Shame of the Heart Center: Intrapersonal vs Interpersonal

One of the central elements of the Enneagram of Personality are three powerful emotional affects that underlie and unconsciously motivate the Nine Types: Rage, Shame, and Fear. The Nine Types of the Enneagram arise from the relationships between the body, the heart, and the mind, and rage, shame, and fear are described as reactions in the respective centers to the pain of psychologically separating from “the source”, whether that can be understood in spiritual terms or in psychological terms, ie. individuation from our mothers. Regardless of one’s framework, they are inevitable consequences of being an entity that has a body, a heart, and a mind that our personality is constantly managing.

 Generally speaking, rage and fear are somewhat straightforward and widely understood as the anger that is a response to the demands that are constantly put upon our bodies and life force and fear as the anxiety that stems from trying to make sense of an uncertain and chaotic world as a vulnerable living being.

Shame in the context of the Enneagram, however, is less straightforward. It’s widely interpreted as the kind of shame brought about by stepping out of alignment of the expectations of society or by negative judgement from others. This is shame, in the colloquial sense, which is interpersonal shame, a sense of being disappointing, bad, or unworthy in the eyes of others that leads to a sense of being flawed or inadequate. Because this is the typical meaning of shame, it would seem to naturally be what’s meant. Like so many terms within the Enneagram, such as “passion”, “fixation”, “virtue” and so many others, “shame” requires unpacking, because the shame underlying the Heart Center is not interpersonal. It’s more complex and psychological.

The shame of the Heart Center refers to intrapersonal shame, a painful emotional response to the sense that one’s inner sense of identity is deficient, flawed, or even empty that results from a weak or insubstantial sense of self. It arises on the grounds of one’s own judgment about oneself, a weakness in one’s own ability to be in touch with and the consequential difficulty in authentically expressing one’s sense of identity, not in reaction to or anticipation of how others might feel about oneself. Intrapersonal shame can, but not necessarily, be followed by interpersonal shame depending on how individuals and certain types try to resource a more substantial sense of self.

The body, heart, and mind represent three distinct layers of selfhood through which our sense of self is maintained via our internal relationships (mediated by the object relational affects of attachment, frustration, and rejection) to sensation, feeling, and cognition. The heart is the center through which we experience, know, and express our sense of identity. The types in the heart center represent three universal ways all human beings know and experience identity.

The "image" preoccupation in "image types" is not about an exclusively outward appearance or attitude. The self-image is an internal representation of ourselves that we internally uphold to give ourselves a sense of identity, although it is incomplete. It is a kind of necessary psychological proxy for our identity, an almost "short hand" of identity that does not encompass the totality of our identity (because identity is kind of endless). Instead, it is merely an incomplete emotional-mental representation.

This self-image is something all of us internally uphold and maintain to and for ourselves, but because it is incomplete and composed of a mix of emotional and conceptual impressions, it lacks a sense of feeling fully real and encompassing all of our complexity. Thus, the self-image requires ongoing validation and reinforcement. This is especially true if, in early life, our parents weren’t able to give us proper emotional attunement and mirroring early in life. Our parents' capacity to see and mirror us serves as a template for giving mirroring and attunement to ourselves. Thus, in most people, our connection to our deeper sense of self and identity is weak and deficient.

To compensate, we all invest a great deal in investing in, maintaining, and bolstering the value and validity of the self-image. We do this, in part, by engaging in certain behaviors, proving things to ourselves, repeating emotional patterns and certain thoughts, adopting certain outlooks. We also try to buy into the validity of the self image by drawing on reinforcement from others, seeking validation and mirroring. This is where interpersonal shame comes in. If our own sense of connection with ourselves is weak or if we experience uncertainty or shakiness about “who we are”, this provokes intrapersonal shame, so to manage this we seek outside validation. When outside validation is denied, interpersonal shame is the response.

While this circumstance is universal regardless of one’s Enneagram Type, the shame of the heart types is a central preoccupation, with their entire personality fixated on trying to maintain, upkeep, and validate their self-image to themselves. This view of intrapersonal shame explains the behavior of the heart types far better than assigning interpersonal shame to the heart triad. Heart types can act quite shamelessly or impervious to the pressure that might cause shame in other types because the heart type is anchored to their own self-image above all.

For example, Type Twos have a tendency to violate others’ boundaries and act in ways that others recognize as embarrassing. They can be highly impervious to others’ feedback, discomfort, and criticism because they're not responding to interpersonal shame, they are fending off a deficiency of their own self image via their rejection stance. Twos feel intrapersonal shame based on early-life failures and “misses” on the part of caregivers (who, even under perfect circumstances, will fail due to innate difficulties of human development) to give them the ideal mirroring that would provide a strong and unshakable connection to their inner sense of self.

To override their intrapersonal shame brought about by the pain of imperfect attunement, Twos identify with being attunement-givers so that their identity is unquestionable and validated to themselves (hence their passion of Pride) and the negative feedback from others and poor attunement to their self-image is effectively “blocked” by being overridden by the energy Two’s are putting into “caring”.

Threes are attachment types, so they are most susceptible to interpersonal shame, but nonetheless there's a certain selectivity to Threes about what outside sources of attunement (and thus, interpersonal shame) they are vulnerable to. In other words, they are measuring whose "gaze" or validation they are wanting or drawing from based on their own self-image of value. Threes are actively seeking the attunement of valued others as essentially templates for seeing and attuning to aspects of themselves. “If you see value in me, I can use that to see value in me”.

Fours actively cultivate and demonstrate behaviors to alienate people, behaviors that would produce shame in most people. They are doing this because, as frustration types, Fours early in life felt that others could not mirror them, so they attempted to go inward and mirror themselves, albeit from a developmentally immature capacity to self-mirror. Thus, Fours spend their energy trying to remain attuned to their inner sense of self and to express and act from this inner sense of self outwardly. As a result, they put a lot of energy reacting against the external world and others as shallow, superficial, and absent of significance, from which stems some of their others-alienating behaviors. Being too accessible, too easily understood, and too accepted translates to the Four that their identity is on a level comprehensible to the shallow, superficial world. Whereas the image Threes and Three-Fixers put forward are about representing their value, Fours and Four-Fixers broadcast an image of being inaccessible and mysteriously complex such that others can’t grasp what’s in their inner world or easily put them into a category that overlooks their unique identity.

Thus, for Fours, not being easily understood and being a bit alienating, which would likely incur interpersonal shame in some other types, is actually a tactic of self-validation, a validation that stems from being out of alignment of the expectations of others or incurring others negative judgments. It's not that Fours never want anyone's acceptance or approval, but they are discriminating based on who they deem has a capacity to see depth. Fours intrapersonal shame expresses in three primary ways, first of which is when they feel they have acted out of alignment with or compromised their inner sense of identity, a kind of self-betrayal. Secondly, when others think they are too comprehensible for people they see as lacking depth. It can provoke in Fours a self-questioning as to whether they’re basic and trivial or not. Thirdly, when Fours feel loved ones don’t see or appreciate their unique value (“specialness). It can create a distress as to whether their internal sense of identity is not sufficiently unique, personal, distinct, and interesting enough.