional Systems
- How the 3Fs reflexes of system overwhelm — flight, freeze, and fight — and the fourth, more regulatory and cerebral fawn response, relate to type
- Why the fawn response requires more regulation as it appeals to and salvages as follows: compromise/negotiation (head); connection/resonance (heart); and peace/surrender (gut)
- What happens when you get triggered — and what you look like when you get overwhelmed, defended, and reactive
- The 5As of the Universal Growth Process for Self-Mastery to alleviate reactivity and help you develop the skills to intervene in the stress-response system in order to pause, regulate, and have a response-choice
Module 3: The Defense System & Defense Mechanisms by Type (July 14)
Oftentimes, we get riled up and defensive even when we don’t need to be, which creates distance between ourselves and others.
This week, you’ll explore how your Enneagram type uses defense mechanisms — how your entire being perceives safety and responds to ensure your sense of self is protected.
You’ll also discover how your type provides solutions for preventing and alleviating harsh and defensive responses and system overwhelm.
As Suzanne and Sean teach, learning about your defense mechanisms — the ones that try to remedy your upset before you become reactive — can help you intervene, acknowledge, mediate, and dismantle them, removing the self-constructed barriers between yourself and others.
This is a pivotal step in the pursuit of creating greater connection with yourself and greater, more sustaining connections with others.
As you explore your type’s defense mechanisms, you’ll:
- Discover how and why your cognitive, emotional, physical, and spiritual survival responses drive your entire defense system — and why they deserve compassion and appreciation
- Learn how to identify and name your deeply ingrained beliefs and held avoidances
- Explore the most common defense mechanisms — and the 9 often co-opted by the Enneagram types
- Deepen your understanding of how you handle surface, secret, and source pain
- Learn how the distance you keep from yourself reflects the distance you will keep from others
Module 4: Understanding Triadic Groups — Bringing Your Best Self Into the World (July 21)
The Enneagram system teaches us that we all possess three Intelligence Centers — a dominant center, one that supports the dominant center, and a repressed center. All three centers shed light on your fundamental aptitudes and underlying drivers.
This week, you’ll learn how to bring balance to misaligned centers to live with less (cognitive-emotional) pain and greater love.
You’ll also explore other triad groupings in the Enneagram system, such as the Hornevian Triads and Harmonic Triads to accurately type yourself… and deepen how you show up in the world.
Delving into triadic groups, you’ll:
- Learn how the Hornevian Triads and Harmonic Triads can be used to identify the way that you solve and cope with conflict — and leverage your natural abilities therein
- Gain deeper insights using your Enneagram type regarding how you respond when you don’t get what you want and why
- Explore how you interact with others, socially and relationally, in order to get your needs met and keep your own internal conflict at bay in order to do so
- Learn how you and others respond to life’s challenges and regulate emotions, or not, by type
Module 5: Keep it Light, Sweet & at Bay — Rejection & Connection (Types 2, 7 & 9) (July 28)
This week, you’ll explore harmonically organized types 2, 7, and 9 from different angles to understand how rejection and connection are managed… and how the gifts of these types enhance relational experience with yourself and others.
You’ll learn how we give and receive love with these types, which are considered to be the positive-reframing Enneagram types.
Type 7s, for example, keep it light as they reframe their discomfort by rationalizing, highlighting the positive, and escaping into more pleasurable future options when distressed or rejected.
Type 2s, on the other hand, keep it sweet by denying their needs and giving more, while 9s keep it at bay as they numb themselves and diffuse upset, appearing totally fine until stubbornness overtakes them.
Suzanne and Sean will open up a Q&A session and explore examples of these types by either theatrical role play, class-participant panels, or a combination of each.
As you explore rejection and connection through types 2, 7, and 9, you’ll learn:
- How each of these types deals with rejection — and how each expands and expresses through love and connection
- How love and connection is expressed and gifted to others in 3 different nurturing, expansive, steadily tender ways
- The impact of your rejection and connection response on yourself and others
- What it is generally like to work with, parent, love, or partner with someone who is one of these type structures
Module 6: Improve, Work Harder & Retract — Rejection & Connection (Types 1, 3 & 5) (August 4)
This week, you’ll explore harmonically organized types 1, 3, and 5 from different angles to understand how rejection and connection are managed… and how the gifts of these types enhance relational experience with yourself and others.
You’ll learn how we give and receive love with these types, which are considered to be the competency and compartmentalizing Enneagram types.
Type 1s, for example, focus on improvement, over-idealizing the corrections, and fixing their feelings and those of others when distressed or rejected.
Type 3s, on the other hand, work even harder to overcome unwanted feelings, get more competitive, deny their upset and win the day, while 5s retract into a world of insights, figuring it out, and detaching away from the hurt.
Suzanne and Sean will open up a Q&A session and explore examples of these types using theatrical role play, class-participant panels, or a combination of each.
As you explore rejection and connection through types 1, 3, and 5, you’ll learn:
- How each of these types deals with rejection — and how they expand and express through love and connection
- How love and connection is expressed and gifted to others in 3 different devotedly committed, purposeful, and endearing ways
- The impact of your rejection and connection response on yourself and others
- What it is generally like to work with, parent, love, or partner with someone who is one of these type structures
Module 7: Introject, Project & Confront — Rejection & Connection (Types 4, 6 & 8) (August 11)
This week, you’ll explore harmonically organized types 4, 6, and 8 from different angles to understand how rejection and connection are managed… and how the gifts of these types enhance relational experience with yourself and others.
You’ll learn how we give and receive love with these Enneagram types.
Type 4s, for example, suffer disappointment and use introjection to express or convert unwanted feelings of distress or rejection.
Type 6s, meanwhile, overtly express unwanted feelings and project their concerns and fears on the world and the people in it.
The direct approach of 8s confront, challenge, and overcome feelings of distress or rejection, keeping their tender heart well out of it.
Suzanne and Sean will open up a Q&A session and explore examples of these types using theatrical role play, class-participant panels, or a combination of each.
As you explore rejection and connection through types 4, 6, and 8, you’ll learn:
- How each of these types deals with rejection — and expand and express through love and connection
- How love and connection is expressed and gifted to others in 3 different beautifully romantic, fiercely loyal, protective, and caring ways with these 3 different types
- The impact of your rejection and connection response on yourself and others
- What it is generally like to work with, parent, love, or partner with someone who is one of these type structures
Module 8: Personal Stories — Harnessing the Power of the Enneagram for Deeper Compassion, Greater Fulfillment & Less Suffering (August 18)
Learning from others who share your same Enneagram type, Center of Intelligence, Harmony Triad, and/or Harmonic Triad is key to gaining deeper insights into your own type.
One of the greatest reasons to study the Enneagram is for the development of self — and to better understand those we work with, love, and live with… all of which leads to developing a deep sense of compassion for ourselves and for others.
Your final class brings the theories of the Enneagram and the possibilities it holds for opening up your life, relationships, and personal growth with storytelling, examples, and sharing.
During your final class, you’ll:
- Gain deeper insights into how the complexities of Enneagram wisdom ties together and leads to living a fulfilled and authentic life with less unnecessary type-related suffering
- Explore real-world examples and experiences of relationships by type — why some thrive and succeed and why others continue to struggle
- Expand your connection with the Enneagram system and your type — and learn how to apply it to your daily life
The Enneagram for Relationships By Suzanne Dion and Sean Palmer
