Enneagram pioneer Helen Palmer in conversation with Mónica Tinoco

Helen thank you very much for accepting to be here for this interview about your legacy and about you we all care very much and are very interested in learning and hearing a bit more from you so I want to thank all of our community and our members and let you know that this interview with Helen is just one more of all the benefits you get for being members of T&E thank you so Holly I'm kind of amused that I'm a trophy for a membership it's kind of the epitome of my career so the first question I would like to ask you Helen is what's important for you in the narrative any graham community these days hmm well first of all I think the narrative is the best teaching method on the planet which is to go directly to inquire into the differences between different types of people and to get feedback from those who inhabit each of the nine different profiles rather than teaching out of a book for example it's very useful for students to be able to directly interact with the tights because through just a book although I I wrote a book and I enjoyed that action activity I much more enjoy the the method of speaking directly and being able to inquire into the life of somebody who is alive well and wants to answer me yeah so that's about what the narrative tradition is about the narrative is the life story and all of that when I started in this journey of the anagram which is a very long time ago in the mid 70s psychology was really not as advanced as it is today and so I have degrees in psychology and I teach psychology or did for a number of years but the the materials that I was teaching were so narrow and so deaf defining a type a person that it really didn't have any kind of momentum the way the Enneagram does we have a vehicle here that comes out of the ancient world actually that's filled with useful information that psychology isn't so interested in yeah and at the time that I was learning psychology at CCNY in New York the focus was on pathology had an how to recognize and treat pathology rather than how you can use your personality structure to evolve as a person this idea of spiritual evolution was not on the table at the time so I would say the the interest was that I was also a meditator which was unusual at that time science now has a methodology called the relaxation response which improves healing rate in illness and has other great benefits of quieting you know the passions of the heart but at that time there was so little material except the diagnosis assessment and treatment of pathology a few radical ideas but nothing substantive so I was caught in this mind of being both a meditator and realizing the change of state that meditation can bring in and as kind of a joy in it and as you progress in being relatively empty even feel the light fortune to feel flow well that was news you know I dare not speak of that in public but flow is you know the most common experience in in meditative circles its blissful this the edge of blissful but certainly if you can enter that state when you're focused on on the minutiae of the type and you're suffering as a result of this recreation of your habit of mind it's very useful to be able to say okay I'm going to witness this I'm going to internalize and I'm going to be able to witness this conflict that I have and I'm able to surrender it I will deal with it but when I'm calm when I have changed my state into peacefulness I can deal with it more successfully and that was news to people you know it was kind of like Cena's voodoo you know or some kind of claim of magical acts at the beginning at the beginning at least in my circles in Manhattan so I left Manhattan and came to California because it was more peaceful out here and I enjoyed the enjoyed the change just the noise difference you know the traffic noise difference was huge for me and when I came here I met my current husband this is almost 50 years ago and we've been together ever since and the Enneagram is part of our life in the sense that both of us are meditators and both of us are interested in each other we want to know each other better so that was it I have one son who is now a tiny little boy of 59 so it's been a while that I've been with us materials yeah thank you thank you you spoke a little about spiritual evolution over the years I would like to to know if you can share something about how has your own spiritual evolution hmm well I wouldn't undertake it alone I was pretty alone with it because in the 70s and 80s this was not a popular topic and you couldn't get much feedback but now it's it's very available in the Christian sector for sample this prayer and meditation and the Judaic stream in the Buddhist stream the the different versions of how to be able to relax resistance to the present moment in the reality that you face objective reality instead of being bound up in the up in the subjective reality of your personality type which is recurring thoughts and feelings and sensations it's a big habit relaxing the habit is immensely freeing because it frees up as I said the life force in your body many of us already know these helming but why is it so hard so hard to relax they haven't well it's all that we have that's how we've seen life and the reality that we see through life we subjectively know is bias in a certain direction but it certainly doesn't seem that way to the person who is embedded in exclusively innit idea and there's also very high high functioning aspects of the type there's nothing wrong with that you know you have the virtues which is the freed up life force versus virtues in Latin and the freed up life force itself is very invigorating you know it kind of wipes away the fact that the type is a rather narrow view you know and there's eight other equally valid views so we think we're talking to someone and we you know think we understand