The TLDR? Don’t take your journey when you’re stressed or in crisis.

When I heard about the Enneagram from a friend, I liked the idea right away. Like many people, I suspect, I like taking quizzes that tell me more about who I am. Even better if there are details, things I can really resonate with, and in this case, a compassionate narrative to walk alongside as you (re)discover your strengths and weaknesses.

I took the $12 test here, and so did my husband. There are two tests you can take. If you choose to do it, I would start with the RHETI. I did both, and found the IVQ not to be worth my time. It didn’t tell me anything new, and frankly, I didn’t really understand my results. I don’t speak the lingo fluently yet, so talk about stacks and whatnot didn’t mean anything to me.

Once you take the quiz and get your results, you receive a lot of info via email in a PDF. I got a 35-page document with my RHETI results, and 9 pages with the IVQ. Below is a screenshot from my RHETI results.

Depending on what literature you read, I’m an Individualist, a Romantic, or a Tragic Romantic. They are all the same type, but have been called different names in different interpretations of the method and at different times. I prefer Romantic, but I don’t mind Individualist. If you know the parlance, I’m a 4w5, which means my “wing” is 5, The Investigator. I tied for third with The Reformer and Peacemaker, types 1 and 9, respectively.

If you know yourself and your spouse’s Enneagram number, you can find out what typically characterizes a relationship between the two of you. This can also work for employer/employee or parent/child relationships.

With nine different personality types, though, you would have to kind of become a bit of an expert on all of them in order to identify personality types in others, so that you could know which pairing information to look at. It’s not as straight forward, for instance, as identifying the Melancholic, Sanguine, Phlegmatic, or Choleric temperaments in other personality-type literature.

After getting my quiz results and comparing them with my spouse’s, we were a bit traumatized to find out that not only were we an “uncommon pairing,” but that according to our results, we were barely compatible and had a tendency for destructive relational habits. Finding that out at a time when we were already having a crisis was difficult, to say the least, and not especially encouraging.

After stepping back from the results and reading other (relationship-centered) literature for a couple of weeks, I was able to finally crack open the book my friend had recommended, which I got from the library, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery, by Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile. Because I had such a tall stack of books to read, I skipped right to the chapters on my husband’s and my personality types, then read the first two chapters and the last chapter.If you know me well, you’ll know this represents an enormous amount of growth. I used to moan, groan, and struggle through books I hated, cover to cover, just because I couldn’t stand to be a quitter. Now, out of necessity and the realization that life really is too short, I set aside books I can’t stand, and read just the salient parts of nonfiction works as necessary. Interestingly, I often set out to read just part of a nonfiction book and get sucked in and read the whole thing (I intend to come back to this one and read more about the other personality types).

While the book is more of an overview of each type and the Enneagram in general, the online quiz results had extensive information on all four types that I scored highest in (since I tied with two for third place).

I went back to the website to find information on pairings. The quiz results contain information on positives and negatives for each type, characteristics of high, average, and low functioning individuals, and the way the personality functions under stress and when healthy. There was a section on relationship issues. There was also a pretty long list of famous people for each type.  (J.D. Salinger, Anne Frank, Johnny Depp, and Frida Kahlo are all my personality-type buddies. Yessss.)

What I enjoyed about the book is its sympathetic voice. As the authors talked about each type’s struggles, they used anecdotes, quotes, and appropriate cultural references. I mention the cultural references because having grown up in a very protected home, many times when cultural references are made, I don’t get them. (I tried to watch the Gilmore Girls, but hated it because they were always making references I didn’t get and it drove me a little nuts. There were other things not to like, but that was a primary turn off for me.)

With An Enneagram Journey, I could almost feel the author’s hand on my back and a soft voice coaxing me to look at my destructive tendencies and recognize my weaknesses. It isn’t all bad, either. It was also engaging to read about the non-pejorative information about my type and to recognize myself in it. At the beginning of each personality type’s chapter is a list of statements that typically ring true for the type. Then it dives in with specific information about the type, along with personal examples.

It didn’t ever feel too burdensome a read to me, and it was from a Christian perspective. One of the most interesting things about that is how the book characterized each type’s typical shortcomings in the framework of your relationship with God.

The Enneagram : Understanding Yourself and The Others in Your Life, by Helen Palmer, was the other Enneagram book I tried. I didn’t get far. The publication date listed on Amazon is 1991, but I think the copy I got on inter-library loan was even older than that. This is the version that coined me as a Tragic Romantic, which I didn’t like, and the writing was dense and felt out of date. I browsed the sections on my husband’s personality type and mine, but the way they were characterized didn’t resonate with me the way An Enneagram Journey did.

For $12, I felt it was worth it to me to take the online test and get specific results rather than trying to figure out my type by reading all the descriptions on the website or in the books. Patience isn’t really one of my strong suits. However, if you had some time and your reading comprehension is on point, I don’t know why you couldn’t get a pretty good sense of which type you were from reading the Journey book.

Either way, I was fascinated by the information, and wished I had come across it when things were not in upheaval, so that I could have just dug in and wallowed in it without feeling desperate or over-sensitive to the material (especially the info about the compatibility of my husband’s and my types in romantic relationships.) If you have enjoyed learning more about yourself from personality tests in the past, this is a good tool to have.