Love & Relationships

The Enneagram Improves Relationships

The Enneagram offers the opportunity for you to look deep within yourself and create healthier relationships with your partner, family members, friends, clients, and co-workers. Through an appreciation of each other’s worldview and lived experience, the Narrative Enneagram not only helps us to be more present and openhearted, but also gives us tools to work together through conflicts. In our view, there is no other system as profound and practical in developing more compassionate relationships with others and ourselves.

two students

Relationship Development
Using the Enneagram

  1. Acknowledge Responsibility: What do you contribute to relationship difficulties?
  2. Appreciate the Other: What do each of you appreciate and support in the other?
  3. Build & Sustain the Relationship: What do each of you need to start doing, stop doing, work on or accept to improve connection and communication, enhance satisfaction, and ultimately create a relationship that truly flourishes?

For Further Exploration

Instinctual Subtypes in Relationships

Beyond type differences, the Enneagram’s 27 instinctual subtypes also have an important influence on relationship dynamics. Understanding how subtypes impact our behavior and attention helps us manage our own reactivity and be more sensitive to the needs and concerns of others.

Resources

Learn more about intimate and business relationships:

Relationships Bundle Download

This comprehensive bundle includes three great resources that cover the 45 relationship combinations created by the nine Enneagram types and the six pairings created by the three instinctual drives.

Enneagram Relationships Bundle - $40
headshot of terry saracino
We all have others in our lives, so there will always be challenges and ways we each see the world differently. The Enneagram really helps me see from their point of view instead of from my own patterns, and that builds compassion immediately. I no longer take the other person’s behavior personally. Before we know the Enneagram, we tend to think that everybody looks through the same lenses we do. But the Enneagram describes nine different yet equally powerful lenses, and when we understand our family members, coworkers and friends through these patterns, it improves relationships almost automatically.
Terry Saracino
Core Faculty Member