them but they may be interpreting what's happening in the conversation through their own filter and becoming it's simply not a complete agreement you know so I think that's important to know you don't really know the people around you neither do they have enough self observation capacity unless they've studied something like this to be able to describe themselves fully to you yeah so I think it's a wonderful thing to be able to drop some of the resistance that we have and be able to see objectively instead of so a subjective thank you so Helen what's the message you would like to carry forward hmm that you can change that a lot of what you accept as a type as a stroke as a psychological structure a lot of what you accept leads recurrently into a degree of suffering and you know that but what to do about it you see so this is this is a real leverage system of being able to have an antidote to the box that you find yourself in I mean you might fall in love with somebody who has a totally different view of the world another type but you can see the suffering you know and you want to help but it's so much more effective to help yourself by noticing now that's an important word many people you know when they begin this the the study they don't realize what they're involved in is trying to get to objective perception and the vehicle of that the perceptual vehicle internally is called the inner witness to be able to witness when you're suffering and there's something you can do about it well what well you can relax the suffering you can focus in your objective way on I'm a six in the anagram well let's say I get terror afraid yeah so I I don't enjoy being in public too much and that's my type but the release of that anxiety in public speaking the release of it is something that I can manage through witnessing the fact that I'm in trouble here yeah and to be able to relax the resistance in my body relax the solar plexus relax the whole system so that I can be clear enough to speak again now that's a great advantage because these inhibiting patterns in in the type they hold us back in different ways you know so Helen you spoke a little about our own suffering hmm once we are aware it's there and it's present mm-hmm well what happens when we're not even aware of the depth of our suffering I you know I don't feel equipped to handle that all I know is that we're besieged by particularly evangelical people that we that they're very interested in this but I didn't go out and enroll them were besieged by people in the health care community who would like to have a simple method for people to identify what their suffering is well most people just feel bad about something they don't investigate by witnessing okay now what what how did I feel insulted how did I feel harmed maybe this person wasn't trying to intentionally harming me but I feel harmed what can I do about this because they're not intentionally trying to harm me they're just talking from their own perspective so it's an inside job that you first have to own that it's an inside job and the the young people that we're getting now especially as I said from the evangelical frame they're convinced that you can identify psychological suffering and there's something you can do about this it's a very simple proposition the method is also deeply spiritual according to the nature of your religion and the God never meant us to suffer we just do you know and we're in conflict a whole lot and God never wanted us in conflict but we are you see and I don't think I have to go further into that the world is in a very bad place in a certain way and there's something you can do about your reactivity to that it doesn't mean you're quitting it doesn't mean you're leaving you know your duty and obligation to participate in helping as much as you however you can't help if you're suffering because you miss perceive things you see if I'm afraid then I miss receive some something out there is harming me it's a misperception I'm afraid I can fix that I can't fix the the harm out there which is coming from where I'm not sure you see so important that when you feel harmed according to your type you know like not enough attention or not not enough engagement like an eight or you know not enough you know perfection like a one or not enough allowing somebody to help you like a - you know if you're offending somebody and you don't know it all you can do is change yourself you can change your reaction and to do that you need to observe your patterns say look I'm kind of tense about this you know somebody's trying to help me and I don't like the kind of advice they're giving me one name you know they're doing something to me no I'm tensing up I'm getting judgmental I am projecting some of my own disorder here upon another person and magnifying the importance of what they're doing to me right so it's my job to change meeting others can point it out give a course of action I mean that's what psychology is about that nobody can change me if I don't want to you go on automatic absolutely mmm howling and speaking of change the anagram world is changing these days a lot of interest is coming from everywhere everywhere and it's a message you would like to convey to younger in your commerce go through the anagram world well I would like them to go into a narrative training because we rely upon the different types of panel mixed gender mixed race panel and the interviewer would bring out the key questions about the type and you can watch and hear the legitimate story from the inside I think it's a much better training method to understand people in general you know then reading a book so I kind of cheated on the first book that I wrote because I used a lot of the voices that I'd heard on panels in class and all I had to do is you know parse out the very best statements book and people could read those statements you see so a lot of