Enneagram: Resetting Your Nervous System

Dr. Chris Stroble / Published November 6, 2025

For trauma survivors, one of the tasks required to heal from trauma is resetting your nervous system, this writes Jamin Lee Cori in her book, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life. Resetting your nervous system is necessary because trauma gets stuck in the body and literally rewires the cells in the nervous system. This rewriting alters the body's healthy response to coping and keeping ourselves safe.

Enneagram Personality Assessment

The Enneagram is a personality type test. Those of us who are older might remember the old Myers-Briggs personality test. The two tests are similar, but the Enneagram assessment has a spiritual element.

According to Morgan and Stabile, the purpose of the Enneagram is "to discover self-knowledge and learn how to recognize and change the parts of our personalities that limit us so that we can be reunited with our truest and best selves..." The Enneagram consists of nine different personality styles, or "types," one of which we naturally gravitate toward in childhood to cope and feel safe. . . Each type has a distinct way of seeing the world and an underlying motivation that influences how it thinks, feels, and behaves."

The 9 Personality Types

• Type 1: The Perfectionist. Ethical, dedicated, and reliable, they are motivated by a desire to live that right way, improve the world, and avoid fault and blame
• Type 2: The Helper. Warm, caring and giving, they are motivated by a need to be loved and needed, and to avoid acknowledging their own needs.
• Type 3: The Performer. Success-oriented, image conscious, and wired for productivity, they are motivated by a need to be (or appear to be) successful and to avoid failure.
• Type 4: The Romantic. Creative, sensitive, and moody, they are motivated by a need to be understood, experienced their oversized feelings and avoid being ordinary.
• Type 5: The Investigator. Analytical, detached, and private, they are motivated by a need to gain knowledge, conserve energy and avoid relying on others.
• Type 6: The Loyalist. Committed, practical, and witty, they are worst-case-scenario thinkers who are motivated by fear and the need for security.
• Type 7: The Enthusiast. Fun, spontaneous and adventurous, they are motivated by a need to be happy, to plan stimulating experiences and to avoid pain.
• Type 8: The Challenger. Commanding, intense and confrontational, they are motivated by a need to be strong and avoid feeling weak or vulnerable.
• Type 9: The Peacemaker. Pleasant, laid back and accommodating, they are motivated by a need to keep the peace, merge with others and avoid conflict

9 Types Divided into three groups or triads.

The nine numbers/types are divided into three groups, or triads.

• Three are in the Heart or Feeling Triad.
• Three are in the Head or Fear Triad.
• Three are in the Gut or Anger Triad.

Cron and Stabile explain that each of the three numbers in a triad is driven by a different emotional response related to a part of the body known as a "center of intelligence." In essence, your triad describes how you habitually take in, process, and respond to life.

Gut Triad –    8: The Challenger, 9: The Peacemaker, 1: The Perfectionist

When you encounter life, your first reaction is to do something.

• Tends to act before thinking
• Anger is always waiting beneath the surface.

Heart Triad – 2: The Helper, 3: The Performer, 4: The Romantic

When you encounter life, your first reaction is to feel something.

• Tends to be overly emotional
• Shame is always waiting beneath the surface

Head Triad – 5: The Investigator, 6: The Loyalist, 7: The Enthusiast

When you encounter life your first reaction is to think and plan.

• Tends to overthink.
• Fear is always waiting beneath the surface. 

So, now that you have discovered this self-knowledge about yourself, how do you learn how to recognize and relax those automatic, self-defeating behaviors of your personality type? Cron and Stabile in the Study Guide to The Road Back to You, provide a four-movement prayer to practice. They call it SNAP (think snap out of it). Here’s how SNAP works:

Stop. Two to three minutes to give your full attention to God and to what’s happening in that precise moment. Take four to five deep, prayerful breaths to ground yourself in your body and return to the present moment. The purpose of this step is simply to wake up (snap out of it) and bring your awareness back to your immediate experience.

Notice. Once you’ve come to a full stop, look around to see what you’ve been missing while you were lost in your looping thoughts or absorbed in your work. So, what’s going on? Is the environment around you calm or chaotic? How are you related to what’s going on? How are other people responding to you? Are you personally in a good space, or are you caught up in default, reactive behaviors of your number (type).

Ask. Now that you are spiritually awake and present to what’s happening at the moment, you can ask yourself a few questions that will help you get back on track if you need it. What am I believing right now? How does it make me feel? Is it true? Who would I be if I let go of that belief.

Pivot. In the process of moving through Stop, Notice, Ask, you’ve exercised self-observation and deepened your self-knowledge. Armed with this, you’re freed up to make different, healthier, more spiritually helpful choices in line with your real true self rather than automatically defaulting to the reflexive choices you made in the past when you were half asleep--still wounded by so much unresolved trauma.

Healing From Trauma

Resetting your nervous system is one of the tasks necessary for healing from trauma. This is because trauma gets stuck in the body and literally rewires the cells in the nervous system. This rewriting alters the body's healthy response to coping and keeping ourselves safe.

When you reset your nervous system using SNAP, a four-movement prayer, you’re freed up to make different, healthier, more spiritually helpful choices in line with your real true self rather than automatically defaulting to the reflexive choices you made in the past when you were half asleep--still so wounded with unresolved trauma.

If you know your Enneagram personality type (there are 9), understand your type’s core beliefs, motivation, and fear, and practice SNAP a 4-movement prayer, you can reset your nervous system, change how you respond, and discover the road back to your real true self. 

To learn more about finding your way back to your real true self, the book and study guide for The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery by Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile is a great resource. 

Always in your corner, 

Dr. Chris