Sex and the Enneagram

Book excerpt: Understanding your approach to dating, relationships, and sex through the lens of your Enneagram personality type • Explains the relationship and sexual differences in the 9 Enneagram personality types for both genders • Examines how we can create greater intimacy with our partners and what blocks our sexual enjoyment • Looks at each type’s fantasies and investigates how our behavior in relationships alters according to how emotionally integrated or disintegrated we are • Explores the three types of love and their countertypes; each type’s Enneagram Passions and Virtues in relation to intimacy; how to engage with each type; and whether some types make better lovers Sex can take us from the sacred sublime to the darkest aspects of humanity. It can carry us on the wings of pure pleasure, or crush and potentially destroy us. No act in the human experience, barring the essential survival needs of food and water, can have more of an effect on us. In Sex and the Enneagram, Ann Gadd explores relationships and sex through the lens of the Enneagram, its nine personality types, and the subtypes of the wings and Instinctual Triads. The author introduces the Enneagram system and provides a full chapter devoted to each type. She examines each type’s approach to sex, their fantasies, and levels of integration in relation to love and sex, as well as each type’s approach to issues such as pornography, sexual problems, and dating sites and whether some types make better lovers. The author explains the Enneagram Passions and Virtues of each type in relation to sex, divorce, wing influences, and gender and explains how the 27 Sub or Instinctual types and the Hornevian Triads of the Enneagram system affect our sexuality. Most importantly, Gadd looks at how we can heal ourselves sexually so we can create more fulfilling, transforming intimacy for ourselves and our partners. Through understanding ourselves and our partners sexually, with the help of the Enneagram, Gadd hopes to bring us to deeper levels of compassion and understanding for each other. Sex then can be an expression enhancing our love for each other, rather than simply a physical act. By understanding your own and your lover’s Enneagram type, intimate giving and receiving can be an empowering process to embody our love for ourselves and others.