it is what I heard from people on a tape and I communicated that in print honey it was powerful oh yeah much easier to recognize somebody right what do you think is so special about the narrative tradition and helping people grow and like just reading a book or learning it from a class why is the panel methods so powerful in your own words well it humanizes the whole thing it's not abstract that's the first thing you know when you read about psychological bullet points in a in a text book for example I mean you can certainly memorize the the problems but how do you solve them you say that that takes a more human in touch and in the narrative we have perhaps four to four to six people men and women mixed in a in a panel and each of them will have a different context for the same problem so a four for example that is idealizing the distance in the far away using qualities of imagination to kind of emphasize the beauty and the and the destiny of the future and coming completely out of the reality of now at the time and idealizing and then moving toward making objective changes in their life to get toward that idealized person usually it's in there and then feeling disappointed because it isn't meeting the ideal it's just a human being again you know so how to work with that well if you have a bank of fours men and women they have poignant stories to tell each type has a poignant story about how they have discovered this defect in their in their rationale where they they just been used by the future idealized love who is disappointing you see and then oh dear it happened again you see it's kind of the for lament now I'm exaggerating not a whole lot actually I'm exaggerating and likewise around the clock of the Enneagram there are these defective placements of attention that are habitual and a belief that this is true which is way away from the objective reality of eight other types so we're not playing in the same field I mean you can imagine a four idealizing the best you know and you got somebody like an eight you know who's kind of pushy about you know not being so ideal all the time and the the degree of suffering that is unnecessary that's what comes up for me right the degree of unnecessary suffering the basic education in the type structure could at least get you into the arena of questioning you know is this true is it really true that it's a paranoid dangerous world and everybody's out to get you is that really true but when a six is pushed it brings up that childhood anxiety if I can't cope with this and it's way overblown and you don't know it you think you're dealing with the problem when actually you're part of the problem itself because you're bringing in the son realistic point of view I think that that's important to know the the panel method gives sometimes very vivid stories of the trap that you fall into by habit and you don't know you're doing it you think are saying objective react it is a dangerous world well it's not a dangerous world it's an okay world and I can live with that you don't have to say what's it's a positive world that would be a lie but somewhere in the middle there the individual is going to find ok how much danger I mean am i over blowing this or not questioning is very good questioning and involving other people come on come on hell and you're over over blowing this I've had so much fun some reality checks reality check is what it's it's the word I was looking for actually thank you but the the unreality that we bring into a relationship very important to relax that and get to the some kind of you know harmonious truth you know so I like the method I like it that they're so diverse you know older people young people you know with we thought the the the panel method to or David did actually it was at a meeting two kids 12 and above and they were fine defining their time they did not all about it but wouldn't it be wonderful if this was brought into a kind of the educational system and that's somebody else's job but wouldn't it be wonderful if that could occur yeah Helen can you share with us a moment of truth that changed you or Meredith marked you as an anagram teacher and spiritual guide you have been for many of us well you mentioned both words any Graham type and spiritual spiritual practitioner okay I would say that the moment of truth was probably in the 80s that we could use spiritual method meditative method for psychological distress and that was news you know at the time and we had you know small uprising and you know kind of difficulties with both clergy who said you can't use spiritual method for mere psychological work you know that's like a wrong use don't apply it to changing your psychological structure and we had the psychologist which would dismissing spiritual method you know as kind of airy-fairy and I'm saying that very literally you know and then of course we had people on both sides who embrace the idea okay so the moment of truth was well I'm gonna go with them with the ones that see the value in witnessing internally which is a spiritual it's a spiritual Faculty of perception now you don't hear about that generally you know in the comment common religious circles and the witness is for everybody you can watch yourself suffer you don't know what to do at the beginning but it's like here I go again here I go again in my pattern well there's something you can do about the pattern you can change it by using internalizing relaxing into yourself and using the witness to recognize the actual structure of your psychological type now that was news you can witness thoughts and the suffering that that might give you you can witness the contractions in your body that suppress the life force you can actually recognize those things and is something you can do about it you can use the method of st. John the way of negation to relax resistance on the spot how helpful yeah and nobody can