The Maturation of the Instinctual Types

Exploring the young, adolescent, and mature instinctual domains

Just as our primary Enneagram type and Trifix can operate from a healthy, average, or unhealthy range, the instinctual types (social, self-preservation, and sexual/intimate) play a crucial role in our functioning. These primal imperatives, operating below our conscious awareness, can be likened to the stages of human development-young, adolescent, or mature. Understanding this is a crucial step toward our personal growth and self-discovery.

Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

For many people, working with the instinctual type is more transformative than working on the Enneagram type or trifix because the instinct is the fire that ignites the Enneagram type defenses. Working to age progress or maturate the instinctual drives can often be the key to learning how to work with our Enneagram type and trifixes more efficiently. Without understanding that the instinct is the fuel of the ego, we can waste considerable time spinning our proverbial self-growth wheels while ignoring the fundamental distortions the instinct delivers to our conscious ego.

After approximately six years old, the primary instinctual drive begins to reveal itself for most of us. The secondary and tertiary instincts still support the primary instinct and create an instinctual stacking with a unique flavor (we’ll unpack the instinctual stackings in a future post). Oscar Ichazo posited that all human beings become fixated on a particular domain as a necessary feature of the human experience.

Once our primary instinctual fixation develops, we act to meet its needs. For example, if we’re fixated in the self-preservation domain, we will begin to make choices and unconsciously manipulate others and our environment to serve our comfort, security, and physical well-being, sometimes to the exclusion of others. The young self-preservation person may make choices that unintentionally infringe on others’ boundaries, throw tantrums, or be excessively fearful and isolate themselves for fear of infringement.

However, as we mature, ideally, so should our egos. So, while the strategies we employ to serve our egos become more sophisticated, for example, we trade throwing a tantrum because we can’t have any more cookies for hoarding cookies just in case we run out. This creates a paradox whereby we intellectually understand that the world won’t end if we don’t have a backstock of extra cookies in the pantry just in case the world ends, but we can’t help but stockpile those cookies just in case. In this instance, the fear of being without one’s perceived essentials often fuels behavior that, while not rational, serves to soothe the instinct’s primal fear of demise.

As we become more conscious of our instinctual concerns, we may develop more balanced perceptions of the instinct’s needs. So, a self-preservation person may, for example, ensure they always have a package of cookies around, just in case, knowing that they can always get more if they run out. However, they may still worry about the store no longer carrying their cookies or even become angry or testy when their spouse, child, or roommate eats their favorite cookies without asking. This is an example of an adolescent perspective of our instinctual domain and shows some maturity in how we view our essential needs and how we get said needs met.

If we become even more conscious of our instinctual concerns and how they affect our behavior and sense of well-being, in conjunction with working on our ego defense strategies and a healthy spiritual or philosophical perspective on life, we can cultivate more understanding and space around our apparent instinctual needs.

By consciously integrating our primal, instinctual drives into our awareness, we may begin to recognize that the cookies only represent our desire to feel comfortable and satisfied. We also understand that the cookies aren’t vital to cultivating a feeling of wholeness. In this way, we release our attachment to the cookies as a surrogate for our safety and recognize that (to a large degree) safety, comfort, and pleasure are relative to our state of being.

Maturing our dominant instinct takes time and a well-developed sense of mindfulness since instinctual programming functions unconsciously.

Below are some pointers to each instinctual domain’s area of focus concerning maturity. The list is not exhaustive but can provide a window to allow you to begin assessing your own relative instinctual maturity level, bearing in mind that our instinctual drives, much like our Enneagram type, exist on a continuum of health.