Enneagram Sixes are the Loyalist, the Devil's Advocate, the Doubter. Their central passion is fear, or anxiety. They long for the certainty and solidity they don't feel.
This is a brief look at the aspect of the divine Sixes are in tune with, how they feel separated from it, and how they can recapture that sense, as detailed in Sandra Maitri's book The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram.
Sixes come into life sensing that the nature of our soul is pure Essence. There's something constant and invulnerable to us at root, something beyond the surfaces. This sense is Holy Strength.
Furthermore, we don't believe this because someone told us, or simply hold the concept intellectually. It's felt directly, unshakeably, in our bones. This is called Holy Faith.
But we lose our connection from this, and come to associate who we are with our physical bodies - frail and vulnerable, with nothing but our animal survival instincts to help us survive. And looking around, Sixes project these animal impulses onto others. Everyone's out for themselves, it seems. The strong tear open the guts of the weak. Anyone could turn on you. Catastrophe's always waiting to strike.
Others are feared, or even scapegoated. But the inner world - where the frightening impulses come from in the first place - is the subject of the greatest uncertainty of all. As Maitri says:
Doubt pervades everything, manifesting in hesitation, indecision, vacillation, indefiniteness, irresoluteness, oscillation, and skepticism. Because they are not sure where they stand or what they feel, decision making can become obsessive and fraught with the fear of making the wrong choice. They stutter - vocally or not - blocking themselves and making it difficult for their action to flow unimpeded by this self-doubt. Inevitably this makes it very difficult for Sixes to take decisive and unequivocal action. When they do come to a conclusion and act on it, second-guessing and worry about having done the wrong thing follow quickly.
Sixes will sometimes project the certainty they long for onto an authority of some kind: an individual, a belief system, an organization, a country, an ethnic identity, a profession, their gender, their family - looking for someone or something they can trust, swear loyalty to and feel confidence in. But they'll still question this authority, and either double down and believe all the more stridently, or feel horribly deficient because of their doubt.
Or, in their attempts to recapture the grounded feeling of Holy Strength, Sixes might seek to embody it themselves through acts of defiant bravery - or even self-destructive, rebellious impulsiveness.
But true courage lies in being able to look into the workings of one's soul, and face the inner drives that seem so frightening. A Six will come face to face with the places inside where he feels estranged from Being, where a hole or a gap seems to exist. But the terror that was assumed to reside there will instead be revealed as spaciousness. His soul will relax as it becomes clearer and clearer there was never anything inside to be frightened of.
As Maitri says:
The more that he has the courage to make these inner forays, the more he will contact his ground, which in turn will give him a sense of inner security and confidence in himself. Bit by bit, he will reclaim his depths and find his foundation within. Rather than being a believer and a follower, he will know Essence firsthand, and out of his experiential contact with himself, he will know that who he is fundamentally is absolutely unshakable and indestructible. Rather than being one of the faithful, he will know Essence to be his strength and will see that it is something he does not need to preserve or protect or be afraid of losing. His faith, at long last, will be real.
