Power Is Never Random: What the Enneagram has taught me about the ways we learn to matter

The question that keeps following me

Lately, I have found myself thinking about power.

Not the kind of power that dominates or controls. Not the kind that wins arguments or gets the last word. I'm interested in the quieter forms of power that show up in our closest relationships—the ways we try to know that we matter, that our voice counts, and that we have some influence in the lives of the people we love.

The more I sit with couples in my office, and the more I pay attention in my own relationships, the more I notice that beneath so many of our conflicts is the same longing. We want to be seen. We want to feel significant. We want to know that we can belong without disappearing. We may argue about dishes, parenting, money, or intimacy, but underneath those conversations is often a much deeper question: Do I matter here?

That question has become one of my favorite mysteries.

As an Enneagram Four, I have never met a mystery I didn't want to unpack. If there is hidden meaning to discover, I'll bring a notebook. If there is a rabbit hole, I've already packed snacks.

For years, one of those rabbit holes has been the Enneagram. I've read the books, listened to the podcasts, attended the workshops, and happily wandered down countless conversations trying to understand why human beings move through the world in such beautifully different ways. My husband, an Enneagram Nine, has been one of my favorite companions in this exploration. After twenty-four years of marriage, I am still amused by his remarkable contentment with almost any option while I can usually find meaning in all of them.

For a long time, I thought I was studying personality.

More recently, I've realized I've been studying power.

Not because the Enneagram is about power, but because it keeps leading me back to the same question: How does this person reach for the experience of mattering?

A Different Way of Understanding Personality

That question took on even more depth when I began learning from Dr. Dan Siegel's work integrating the Enneagram with interpersonal neurobiology. Dr. Siegel's work in Personality and Wholeness in Therapy added an entirely new dimension to the Enneagram for me. Rather than viewing personality as a fixed identity or a box we are trapped inside, he invites us to see it as a pathway—a coherent pattern that develops as our minds, brains, and relationships shape one another over time.

Every Strategy Tells a Story

Drawing on interpersonal neurobiology, Siegel suggests that our personalities represent adaptive ways of organizing experience. Each pathway offers particular strengths and gifts, but each also has predictable blind spots that can narrow our perspective when we become stressed or disconnected. Growth, then, is not about becoming a different personality. It is about becoming more integrated—developing the flexibility to access qualities that don't come as naturally to us and responding to life with greater freedom rather than automatic habit.

That idea has stayed with me. It shifts my curiosity away from asking, "Why is this person like this?" and toward a gentler question: "What has this person's nervous system learned to trust?" It invites compassion instead of judgment and reminds me that the patterns we rely on today often began as remarkably intelligent adaptations to help us belong, stay safe, and make sense of the world.

What if personality isn't simply who we are?

What if it is the particular strategy we discovered, often very early in life, for finding safety, connection, and significance?

The Ways We Reach for Power

When I began looking through that lens, so many things started making sense. The person who seems controlling may have learned that careful preparation creates safety. The one who always takes care of everyone else may have discovered that being needed protects connection. The one who strives endlessly may have learned that achievement earns love. The one who withdraws may have found that distance feels safer than disappointment.

Not an excuse.

Not a life sentence.

A story.

It’s all a story about the remarkable creativity of the human nervous system and its determination to help us survive, belong, and matter.

I think this is why I continue to be drawn to the Enneagram after all these years. It doesn't invite me to put people into boxes. It invites me to become more compassionate about the boxes we built for ourselves. Every strategy carries wisdom. At some point, it worked. It helped us navigate our families, our friendships, and the world around us. It gave us a way to find our footing. 

When Protection Becomes Limitation

The challenge, of course, is that what helps us survive at one stage of life can quietly become what limits us in another. Adaptive then, maladaptive now. 

I see this every day in my work with couples.

Rarely are two people simply arguing about the topic on the surface. More often, they are relying on the strategies that have helped them feel secure for years. One partner pushes harder because they are trying to protect the relationship. The other withdraws because they are trying to protect the relationship. One insists on being understood. The other longs for peace. Neither is trying to create distance, yet both can unintentionally deepen it.

This is where I think soft power can be such a gamechanger.

Soft Power and the Freedom to Choose

Soft power isn't the absence of strength. It is the freedom that comes when we no longer have to rely on a single strategy to know that we matter. It allows us to remain connected to ourselves without overpowering another person. We become more curious than defensive, more flexible than rigid, more interested in understanding than winning.

Perhaps this is what healing looks like.

Not becoming a different personality.

Not getting rid of the parts of ourselves that adapted so wisely.

But gently loosening our grip on the one strategy we have trusted for so long, expanding our capacity to respond rather than react. Healing is discovering that our worth has never depended on being right, or needed, or successful, or unique, or peaceful, or strong.

A Little More Whole

The Enneagram has been one lantern I've carried as I've wandered into this mystery. Dan Siegel handed me another. My clients continue to hand me more, and my own marriage has illuminated corners I never could have discovered alone.

And the deeper I walk into it, the more convinced I become that beneath our different personalities, our different histories, and our different strategies, we are all asking remarkably similar questions.

Do I matter?

Am I safe?

Can I be fully myself and still belong?

I don't think the answers are found in becoming more powerful.

I think they are found in becoming more whole.

Over the next several posts, I'd love to explore what this looks like through each of the nine Enneagram pathways—not to explain people away, but to become more curious about the beautiful, imperfect, deeply human ways we have all learned to reach for power.

My hope is that you'll recognize yourself (and your people) with a little more compassion. Because when we understand the strategies we've relied on to feel safe and significant, we also begin to imagine that there may be more than one way to live. And to me, that is where healing begins.