Our Experience of the Instinct Drives is not the Same
In the past few days, I've had a couple of difficult conversations with people I love deeply. In both instances, it was clear that the chasm created by differences in class (and class intertwined with race) are not fully bridgeable. I grew up in an upper-middle-class academic family. Except for a brief period during graduate school, where I scraped by on a teaching assistant’s salary or through temp jobs, my class and educational status have remained stable throughout my life. I am now 59. This stability means I can afford certain luxuries—taking an Uber to a dinner at a nice restaurant, joining a gym, planning overseas travel, or even accepting a low-paying job—without having to consider what I might need to sacrifice in return. For me, budgeting is more a moral exercise than a survival tool.
Yet, my work, relationships, and values are deeply rooted in social justice, aligning me with those who have far fewer resources. I have built my identity around being a generous, empathetic person eager to help others. This has allowed me to forge and sustain meaningful connections with people who lack similar resources. While right now the national conversation at least expressed in much national media is focused on the political polarization in the US, I believe the polarization around access to resources is more profound. People whose families once had resources but now struggle feel a particular kind of loss and disorientation. Those who have never had resources and see no one advocating for them experience a different kind of alienation. And, those who do have resources but are uncertain if they will last—whether for their lifetime or to support their children—are affected in different ways.
The Enneagram community, for the most part, has not addressed how systemic inequities shape our personalities. Most interpretations remain focused on individual work, often reflecting the biases of the social location of their authors. Of course, this is true of any theoretical framework—psychological, economic, political, or spiritual. Our narratives about who we are and where we come from shape what we can see and how we interpret what we see. However, I believe that working at the instinctual level of the Enneagram offers us tools to view our personalities within the context of systemic privilege.
The needs of the instinctual drives—self-preservation, sexual, and social—are both biological and emotional. There is much debate among Enneagram teachers about how to describe these instincts and how they map onto our Enneagram type. It’s an exciting and relatively new area within Enneagram studies that expands the tool in meaningful ways and is well worth exploration.
As I am becoming more familiar with these resources, what I’ve been contemplating is how these instincts, which are not cognitive patterns but rather embodied impulses and often unconscious behaviors, are profoundly influenced by how society distributes resources. Consider the social instinct, which revolves around our need for emotional contact and belonging. For a first-generation immigrant without resources, achieving a sense of belonging and emotional connection might look very different than for a millionaire who has lost a spouse and is grappling with suicidal loneliness and depression. Both individuals may experience the drive for belonging deeply, but its relationship to survival will shape the expression of that instinct differently. It might also mean that other instincts become more prominent. In the first case, the social instinct may serve the self-preservation instinct, while in the second, the social drive might be felt more narrowly around the loss of intimacy. The mechanisms through which these drives are addressed and how healing can occur is also affected by systemic difference in access to resources. In the first scenario, one might seek healing through church, famiy or social groups that share a cultural identity; in the second, therapy, coaching or medication—services that require time and money—might be the path.
These are broad generalizations, of course. But the core point is that our instinctual drives and how we respond to them are shaped by our social circumstances, and in the U.S., those circumstances are played out in a system of cruel and growing inequities.
The closer one is to tangibly experiencing the loss of privilege, the more necessary it becomes to ensure that the instinctual drives serve self-preservation at some level. This doesn't mean that all people experiencing poverty are self-preservation dominant, but it does mean that they must engage with the self-preservation instinct in more immediate ways than someone who is more removed from economic hardship.
Similarly, in a society where rape and sexual assault disproportionately affect femme-identified people, the relationship to the sexual instinct will likely be experienced differently for femme identified people or sexually vulnerable people than those socialized into positions of sexual dominance. The drive to bond intimately can be fraught with fear and a need for vigilance, fundamentally altering how this instinct is experienced and expressed.
This brings me back to the difficult conversations I had with two friends. As a social-dominant person, my need for belonging is both profound and ever-present. And, in my closest relationships with those of a different class status, I feel my class privilege as a barrier that prevents me from achieving the deep intimacy I long for. Yet, for me, this need for belonging is more existential than literal. I don’t have children, and I am unsure what care will look like for me as I age. In some ways, then, I do connect with how cultivating relationships is linked to my survival, but I think this is mostly an after-the-fact analysis than an instinctual behavior. For my friends, however, the relationship to belonging, even belonging with me, is more straightforwardly connected to survival because the economic precarity they navigate is more present.
by Sharon Groves
