Enneagram Types and EMDR Therapy: How Each Personality Style Heals in the Therapy Room
Here at Denver Wellness Counseling, our trauma-informed therapists support clients in broadening awareness of how personality style interacts with life experience to foster unique strengths and/or contribute to emotional wounding. Effective therapists can include a personality assessment, like the Enneagram, to enhance client meta-cognition and assist clients in making connections between their personality structure and their goals for therapy.
The Enneagram, a dynamic psychological-spiritual framework, identifies nine core personality types, each shaped by unique fears, defenses, and desires. These types influence how we relate to others, respond to stress, and seek healing.
When paired with EMDR therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)—a trauma-informed modality grounded in neuroscience—the Enneagram can deepen a person’s healing journey. EMDR helps resolve unprocessed emotional wounds that fuel reactive patterns, and the Enneagram helps us understand why we developed those patterns in the first place.
In this blog, we explore each Enneagram type’s mental health profile and how EMDR therapy can be tailored to their specific needs, challenges, and growth goals.
Type One: The Reformer
Core Fear: Being bad, wrong, or corrupt
Mental Health Challenges: Perfectionism, OCD tendencies, harsh inner critic, anger suppression
Common Emotional Wounds
Type Ones often internalize messages that love is conditional on being "good" or morally upright. This may come from early experiences with critical caregivers or environments with rigid standards.
EMDR Focus for Ones
EMDR can target the origins of the inner critic—memories where the One was shamed for making mistakes or not meeting expectations. Processing these memories can reduce internal rigidity and increase self-compassion.
How EMDR May Help
Reduces obsessive rumination and “shoulds”
Reframes rigid moral beliefs rooted in early trauma
Helps integrate anger in healthy, assertive ways
Builds tolerance for imperfection and emotional flexibility
In EMDR therapy, Ones learn that being human is more important than being perfect—and that healing starts with compassion, not criticism.
Type Two: The Helper
Core Fear: Being unloved or unwanted
Mental Health Challenges: Codependency, burnout, resentment, over-functioning in relationships
Common Emotional Wounds
Twos often receive love for what they do rather than who they are. Childhood experiences may involve emotionally needy caregivers or environments where being helpful was rewarded while personal needs were ignored.
EMDR Focus for Twos
Targeting memories where Twos felt rejected for expressing needs or were praised only when self-sacrificing can help restore a sense of intrinsic worth.
How EMDR May Help
Processes wounds of emotional neglect or conditional love
Helps release shame around asking for help or setting boundaries
Reintegrates a sense of self separate from caregiving roles
Restores a balance between giving and receiving
EMDR allows Twos to reclaim their right to receive love, attention, and care—without overextending themselves.
Type Three: The Achiever
Core Fear: Being worthless or a failure
Mental Health Challenges: Workaholism, identity confusion, emotional suppression, performance anxiety
Common Emotional Wounds
Threes may grow up in achievement-oriented families where love and approval were tied to success or appearance. They often disconnect from their emotional life to maintain high performance.
EMDR Focus for Threes
EMDR can help access early memories that installed the belief: “I must perform to be loved.” These memories are often buried beneath layers of emotional avoidance and persona-building.
How EMDR May Help
Reclaims emotional access and vulnerability
Processes shame around perceived failure or inadequacy
Reduces anxiety tied to performance and identity
Strengthens a stable sense of self not reliant on achievements
In EMDR, Threes begin to see that their inherent value is not dependent on productivity—and they are loved for who they are, not what they do.
Type Four: The Individualist
Core Fear: Having no identity or personal significance
Mental Health Challenges: Depression, identity confusion, mood disorders, envy, emotional intensity
Common Emotional Wounds
Fours often feel misunderstood or emotionally abandoned. Many internalize a sense of defectiveness or “otherness” in early attachment relationships.
EMDR Focus for Fours
Targeting attachment wounds—particularly moments where emotional needs were unmet or dismissed—can reduce the need to dramatize pain or feel defined by suffering.
How EMDR May Help
Processes attachment trauma or feelings of emotional abandonment
Helps regulate emotional intensity and reduce mood instability
Reframes beliefs that “I must suffer to be special”
Rebuilds a grounded, authentic identity
EMDR can help Fours move from emotional spiraling to integration, showing them they can feel deeply without being overwhelmed.
Type Five: The Investigator
Core Fear: Being helpless, incapable, or overwhelmed
Mental Health Challenges: Social withdrawal, detachment, intellectualization, anxiety
Common Emotional Wounds
Fives may grow up in emotionally intrusive or overwhelming environments. In response, they retreat into the safety of the mind, distancing themselves from feelings and bodily sensations.
EMDR Focus for Fives
Early memories of being emotionally overwhelmed or shamed for vulnerability are crucial targets. Therapy may also explore the belief that expressing needs or emotions leads to danger.
How EMDR May Help
Reconnects Fives to emotional and somatic experience
Resolves trauma linked to emotional engulfment or deprivation
Increases tolerance for intimacy and emotional connection
Helps integrate head, heart, and body
Fives often experience EMDR as a structured and safe approach to emotional reconnection—one that doesn’t demand immediate vulnerability but gently supports it.
