Sundays with the Enneagram

 

The “Three Centres” Myth – Part 5:

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

 

If the heart centre were really a precise category, the “feeling types” 2, 3, and 4 would clearly organise life around emotional experience and relationship, in a way that other types do not. But once you look more closely at how they actually function, you can just as easily reframe each of them into other supposed domains, which again shows how elastic and unhelpful the head/heart/gut groupings really are.

 

Take Type 2. The usual story is “heart type, focused on feelings and relationships,” yet 2s also move with a very strong sense of agency: they instinctively step in, take charge of helping, anticipate needs, and go straight into action without being asked.

Their helping is not only emotional; it is practical, strategic, and often quite pushy, so with only a small shift of emphasis they can be framed as an agency type whose main tactic happens to be care and support.

 

Type 3 is officially a heart type, but most descriptions emphasise efficiency, image management, tactics, and results. That easily fits an agency domain: 3s take initiative, drive projects, and shape themselves and the environment to hit goals.

At the same time they clearly belong in any certainty or control group, given their fear of failure, performance anxiety, careful planning, and focus on metrics and outcomes that promise security and status.

You can argue them as bonding types, agency types, or certainty types, which suggests the “heart centre” label is doing very little actual sorting work.

 

Type 4 is sold as the quintessential emotional type, yet a lot of 4-ish suffering happens in the head: comparing self with others, constructing stories about identity and deficiency, rehearsing how misunderstood they are, and engaging in enormous introspection.

With a slight tilt of the narrative, 4s can be painted as a kind of agency type too, actively shaping a unique identity, resisting ordinary life, and curating their inner world as a project, or as a certainty type who clings to a fixed story about themselves to anchor a sense of who they are.

 

If someone really wanted a coherent bonding or attachment triad, a more convincing grouping might be 2, 9, and 6: three types whose central preoccupation is staying connected, supported, and included, even if they go about it in very different ways.

 

The ease with which 2, 3, and 4 can be redistributed into agency and certainty domains, and the fact that an alternative bonding triad emerges so naturally, is another sign that the traditional heart centre is more a product of diagram symmetry than of clear, observable differences in how types actually process emotion and relationship.

 

In the next episode, the spotlight moves to the so-called head centre, where 5, 6, and 7 can also be argued into agency, bonding, or certainty in multiple ways, leaving the question hanging: if every type can be made to fit every centre with enough storytelling, what are these centres really adding to our understanding?