The Story of You

An Enneagram Journey to Lasting Change

Ian Morgan Cron

• Publisher: Form
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780281086870
• Topic: Theology & Religion

In The Story of You the author of the bestselling The Road Back to You reveals how to use the power of the Enneagram-the ancient personality typing system-to overwrite the negative stories we tell ourselves, so that we can ultimately become our true selves. In this powerful, transformative guide, Ian Morgan Cron demonstrates the life-changing power of the Enneagram. The Story of You challenges us to rethink what we believe about who we are and offers lessons in using the Enneagram to help you change your story. Drawing on his extensive counselling and personal experience, Cron examines each of the nine personality types. Step by step, he explains how each can find happiness by understanding their origin story, harnessing their type's strengths, acknowledging weaknesses, and creating space for an incredible-and more positive-new reality. The Story of You is a book for anyone looking for practical advice and guidance on how to use the Enneagram as a Christian, and to make it part of their spiritual formation. As you shed the false ideas you have about yourself and master your Enneagram profile, you will unlock your own inner power for spiritual growth-and, ultimately, for becoming the true self God meant for you to be.

1

The Stories We Tell

Recognizing the Myth of Who You Are

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”

—Muriel Rukeyser

When I dragged myself into my first twelve-step meeting for people battling substance addiction, I felt more self-conscious than a bastard at a family reunion. Like most shame-riddled newcomers who fear rejection, I was sheepish about asking anyone to be my sponsor.

But there was this one guy.

Jack, a seventy-five-year-old retired Episcopal priest and therapist, was a recovery superhero. Whenever he spoke at meetings, his wry sense of humor and hard-won wisdom were apparent to everyone. He was a beacon of hope to those of us who had earned our seats in “the rooms.” One night after a meeting, I mustered up the courage to introduce myself to him and ask if he’d consider taking me under his wing.

Jack’s face softened, a smile appearing behind his eyes. “How long since you last drank or drugged?” he asked.

“Two weeks,” I said, looking down at my shoes.

“Congratulations!” he said, throwing his arms around me and hugging me so enthusiastically I thought he might break one of my ribs. “I’ll take you on!”

Under Jack’s mentorship, my two weeks of sobriety stretched into one month, then two, and before I knew it, I received my anniversary chip marking three continuous months. My life was humming along swimmingly until Jack dropped a bomb on me at one of our weekly Sunday morning check-in meetings at the Colonial Diner.

“I signed you up to share your story at next week’s Sunday night speaker’s meeting,” he said, stirring two packets of sugar into his coffee.

Recovery groups offer different meeting formats. In a speaker’s meeting, one person shares their story—what their life was like before and while they were using, and the “experience, strength, and hope” they’re finding through the program and working the steps. It’s kind of like a personal testimony you might hear at a Baptist church, only boozier.

“Jack, you’d tell me if you’d had a stroke, right?” I said, only half-kidding.

“No, why do you ask?” Jack said, arching one eyebrow.

“Because I’ve only been sober for three months. I’m not ready!”

“You don’t have to deliver the Gettysburg Address,” he said, chuckling.

For the next thirty minutes I came up with one lame excuse after another to get out of speaking, but Jack wouldn’t budge. Resigned to my fate, I stood up and lay down a five on the Formica-topped table.

“See you on Sunday,” I muttered, picking up my windbreaker and walking to the door.

“Get yourself to five meetings this week,” Jack called after me.

Without turning around, I waved goodbye. “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

Over the next seven days, I wrote and trashed at least a dozen drafts of my life story. During my last pharmaceutical jag, I had suffered a series of panic attacks and was still terrified of losing control in public. But I slaved away until I had an acceptable draft of my chemical misadventures and rehearsed it, ignoring the movies in my head featuring projectile vomiting and images from Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”

That Sunday night I stood before two hundred people and told the “story of me,” at least as I understood it at the time. I described how I’d always felt like a “troubled guest on the dark earth.”1 I was sure I lacked something inside that everyone else seemed to have—I felt like a college freshman who’d missed orientation week and didn’t know his way around campus like everyone else. I enumerated the long list of reasons for my tattered self-worth, including my father’s death from alcoholism and how I’d still give anything to believe I wasn’t somehow responsible for his inability to love me. Then I described how I felt when I took my first drink—finally, at home in my own skin, fitting in, at ease in the world. Except that back then my life was sort of like The Glass Castle meets The Prince of Tides—only less hopeful.

But when the meeting ended, I felt like a celebrity. Person after person came up to tell me the parts of my story they identified with and to thank me for my willingness to share it. When the last one left, I helped fold and stack the chairs, wash the coffee urns, and left with Jack riding shotgun in my Toyota Corolla.

“You did a good job tonight,” he said, rolling down the passenger-side window to release the smoke from his signature Cuban cigar.

“Thanks,” I said, relieved to be over my first attempt at sharing my life’s journey.

“It’s interesting,” Jack mused. “While you were speaking, I found myself thinking about the crazy story each of us comes up with to make sense of our lives.” He gazed at the smoke wafting up and out the car window, seemingly lost in his own thought.

