Articles
Skillfully Setting Boundaries
What are Boundaries? When we let people know what we will and what we won’t accept in relationships, then we are setting boundaries. Hopefully, we can all agree that we don’t accept verbal or physical abuse and make that clear with our friends and partners. In...
Shadow: An Essential Part of Human Psychology
“The best political, social and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our own Shadow onto others.” -- Carl Jung Carl Jung is an historic figure in the study of human psychology and has contributed immensely to the understanding of the...
Giving the Gift of Emotional Support and Understanding by Steve Purdom
Relationships are the most important and complicated human endeavor. Two people who bring their Personality Type, Instinctual Subtype, Neediness, Emotional Reactivity and difficulties with Boundaries to a dialogue that goes on twenty-four hours per day are going to...
MYELW- Making Yourself Easier to Live With by Steve Purdom
The concept of MYELW is that the only person you can change is yourself. The only person that you can make healthier is yourself. In addition, you cannot get your emotional neediness met from anyone else on a continuous and unconditional basis. There will be moments...
Living in a Scary World of Scarcity – Type 5 by Steve Purdom
I believe that each of us is born into this world with a Personality Type in place. For me, the easiest visualization is that it is genetically determined and when confronted with the normal issues of powerlessness as a child and subsequent separation from our...
Japan and the Enneagram Tritype 6/4/1
By Steve Purdom, MD (Type 3, SP/1:1/SC) Sandra Maitri is a well-respected enneagram teacher. In her book “The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram”, she described Japan as a Type 4 country. I understand clearly her reasoning. The Japanese find beauty in...
The Enneagram and Japan: Is Japan a 6/4/1 Country? I Think So.
By Steve Purdom, MD (Type 3, SP/1:1/SC) I have spent a lot of my adult life in Japan (see “about the author”). My wife is Japanese and we have been together for 15 years. She also fully understands the enneagram. I love the culture, language, and lifestyle, but I...
Type 4
By Steve Purdom, MD (Type 3, SP/1:1/SC) Type 4’s have a unique way of using their enneagram personality to defend themselves from others, or perhaps to emotionally distance themselves from others. They view themselves as flawed and their focus on their inadequacies...
Psychological Projection
By Steve Purdom, MD (Type 3, SP/1:1/SC) Psychological projection is a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves...
Skillfully Setting Boundaries in Intimate Relationships
By Steve Purdom, MD (Type 3, SP/1:1/SC) What are boundaries? They are verbal descriptions of where your emotional and physical space begins and ends. It establishes our separateness from others and lets our family and friends know what sort of behavior we are...
Relationship Cornerstones
Minimize Neediness
Each of us have childhood issues that we sometimes ask other to resolve for us. My mother didn’t love would you do that for me. I was never understood as a child would you do that for me. This behavior seldom works out well. Our partners cannot know what our...
Emotional Reactivity
If someone makes us angry, sad or fearful, then we need to look inside ourselves for the origin of the emotional reactivity. That does not mean they are “right” and it may be that their behavior is such that we are not going to tolerate it but still the emotional...
Skillfully Set Boundaries
Setting boundaries is the process of letting other people know what we will and won’t tolerate. Emotional and physical abuse should not be tolerated and people need to understand that we will not interact with them if they don’t treat us in a loving, respectful...