Sundays with the Enneagram

 

The “Three Centres” Myth – Part 4:

If Any Type Can Be “Gut,” What Does Gut Even Mean?

 

If the gut centre were really a clear psychological category, the “body types” 8, 9, and 1 would all obviously share a distinctive way of processing life through instinct, action, and anger.

Instead, by tweaking the story a little, each of them can be rehomed into a different supposed domain just as convincingly, which shows how loosely the labels are actually being used.

 

Take Type 8. The standard narrative says “gut type, anger, action, body,” yet 8s are also some of the most obviously emotional characters on the diagram: they do not shy away from strong feelings, they often express them directly, and they can be intensely protective, sensitive, and tender with family or the inner circle.

You only have to shift the spotlight from their muscles to their passion and fierce attachment to “their people” to make a very plausible case that 8s belong in a heart or bonding domain rather than a body one.

 

Type 9 is officially in the anger triad, yet their chief feature is bonding: getting along, smoothing things over, creating inclusion, and keeping the atmosphere pleasant and connected.

If you start from the lived behaviour instead of the diagram, 9s look like a natural candidate for a bonding or relationship group, not an agency or anger domain, unless you again reach for the “they are in the anger group but disconnected from anger” trick that can justify anything.

 

Type 1 is the third “body type,” but their whole strategy revolves around creating certainty through rules, order, correctness, and “the right way,” which provides structure and standards that reduce anxiety.

Their core concern is maintaining order and rightness, which fits far more cleanly with a certainty or control domain than with raw instinct; the famous tension in their body is in service of mental standards about how things should be.

 

Once you see how easily 8 can be argued into feeling or bonding, 9 into bonding, and 1 into certainty, the original gut grouping starts to look arbitrary.

If someone insisted on having a genuine agency or body triad, a more believable set might be 8, 3, and 7, three types that quite obviously push into the world, take initiative, and shape reality according to their will and plans.

 

The fact that the traditional 8-9-1 trio needs so much narrative massaging to work as “body types” is a sign that the head/heart/gut scheme is more about protecting a symmetric pattern than about accurately describing how the types function.

 

In the next episode, the same lens turns on the supposed heart centre, and it becomes just as easy to argue 2, 3, and 4 into or out of “feeling dominance” depending on which parts of their description you choose to emphasise.