Push My Buttons! Please! Getting to Know Self through Relationships

By Melissa Hampton

“Being with a partner who pushes your buttons is good. The button points to the place that is most important for us to work on.” – Ayala Malach Pines, Ph.D.

Jake is a spontaneous, fun kind of guy. He likes his options open. He is frequently late, has been known to miss planes, routinely runs out of gas, and is better at starting projects than finishing them.

Angie is an organized, plan-ahead kind of gal. She makes her schedule in advance, keeps her Blackbook with her at all times, never misses a deadline, and has never run out of gas.

Jake and Angie have been married for 9 months. Will this relationship survive?

The quality of our closest relationships gives life meaning. When love, respect and commitment are present, relationships generally move along smoothly. But there are those times when clashes not only occur, but are inevitable given the variety of personalities. People make relationships, and personality makes people what they are.

“If we don't understand how our personalities work”, our own tendencies and what pushes our buttons, we're in a weakened position in terms of being able to be open and receptive to our partner,” says Russ Hudson, co-founder of The Enneagram Institute in New York.

Hudson, along with Don Richard Riso, is the author of the bestselling books on the Enneagram – The Wisdom of the Enneagram, Personality Types, and Understanding the Enneagram, to name a few. The Enneagram is an astonishingly effective system for understanding yourself and others in your life and offers profound insights into your own personality. These insights can influence dramatically the quality of your relationships.

The wisdom of the Enneagram is an amalgam of ancient Christianity, Sufi mysticism and modern psychology. “Ennea” means nine and grammos a “graph,” so the system is based on nine, interconnected personality types, nine points of view, displayed in a circle.

As human beings on a path toward wholeness, we find an element of each of the nine personality types within us. But study of the system reveals that one E-type is our home base – shaping our perceptions and our relating style more than the others.

The following interview with Russ Hudson is about the workshop he will be conducting in Atlanta on March 5th and 6th, titled Relationships: Personal & Professional (see end of article for details).

During this two-day event, Hudson will guide participants to use the Enneagram as a profound and immensely practical way to understand our relationships, thus improving the quality of those relationships, personal and professional.

HUDSON: Each personality type thinks differently, has different values and approaches, and wants different things in a relationship. Some types are more compatible than others, and the compatibility strengths and trouble spots can be specified for each combination of the nine personality types.

HUDSON: This isn't a workshop on how to fix your partner. It's a workshop on how to improve your ability to relate with your partner. First you have to relate to yourself. A lot of us have heard that, but it's easier said than done.

Hampton: Can you give me an example of some of your specific topic areas for the workshop?

HUDSON: We talk about priorities. How people prioritize things differently and how we're wired even from birth to have different priorities. It's really important to understand {our natural tendencies} in order to have the relationship be successful in the long run without it feeling like you're giving up everything that's important to you. So we talk about making a space for a relationship to happen.

Hampton: What does that mean, making a space?

HUDSON: It means that usually we're so loaded up with ideas about who we are – who the other person is, what's supposed to happen, what's not supposed to happen, that we don't give the real relationship we have room to breathe. And while it's OK to want what we want and not like what we don't like, there are also ways to create a little room around that so that the relationship has room to breathe.

Hampton: How can the study of personality help us have a successful relationship?

HUDSON: One way is that awareness of our own personality helps us see that we tend to sign up for the same types of relationships over and over again, and if those are not working out, then recognizing the patterns is essential to the future success of all of our relationships. But we can only know that our understanding is real when we have better relationships. So the quality of our relationships is a pretty good measure of how well we know ourselves, how real is our spirituality, and how solid is our psychological well being. Investing a little time in learning the Enneagram system of personality types reaps great rewards.

Hampton: So someone who pushes your buttons could really be a gift in disguise?

HUDSON: Precisely. And understanding personality is a short-cut to understanding what your buttons are, thus improving communication and unraveling relationship difficulties with self and others.

For more information, attend: Relationships: Personal & Professional March 5 & 6, 2005, 9 am – 6 pm, Holiday Inn Select, 450 Capitol Avenue SW, Atlanta, Georgia 30312. To register, call 678-534-0139 or email enneagramofatl@bellsouth.net