Type Nine
Riso and Hudson labeled Nines the Peacemaker. Palmer and Daniels preferred the Mediator, and others selected the Preservationist and the Peaceful Person. This book named Nines the Peaceful Lamb because this type often spends their lives avoiding conflict at all costs and loves being the sweethearts of the Enneagram. Nines cannot envision a world absent of peace and harmony and thus consider it their mission to impose it. Nines are willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of peace in the family, peace in the community, peace in the church, peace everywhere.
Nines are undeniably agreeable, peaceful, and extremely wary of conflict, making them equivalent to Zen masters in the Enneagram. Nines who have evolved to the highest rungs of their personality spectrum are truly spiritual leaders who practice divine detachment. They love, but they also release and allow everything and everyone to evolve according to their divine design.
The average, ego-driven Nine, however, practices detachment as a way to avoid anything that will create anxiety. They will repress anger and deny feelings for eons, even when their loved ones are literally feeling frozen out by unspoken resentment emanating from the peaceful Nine. Nines can make great diplomats and mediators, but their indecisiveness, neutrality, and foot dragging can also drive their family or coworkers nuts.
At their best, Nines are flexible, modest, and realistically optimistic, but Nines surrender their sense of self for the sake of relationship and can eventually become disconnected from their own lives. They essentially live their unfocused lives lost in a dense fog.
Pathological Nines are capable of actually harming the ones they profess to love so much through emotional neglect and passive-aggressive striking back. Nines can be deadly but silent. If they are balanced, however, Nines experience an emotional awakening and focus the right amount of attention on themselves and their loved ones. When in top form, Nines have a palpable, confident serenity that makes them incredibly effective communicators, calming mediators, and fully connected partners.
Nines are modest, trusting, easygoing, self-effacing, and patient, but also complacent, accommodating, repressed, passive-aggressive, apathetic, and numb. They cower in fear that if they rock the boat, everyone won't love them anymore. They try to hide the fact that their nothing-bothers-me exterior covers a core of anger and resentment, but it leaks out in stinky, silent, unexpected ways. They are lazy in the sense that they don't invest the energy required to reveal their true feelings, express their real desires, or take responsibility for their own spiritual growth.
Nines get into trouble when their habit of ignoring problems and dissociating to avoid conflicts allows neglected troubles in work and in relationships to fester, become serious, and present a real danger to themselves and others.
Famous people who are Nines include Ronald Reagan, Fran Leibowitz, Tony Bennett, Bill Clinton, Clint Eastwood, Jimmy Stewart, Walter Cronkite, Jerry Seinfeld, Grace Kelly, Sandra Bullock, Patty Hearst, the Dalai Lama, and fictional characters Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, the bumbling detective Columbo, and Edith Bunker.