do it but me and with that relaxation your mind clears you're seeing a more objective reality instead of the subject of hell that you go into by habit so this understanding of spiritual method for psychological distress that was where I took a stand and there were many you know who once they understood it you know we're happy to cooperate but it was a risk and at the time somewhere in the 80s I met my co-teacher of many years dr. David Daniels who was a psychiatrist a practicing psychiatrist and a teacher in the school of medicine at Stanford University so at least we had somebody who was respectable within within our camp and the the the willingness with which he embraced this and I was teaching the myth the narrative method up in my home town at the YMCA in the auditorium I did it for years and it was the penile method you see that's how I got all of the statements to put in the first book was from the YMCA paneling and David had on a dare he had been dared by one of his colleagues in at Stanford well you're interested in this kind of Airy fairy spiritual thing you know why don't you go here Helen you know she's she's doing something with that and he came with the three kids and a wife and they all sat in the back and at the end of it he came forward and he said I really want to bring this into Stanford well he didn't realize what he was facing Wow the backlash that he that he would encounter but he was persistent and he wanted to bring it in because it was people speaking themselves you see and if they had the map of the nine types they had a really good spread of being able to negate now I'm not that I'm not that I'm not that oh here I might be here I might be well I have to choose between two can you give me some help about choosing between the two so it was really quick to be able to discover your type and that he appreciated that the other thing that he liked was the disclosure of the people and the last thing that he liked was that you could relax your own suffering because he's doing clinical work all the time he's even doing interventions all the time well how can you intervene by giving somebody a method where they can help themselves he liked that and he got a big bag backlash and there was one story that his eldest son told me later as they were older he said one of the dignitaries in the early days of at Stanford it came to dinner at their house where they were living at Palo Alto and the the word Enneagram came up and he had come primed to tell David to keep his place you know and he said you know how can you teach this garbage I mean that's where we started break it breaking ground in into the university system it was the garbage bin how can you do this that you can be taken away by this nonsense so his eldest son really took it you know like his dad's job is in danger and it all quieted down and in the end years later David Daniels retired as an emeritus so somebody at Stanford loved him to let him be an emeritus but it was it was tough going all the way for him and I so admired that so much courage courage yeah just to you know you know I believe in this and this is how I justify it and I have clinical experience just like you have and let's head let's have a discussion beautiful huh mm-hmm Thank You Helen and one final question what message would you like to give to all of our supporters of the narrative tradition outside well I'm very grateful first of all it's just turned in the last five or six years very recently that the the angiogram has become you know a viable psychological structure of psychological teaching the people can from very very short time they can get methodology to turn around in a very short time I mean it used to take months for a clinician to really introduce a client to their type structure now it's easy to call it a tight structure but your ferreting around with you know like how many levels does this you know this difficult client have you know and what are the overlaps between this theory and that theory you know that might be helpful to the client it was endless in my mind when all you have to do is ask the client to observe the arising of the content of their mind when they suffer and you can't really tell the difference between I'm left out you know I can't stand it like a like a - or I'm really distractible I don't like to hear about people's pain like a seven I mean the core the core nuts in both of it or I'm very scared like a six you know I don't like to be seen in public like me but I mean it these are very different strategies for survival but they are survival that's so important that you are we have survived by this to adulthood and we don't want to change so the message I guess would be look at the simplification of identifying with the core issue of the struck of the psychological structure is you can observe it and you can say not that not that not that around the yearning Ram well I have a little of this tendency but I'm not an 8 I'm not I'm not that aggressive and you know kind of territorial but I might be a 1 you see they're angry too and you know but nitpicky I don't do that you see so not that not that not that the differential diagnosis is very useful you come up with two or three and then you have a relationship with an Enneagram teacher and they assist you to find out where you sit now that makes it much more interesting to say where you sit you mean you were all different than I am you know you don't nitpick why I do and thought you were criticizing me instead you're just telling me in your stubborn way whoever you are that you're a five and that you disagree with me and I can't get to an argument with you because I want to is so that I justify myself see that's how it works yeah helen is there anything else you would like to share with us or to have us here and know about you well I I do believe that the time now for people that you've been working with and that