Type Six: The Loyalist
Core Fear: Being without support or guidance
Mental Health Challenges: Chronic anxiety, worst-case thinking, indecision, hypervigilance
Common Emotional Wounds
Sixes may experience unpredictable or unsafe environments in childhood—perhaps due to inconsistent caregiving, trauma, or untrustworthy authority figures.
EMDR Focus for Sixes
Key targets include experiences where Sixes felt abandoned, betrayed, or unprotected. These memories often underlie the chronic search for certainty and fear of making wrong decisions.
How EMDR May Help
Reduces generalized anxiety and catastrophic thinking
Repairs early attachment injuries and mistrust
Strengthens internal sense of safety and intuition
Builds tolerance for uncertainty and risk-taking
In EMDR, Sixes learn to internalize a felt sense of safety, allowing them to access their inner compass rather than relying solely on external structures.
Type Seven: The Enthusiast
Core Fear: Being trapped in emotional pain or deprivation
Mental Health Challenges: ADHD, addiction, escapism, anxiety masked by positivity
Common Emotional Wounds
Sevens may have experienced emotional neglect or unmet needs, but coped by staying positive and avoiding painful feelings. Many learn early that joy is a better survival strategy than vulnerability.
EMDR Focus for Sevens
Targeting avoidance-based coping mechanisms and early memories of deprivation or disappointment helps Sevens tolerate the “down” emotions they habitually bypass.
How EMDR May Help
Increases emotional range and depth
Processes grief or pain buried beneath optimism
Reduces compulsive behavior or distraction cycles
Builds emotional endurance and present-moment focus
EMDR helps Sevens discover that joy becomes deeper and more sustainable when they stop running from pain.
Type Eight: The Challenger
Core Fear: Being harmed or controlled
Mental Health Challenges: Anger issues, PTSD, control struggles, impulsivity
Common Emotional Wounds
Eights often experience betrayal, abuse, or environments where vulnerability was dangerous. Their tough exterior often hides a sensitive, wounded inner world.
EMDR Focus for Eights
Traumatic memories of betrayal, physical/emotional harm, or powerlessness are key targets. Eights may also need to process moments when their protective instincts were activated too early in life.
How EMDR May Help
Processes PTSD symptoms and hypervigilance
Helps re-integrate disowned vulnerability and emotional nuance
Reduces compulsive need for control
Restores a sense of empowered safety
Eights often experience EMDR as liberating—it gives them control in the healing process while helping them access deeper emotional truth.
Type Nine: The Peacemaker
Core Fear: Loss of connection, fragmentation, or conflict
Mental Health Challenges: Depression, dissociation, passivity, identity diffusion
Common Emotional Wounds
Nines may have learned early on that expressing their needs or desires led to conflict, rejection, or disconnection. As a result, they may "fall asleep" to themselves and merge with others.
EMDR Focus for Nines
Key targets include moments of self-erasure, emotional neglect, or family dynamics where conflict avoidance was prioritized. Therapy also helps reawaken the Nine’s own voice and vitality.
How EMDR May Help
Reintegrates disowned needs and emotions
Processes memories of emotional invalidation or invisibility
Increases motivation and assertiveness
Strengthens a clear, embodied sense of self
For Nines, EMDR gently helps them “wake up” to their own desires and power—without fear of disconnection.
Why EMDR Works So Well with the Enneagram
The Enneagram reveals how we protect ourselves from pain. EMDR helps us heal the very pain those defenses were built to avoid.
Each Enneagram type is shaped by early relational and emotional experiences—many of which live beneath conscious awareness. EMDR, by working directly with memory networks and the nervous system, accesses and reprocesses those formative experiences in a way that talk therapy alone often cannot.
In combination, EMDR and the Enneagram offer:
A map of your core identity and coping styles (Enneagram)
A method to resolve the traumas fueling those patterns (EMDR)
Summary Table: EMDR Therapy by Enneagram Type
| Type | Core Issue | EMDR Focus | Therapeutic Gains |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Inner critic, perfectionism | Shame memories, unmet expectations | Compassion, flexibility |
| 2 | Conditional love, people-pleasing | Emotional neglect, codependency | Boundaries, self-worth |
| 3 | Identity tied to success | Shame, performance anxiety | Authenticity, emotional access |
| 4 | Emotional abandonment, identity | Attachment wounds, self-defectiveness | Regulation, grounded identity |
| 5 | Fear of intrusion, withdrawal | Overwhelm, emotional neglect | Connection, embodiment |
| 6 | Fear of abandonment | Betrayal, inconsistency | Safety, self-trust |
| 7 | Avoidance of pain | Deprivation, grief | Depth, presence |
| 8 | Betrayal, trauma | Abuse, powerlessness | Vulnerability, trust |
| 9 | Loss of self, conflict avoidance | Invisibility, self-suppression | Assertiveness, vitality |
Ready to Begin EMDR Therapy in Denver?
If you recognize yourself—or your clients—in these patterns, it might be time to integrate Enneagram wisdom with EMDR healing.
Our Denver therapy practice, Denver Wellness Counseling, specializes in EMDR therapy, trauma-informed care, and attachment-based counseling. We help clients move from reactive patterns to emotional freedom by addressing the root of the pain, not just the symptoms.
