The Instinctual Centre

The Instinctual Centre corresponds to the reptilian brain and is the most ancient of the three: it ensures our survival through instinctive defence mechanisms, flight, aggression, and through immediate, repetitive behaviours.

An instinctual personality tends to move into action quickly, sometimes without thinking, in an automatic manner. People who, for convenience, we will call Instinctual sometimes surprise themselves by doing things before they have even had time to think about them. They feel things first "in the gut."

On Sunday afternoon I was in my garden and a neighbour started to mow his lawn, although doing this on a Sunday is banned. He had barely mown one strip when I was up there on the separating wall shouting: "Are you mad?” »

Instinctual personalities tend to get going, move, do things, without necessarily having felt emotions or having thought. An instinctual person is also someone who will resolve a tension experienced in feeling or thinking in action and by means of action.

When I come back from work late in the evening and everything is in a mess in the kitchen, I feel infuriated inside, and that gives me the energy to do the washing up and tidy everything away, even if I am shattered.

Anger is the unconscious driver of instinctual drives. Here we are talking about aggression, this basic emotion which, in animals and in human beings, has the function of getting the better of an enemy, a rival, a prey.

In the Enneagram model, instinctual personalities have the numbers 8, 9 and 1. Each number type is very different.