so many other teachers in different countries are teaching with and just to create a little example for that there's been such a proliferation in the last five years around the world we recently very recently in 2000 the end of nineteen twenty nineteen we had the 25th IEA which is international intagram Association meeting in close to my hometown in California so it was amazing to see them coming in somewhat translators you know other people have been really active for years in everywhere in Egypt in South America like yourself Mexico in you know Thailand in Canada in I mean there were like 20 representational speakers who had started up some of them just out of a book because they were interested and others out of a university because they could teach it as a kind of a psychology for the normal and high functioning person not pathology yeah the normal and high functioning people can read this and get benefit out of it wow that's interesting you know it's a whole new concept about psychology that's been evolving since the old days of diagnosing but you know destructive tendencies and David Daniels again to refer to him and I had co-directed 25 years ago this is the 25th anniversary at Stanford God loved David I mean he hired Memorial Hall I thought we'd have about 40 people we had an astonishing 120 people you know a thousand 200 people it was where do they come from and I walked down the aisle at Stanford this is the 25 years ago and languages and translators and you know a lot of it was from the religious orders who were teaching in other countries and they were using this as identifying your sin which means separation in their language your separation from God of separation from spirituality a psychologist would say you are you're in separation away from authentic objective truth you're misreading it through this filter of thoughts feelings sensations now that was news I mean we owe a lot for example to the Jesuit stream that was proliferating the angiogram in different countries we you know the the spiritual communities have been added for this because they see the tight structure as an obstruction to prayer which it is I mean somebody is desperate about something and they pray and they can't and they must and and the type and it is very confusing but if you pray in the method of John and you empty yourself because of space well you can at least not devalue yourself so much or get stuck in a box and unable to see what's actually happening around you so the religious communities took it on as a method of printer the via negativa John which is Zen for example and the emptying practice of allows you to see what you are actually thinking and then you can get evaluation psychological evaluation is this true but I think about you or is this true what I what I'm projecting about my future and my my profession or my you know do I want to have a child or not you know like it's it's so easy to be able to confuse yourself the religious communities saw method and they attach to that so spiritual method for psychological distress has been the banner of our school and to apply the method of John and there is a second method to John's spiritual companion Teresa of Avila which is a different spiritual methodology but they work so well together and maybe this will be the last question yeah but John was devoted to the way of negation meaning I'm confused by all my patterns and thoughts so I internalized and I notice what's before me and I relaxed that not that not that distraction so it's a series of being overwhelmed by thoughts or feelings or bodily sensations and recognizing that with an inner witnessing calm and allowing those patterns to relax by simply letting them go so that they're off the screen it's a wonderful method and his companion spiritual companion Teresa she had the absolute opposite tendency she taught a method of contemplation spiritual contemplation which is now called the via positiva which is concentration now a word of advice as soon as anybody says concentration you want to muscle up you know and concentrate very hard on one thing it's not not it the concentration means that you notice the intruding thought you let it go that's John's and you can also stabilize a concentration point which is healing to you and you can bring it into your mind in times of trouble and it has immense calming effect yeah here's a thought dreadful thought will relax that thought and it's a method I don't want to go into the depth of the method but the two in combination and now in spiritual method we have you know like the whole world is involved now in trying to find a spiritual anchor in themselves as solace to what what's happening you know politically and emotionally to all of us we're living in a nuclear age nobody forgets that at the depths of their consciousness but when you get tight and apprehensive and confused because of that reality there's something you can do about that and you can be infinitely more useful if you're not spazzed out you know in about your type you know and how you might be harmed so the the movement in the evangelical groups that we're seeing now and the movement just in ordinary people who is finding value in improving the relationship you see but soon if you've got that you have to be able to witness your own structure in order to be able to change anything in a relationship otherwise you just suck hmm well I could go on at length but I think I won't thank you well thank you thank you again Helen for everything you have shared with us we all appreciate very much and again I want to thank all of our community members for being part of this thank you you

Channel: The Narrative Enneagram

Views: 4,798

Rating: 4.9200001 out of 5

Keywords: Enneagram, Narrative, Narrative Enneagram, Helen Palmer, Monica Tinoco

Id: tR-Q4rdcnlg

Length: 39min 50sec (2390 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 12 2020