Sundays with the Enneagram
 
The “Three Centres” Myth – Part 9: Tritypes on a Shaky Foundation
 
Tritypes are the idea that each person has not just one Enneagram type, but three: one from each traditional centre, supposedly giving you a “primary” type plus a supporting type in the other two centres. The concept emerged and was developed in modern Enneagram circles (especially Katherine Fauvre’s work), building directly on the assumption that the head, heart, and gut centres are real and that everyone must have one type from each.
 
The logic sounds tidy: if you have a dominant centre, surely you also have secondary patterns from the other two, so why not name a “3-type code” to capture this? But the whole thing quietly smuggles in several untested assumptions. 
 
Why should every person necessarily have exactly one type from each centre? Why not two from one centre and one from another, or five types you strongly relate to, or different patterns in different life domains? There is no evidence that our inner world arranges itself into a neat “one from each triad” structure, beyond the desire to keep the head/heart/gut story symmetrical.
 
Tritypes also risk turning the Enneagram into a collecting game: instead of doing deep work with one core fixation and one dominant bias, people start hunting for “their” combination across 27 possibilities, explaining away almost any behaviour by saying “that’s my other type showing.” The more patterns you add, the easier it becomes to avoid the uncomfortable simplicity of owning one main strategy that keeps repeating.
 
In the next episode, we will flip the script and use the tritype descriptions as raw material: taking the 27 tritypes and showing how they can be translated into the 27 ATA subtypes, without needing three centres or three types inside you at all. The tritype translator.

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