Type 2 Initial Self-Belief: “I am unappreciated as I am.”

Type 2 Compensation: "I must find appreciation from and connection to people by responding to their needs and desires."

Type 2 Core Focus: Appreciation comes from responding to the emotional needs and desires of others. This requires that I read their unspoken emotional cues in order to find a way to connect to and support them. From this I also find my role in the world and others' lives.

Personality characteristics that might arise from the type 2 core focus include:

• Represses own needs in service of others' needs
• Desires to be liked and important in the lives of others
• Shifts image to become what others desire or need
• Gets their own needs met by meeting the needs of others
• Emotionally seduces others to bring them closer
• Feels more comfortable giving than receiving
• Pays attention to emotional cues more than verbal content
• Thinks they know your needs better than you do yourself
• Unconsciously expects something in return for what they give

The Helper, The Caring, Interpersonal Type: Generous, Deomonstrative, People-Pleasing, and Possessive¹

Basic Fear: Of being unloved and unwanted for themselves alone¹

Basic Desire: To feel loved¹

How Twos Pay Attention: Attention is by habit focused upon the emotional fluctuations of significant others, guided by the wish to become the object of their love.²

Basic Proposition: You gain love and approval, and fulfill your personal needs, through giving to others.²

Strengths: Caring, helpful, relationship-oriented, generous, sensitive to others’ feelings, supportive and exuberant²

Challenges: Prideful, dependent on approval of others, intrusive, demanding, entitled²

Energy goes into: Sensing the emotional needs of others and doing what pleases them. Feeling good about being able to meet others’ needs so well. Creating good feelings in others. Maintaining others’ acceptance and approval. Romantic attachment.³

The Helper: Warm, caring and giving, they are motivated by a need to be loved and needed, and to avoid acknowledging their own needs.⁴

Helpers are warm, concerned, nurturing, and sensitive to other people's needs.⁵

Focus of Attention: Twos focus on relationships, gaining approval, and seducing others through helpfulness as a strategic way to get their disowned needs met. Twos actively “read” the people around them and align with (what they perceive to be) their moods and preferences in order to maximize the potential for positive connection.⁶

¹Book: The Wisdom of the Enneagram; Website: The Enneagram Institute

²Book: The Enneagram; Website: The Narrative Enneagram

³Book: The Essential Enneagram; Website: Dr. David Daniels

⁴Book: The Road Back to You

⁵Book: The Enneagram Made Easy

⁶Book: The Complete Enneagram; Website: Chestnut Paes Enneagram Academy

Type 2 Fixation and Trap

Fixation: Flattery comes from praising and giving to others in order to connect to them and be liked or gain favor.

Trap: Freedom comes from being attentive to the needs and desires of others so they'll take care of yours.

The fixation of flattery points to the mental preoccupation of the type 2 ego. The trap of freedom keeps an individual stuck in the fixation.

Type 2 Holy Idea

Holy Idea: Holy freedom is taking care of your own needs so that you can freely give to others without expecting anything in return.

The fixation of flattery and trap of freedom keep an individual stuck in the type 2 fixation. The way out of that fixation is through holy freedom.

Type 2 Passion

Passion: Pride is an inflated feeling of self-importance in the lives of others. "Others need me because I uniquely understand and can meet their needs and desires."

The passion of pride is the emotional energy that serves the fixation of flattery and trap of freedom.

Type 2 Virtue

Virtue: Humility appears when instead of seeking favored treatment and regard you accept that you are no more or less important than anyone else.

The virtue of humility is what appears when the passion of pride subsides.

• Pride
• Love Need
• Hedonism
• Seductiveness
• Assertiveness
• Nurturance and False Abundance
• Histrionism
• Impressionable Emotionality

One method used to bring the types to life when teaching the Enneagram types involves interviewing people of a given type about how that type plays out in their life. This may be done through panels and one-on-one interviews.

Self-revelatory videos can also be useful where a person simply describes their type to a camera without the prompting of an interviewer.

Note that sometimes a person in a video may have been mistyped and may not offer an accurate representation of type when that happens.

Once their Enneagram type is known, celebrities or famous people can also offer interesting examples of and insights into Enneagram type as revealed through interviews, lectures, writings, and the person's work.

However, it's not like the Enneagram panels, interviews, and self-revelations where people are specifically describing how they experience Enneagram type in their lives. It's more a matter of looking for glimpses into how Enneagram type is operating in the person.

It can be difficult to type someone at a distance. Look for a consensus of opinion on a person's type from multiple sources and hold it loosely. Celebrities and famous people are often typed differently by different Enneagram authors, teachers, and enthusiasts.

It needs to be made clear that fictional characters are not real people, even when they are based on real people. There can be a temptation to assign Enneagram type to every character in a story, but many characters don't have that kind of consistency or depth.

Not only might there be a number of different people, usually of different types, influencing the creation or portrayal of a character but often the character is nothing more than a vehicle for telling the story and moving it along.

While once in a while a character appears that you can attribute an Enneagram type to, generally it's more accurate to look at specific scenes as examples of a type rather than the character as a whole.

Tom Condon wrote a book called The Enneagram Movie & Video Guide that you may find useful for seeing type in fictional characters.

Although they do exist, there are few song lyrics that can be attributed to one particular Enneagram type. Most songs have both lyrical and musical elements that can be attributed to a number of different Enneagram types.

Songs are extremely subjective. There are many songs that listeners, and even performers, interpret in a very different way than the song writer intended. A number of songs also emphasize the sounds of words rather than their meaning.

As such, different people hearing the same song often will experience it as representing different Enneagram types.

Enneagram type 2 wings (2w1 and 2w3)

Enneagram type 2 subtypes (sp 2, sx 2, so 2)

Enneagram type 2 tri-center (gut, heart, head)

• 2 vs 1
• 2 vs 3
• 2 vs 4
• 2 vs 5
• 2 vs 6
• 2 vs 7
• 2 vs 8
• 2 vs 9

Enneagram Type Preference Test
This test produces a scored list of all nine types.
Questions are forced-choice, similar to the method used by the Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indictor (RHETI).
Use to determine type, wings, gut/heart/head types, and tri-center.

Enneagram Type Comparison Test
This test compares any two types. The preferred type will have the higher score.
Use when you've narrowed your type down to two or three possibilities you'd like to compare.