What is The Enneagram Gut Triad?

Let’s look at the Enneagram Gut Triad, one of the three intelligence triads that the Enneagram proposes.

Though it’s powerful to understand your dominant Enneagram type or types, knowing whether it belongs to the Gut, Head or Heart Triad also helps you know what your dominant emotional theme is and get a handle on your fears and desires.

What Are Triads?

To give you some context, there are nine Enneagram personality types, numbered 1 to 9, and each belongs to one of the three intelligence triads, called the Gut triad, the Heart triad, and the Head triad.

Each triad is a unique way of understanding and interacting with other people and the world around us.

Types 8, 9 and 1 belong to the Gut triad; 5, 6 and 7 form the Head triad, and 2, 3 and 4 form the Heart triad. Since the types within each intelligence triad are all adjacent, the Enneagram diagram gives a nice visual representation of the triads:

Let’s look more closely at the Enneagram Gut Triad.

What is the Enneagram Gut Triad?

As we know, the Enneagram Gut Triad consists of Enneagram Types 8, 9 and 1. It also includes four of the eighteen wing types, 8w9, 9w8, 9w1 and 1w9, while the four wing types 7w8, 8w7, 1w2 and 2w1 are partially in the Head triad. To keep things simple, we’ll focus on Types 8, 9 and 1, but it’s quite possible you are a wing type.

You might see this called the Thinking triad.

The three Enneagram Gut triad types have some common traits. A person centred in one of these types tends to…

• rely on intuition and gut feeling to make decisions,
• be instinctive, visceral, spontaneous,
• desire free expression of their desires and needs,
• primarily experience anger in challenging situations,
• aim to find independence and freedom, and function best when they do,
• manage relationships via spontaneity and self-expression.

The challenges of being a Gut type include over-reliance on gut feeling and instinct, and feeling unseen or unrecognised.

In the Enneagram, there is the idea that each triad has one predominant emotion associated with it: anger (Gut triad), shame (Heart triad) and fear (Head triad).
I understand why the Enneagram theorists described it in this way, but I find it hard to believe that these are the three dominant human emotions and that your type fully determines which one you experience. It seems reductionistic and oversimplified to me.

The Enneagram Gut Triad: Types 9-1

Let’s look a little at the three types that form the Gut Triad. You’ll find that they’re similar enough to form a group, but different enough to be distinct types.

Enneagram Type 8: The Challenger

The Ennegram Type 8 is called the Challenger. Challengers are honest, confident and open. They thirst for personal strength and self-reliance.

8s dislike weakness, falsity, banalities and small talk. They want to get to the point and see people’s true colours.

Like all Enneagram types, the 8’s strengths can also be weaknesses. For one thing, 8s fear being controlled, manipulated and harmed by others.

Enneagram Type 9: The Peacemaker

Type 9 is called the Peacemaker. 9s desire peace and stability above all else. This type is great at remaining calm and maintaining harmony yet tends to cower away from conflict.

Type 9s dislike separation and discord, so try to create unity and connection with others. They are highly empathetic and tolerant, so tend not to rock the boat.

Their need to build and maintain harmony often has several drawbacks, like their avoidance of confrontation and tolerance of bad situations. Obsessed with pleasing others, they can forget about their own needs.

Someone who is a 9w1 predominantly shows Type 9 traits but a significant number of 1 traits, and vice versa for a 1w9.

Enneagram Type 1: The Reformer

The Enneagram 1 is called the Reformer. This type is inspiring, visionary and idealistic. Fundamentally, 1s want to make positive change happen.

They spend a lot of time developing their vision for the world and taking hard action to make it reality. On one hand this means they can garner support and enact positive change, though often they become forceful and overbearing in doing so.

They are perfectionistic and idealistic, and tend to lament the state of the world. All this means they sometimes forget to ground themselves in the harsh realities of life.

Someone who is a 1w9 predominantly shows Type 1 traits but a significant number of 9 traits, and vice versa for a 9w1.

In the Enneagram Gut Triad? What to Do Next

Perhaps you’ve taken a test or read the descriptions above and have garnered that you’re predominantly an Enneagram Type 8, Type 9, or Type 1, or one of the all-Gut wing types (8w9, 9w8, 9w1 or 1w9). What do you do now?

First of all, your personality type and triad are neither fundamentally good nor bad. All nine Types and three Triads have upsides and downsides. In certain situations they help, in others they hinder.

For me, it was very helpful to uncover my type because I realised that many of my personality traits, including the quirky ones, are essentially normal and to be expected given my type. Isn’t that a huge relief?

You can then begin to ask how your type and triad help you live fully in the different domains of your life, like work, family and friendships. Where do they give you an edge or vital skills that you would be lost without?

On the other hand, where do your type and triad hinder you in these domains? Where do they create issues in your life?

It’s important not to think that your personality type and triad definitively describe who you are and will always be. We are remarkably moldable and adaptable, and in any case all these categories and labels are just approximations, shorthand ways of describing human personality. They don’t define us.

I like to think that our type and triad present specific challenges that it’s our job to work with, to work through, rather than be accosted by. For example, if you’re a Type 9 and notice you’re always trying to create harmony and please people, just realise that. Observe yourself when caught in this behaviour, and watch how it’s both a blessing and a curse.

Then you can work to accentuate the positive and iron out the negative. Perhaps as an antidote to this tendency, you decide to practice imposing yourself more. After a while, you might realise that you’ve reworked or transmuted this inherent quality of 9 so that the pros are accentuated and the cons are tempered.

The same goes for the many qualities of the types and triads. Be self-observant and creative as you channel them to your benefit.