Understand Yourself, Understand Your Partner: The Essential Enneagram Guide to a Better Relationship

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According to an increasingly popular personality system called the Enneagram, there are nine basic types of people in the world. Each Type sees the world through a different lens, and has different goals, fears, challenges, priorities, and motivations. Once you know the the Type of each member of a couple, you have a very good idea of what are likely to be the strengths and challenges of that pairing, and what issues are most likely to come up again and again for them. Volume I of my book describes each of the 9 Types and how they are expressed within a relationship. Volume 2 has a separate chapter for each of the 45 possible pairings of these 9 personalities. They help the couple understand where they might get stuck and how they can better work out their differences. The books is based on reports by actual pairs of each type, and each chapter has quotations from the couple describes what a relationship of that combination of types is like. Each chapter ends with a few questions for the couple of that particular combination to discuss

The main theme is that if you understand yourself, according to the enneagram personality system, and your spouse or partner understands him or herself, you won’t take your partner’s actions so personally and will have greater success in problem-solving in your marriage and in communicating more effectively with your partner. This pair of books teaches you how to do that.

What distinguishes your book from others: Most of my writing in the past has been researche –based, and this is no exception. My coauthor and I surveyed many couples in the Enneagram community , and asked them many questions about the strengths and challenges of their coupleship, the nature of the recurrent disagreements, what strengths they believe they and their spouse brought to the relationship, etc. We then wrote 45 individual chapters, describing every single possible pairing of the 9 enneagram types. This was preceded by descriptions of each of the 9 types in relationship. This approach is unique. Additionally, given that my coauthor is a psychotherapist who actually works with couples, we ended each chapter of both books with questions for the couple to discuss with each other, based on their specific personality type.

The target audience includes people who feel that their marriage or committed relationship could improve and want to learn how to do it. Any age, both genders, high-school education or more. Also people who arenot in a relationship currently, who would like to understand why previous relationship ended and how to have a better outcome next time. Also counselors, therapists, and other professionals who want to be able to work with clients more effectively.

What inspired me to write the book is that when I first learned about the enneagram about 20 years ago and understood my personality type and that of my former husband and current husband, I was stunned to realize how PREDICTABLE our chief problems were, given our personality types, and how to get better outcomes based on this new knowledge