When I pulled up at the end of Jack’s driveway, he offered his congratulations one last time and got out of the car, hobbling on his creaky knees. I was about to put the car in drive and pull away when he turned back around.

“One more thing,” he said, bending over to speak to me through the open passenger window. “Do you ever wonder if you’re living in the wrong story?”

“Uh, no,” I said, trying not to frown.

“You might,” Jack said, double-tapping the roof of my car with his hand. Then he turned on his heels and began trudging up the driveway, disappearing into the night’s inky darkness.

The Power of the Enneagram

I was twenty-seven years old when Jack asked me that question. At the time, I dismissed it as the kind of oddball question only a septuagenarian therapist might pose when he’s stayed up past his bedtime.

Today, I see Jack’s question to me as a major turning point in changing the false story I told myself about who I was, a story that had helped me make sense of a painful childhood but became an obstacle to my growth as an adult.

My old story is captured in a snapshot I still have of me back when I was a little boy at the beach with my family. In the picture I’m sitting in a beached lifeguard boat waving and laughing at the camera. I remember it was a beautiful, sunny day. I’m squinting at the camera and everyone in the background is sporting Ray-Bans, baking in the sun, their bronze skin glistening with Hawaiian Tropic Dark Tanning Oil. It strikes me as ironic that I’m sitting in a lifeboat. My family was lost at sea in those days and though I was a child I remember sensing that my siblings and I were living under a low ceiling of gray clouds. Our troubled father was taking our ship down.

Fifteen years later, I was a hard-drinking partier being chased down by my friends in Young Life who viewed me as a prized evangelism project. But I wanted nothing to do with God. In childhood I’d loved him with all my heart, but I grew to believe that he’d abandoned me to my crazy family. Stretched out in front of me was a lifetime of feeling ashamed, weighted down with a longing to be seen and loved that I feared would never be fulfilled.

When I began working on my issues in my twenties, the green shoots of a new story began to emerge from the soil. It took years of hard work and prayer to craft a new narrative, but today when I look in the mirror, I see a sober husband and father, an Episcopal priest, therapist, and author.

Where there was old me, now there’s a new me.

Where there was fear and shame, now there’s dignity.

Where there was an unnamable missing piece everyone else had but I didn’t, now there’s the certain belief that I’m not missing anything inside.

Where there was loneliness and abandonment, I now have a kind and encouraging community that affirms my gifts.

Where there was grim resignation, now there’s a serene acceptance that life is simultaneously hard and brimming with beauty and grace.

And where there was meaninglessness, now there’s the knowledge that I continue to take everything I’ve experienced and use it to advance God’s love into our riven world.

When I reached another major turning point in my life in discovering the Enneagram, it helped make sense of this dramatic before-and-after difference in my life. Even more important— and this is key to this entire book—it helped me learn what was fueling and sustaining my old story, and what I needed to do that would make it possible for me to keep moving into my new story. The transformation itself was all grace, but I had a choice either to resist or to receive it. I wish I’d known the Enneagram when I began the journey of writing a new story for myself. It would have saved me time.

Traditionally, the Enneagram refers to a personality typing system that helps people cultivate self-knowledge. (To learn more about the Enneagram, and to take a test to determine your Enneagram type, visit my website, ianmorgancron.com.) I’m an Enneagram Four, which is just one of the nine basic types of the system (ennea is the Greek root for the word nine). Called the Romantics, Fours are creative, imaginative people who are sensitive, empathic, and attuned to beauty and aesthetics. Sounds good, right? But, like all Enneagram types, they have a shadow side. In the Fours’ case, it includes moodiness, a fear of abandonment, and the belief that they’re irredeemably deficient, among other things.

Through the years I’ve learned that the Enneagram is a remarkably helpful tool for understanding myself and others. When I was first introduced to it during a difficult season in my life, its ability to describe my way of moving through the world amazed me. I became a devoted student of this ancient, uncannily accurate system of personality.

As my fascination and appreciation grew, I wrote a book about it, The Road Back to You (with Suzanne Stabile), and started a podcast (Typology) on which I explore the mystery of the human personality through the lens of the Enneagram.2 In the pages ahead you’ll meet my friends who were willing to show up and share their stories.

Several years into my study of the Enneagram, I had an aha moment that boosted my appreciation of its wisdom even more. Not only does its description of nine different types accurately describe our personality, but the Enneagram reveals the nine broken stories that each type adopts and inhabits in childhood to make sense of the world—destructive stories we continue to tell ourselves in adulthood about who we are and how the world operates.

As you’ll learn, the self-defining stories we invent in childhood later wreak havoc on our lives, psychologically and spiritually, because the underlying premise of each is in direct opposition to the grace-filled Larger Story God wants us to enter into and enjoy.

The Enneagram also shows us how to escape our type’s broken story by getting off the treadmill repetitions of self-defeating behaviors and misperceptions that often leave us frustrated, confused, and heartbroken.

What separates the Enneagram from other personality typing systems is that it helps us craft and live a better, truer story than the one we’ve unconsciously settled for. I’m going to tell you a bit later in the book how I’ve learned to do this myself.

Our Origin Story

Human beings are incurable storytellers. We tell hard luck stories, tall stories, short stories, co...