Point and Type Seven
Freedom and Completeness

TYPE SEVEN ARCHETYPE

Point Seven represents the archetype of joy and freedom. It is the part of us that strives to achieve fulfilment and happiness by appreciating and savoring all the possibilities that life offers.

When we experience the high qualities of this point we feel satisfied and blessed regardless of external factors. We live life as an endless wonder, free from automatisms and inner conditioning. We want to experiment and enjoy every moment with lightness, dynamism, surprise and spontaneity.

TYPE SEVEN OVERVIEW

Point Seven is part of the Intelligence Center of the Head and of the intellect, so those with this dominant personality type are oriented towards support and direction.

Type Seven wants to enjoy life. His core value is a world where everyone has a chance to be happy. He is optimistic, energetic and creative. He values ​​the positive aspects of situations and he is grateful for everything that happens. He wants to live life to the full, like an adventure, feeling satisfied and joyful.

At his best he is a cheerful, lively, spirited, enthusiastic and outgoing person who finds everything invigorating. He is energetic, adventurous, seeking strong experiences and sensations, easily excitable and responsive to external stimuli and with good resilience. He is curious, able to learn quickly and to fruitfully cross different areas of interest. He is a bold, future-oriented visionary capable of being gregarious and carrying out multiple tasks at the same time. He is self-confident, passionate, committed, practical and prolific.

When type Seven loses connection with his inner sense of joy and lightness, he feels the need to have many options to experiment and to optimise each situation.
He begins to believe that it is necessary to maximise pleasure and eliminate pain, and to plan and anticipate the ways and times of his happiness.
He becomes overly careful not to miss out on the many different opportunities and experiences that he imagines valid and that will possibly ensure he has what he needs.
Then everything becomes a forced search for stimulation to prevent negative feelings from emerging. He is pleasure oriented and he just wants to enjoy life and feel fulfilled. He wants to have all the many possibilities and choices available, he doesn’t want to miss anything, he keeps himself busy, increases the variety and number of activities, carries out multiple projects and keeps several options open.
He is convinced that making a choice means losing all other possibilities forever.
This makes him restless, very inattentive, excitable and impulse-driven. He wants to keep up with trends, to know and talk about what is classy, ​​refined and sophisticated. He is often seen by others as superficial and childish, although this is not how he perceives himself.

The reactive emotional environment that matures, the passion of this type, is  gluttony. Gluttony is the need to fill ourselves, the hunger for possibilities and experiences that drives to want to do everything. It’s the feeling of never having enough choices and options. It is greed and frenzy to obtain ideal situations of joy and freedom.
This reactivity leads Type Seven to believe that his happiness depends on the quantity rather than the quality of his experiences. It pushes him to develop habits that avoid any unpleasant sensation, to always be elsewhere with his head, more and more active and restless looking for the right situation or person. The more he tries to achieve this impossible freedom, the more frustrated and dissatisfied he feels.
He increasingly justifies his impulsive and hyperactive behaviours and his aggressive insistence that others comply with his requests. This leads him to fear more and more that people and the environment prevent him from getting what he wants. He feels easily bored and irritated, becomes distracted, uninhibited, histrionic, nagging and unable to restrain himself. He is self-centered, insensitive, fickle, frivolous, pretentious and denies his responsibilities and faults.

Type Seven at his worst needs instant gratification, to feel high and to avoid feeling anxiety at any cost. He can’t stop, he’s insatiable, childish, capricious, foiled, insulting, manic and hysterical. He believes that others are preventing him from being free and happy, he condemns and punishes others. He feels overloaded and overwhelmed, debilitated, ruined, destroyed and his energy is depleted. He ends up being truly trapped in the pain he fears and deprived of what it takes to be satisfied and happy.

Point Seven of the Enneagram invites us to be grateful for every moment of life and puts us in touch with the desire for inner freedom. To contact this dimension it is necessary to be totally present in the moment and understand that satisfaction and happiness are not built by particular situations. Accepting responsibility for what we feel makes us live every experience lightly and as a possibility. Thus we can joyfully celebrate existence and share happiness by increasing the richness of everyone’s experience.

(selected and translated from “Crescere con l’Enneagramma”, Maura Amelia Bonanno, 2018, Armenia Edizioni)