Choose Your Fighter: Enneagram or IFS
The "choose your fighter" trend is everywhere on social media these days, and I’m full on using it as an excuse to talk about something I LOVE: integrating the Enneagram and IFS. And while no one is really pitting IFS against the Enneagram (at least not as far as I know), I’m going to pretend like someone has asked me, “Choose Your Fighter: Enneagram or IFS?” so that I can say: I decline to choose just one fighter. I choose both.
And then I’m gonna pretend like you gasp and ask me, with incredulity, why, so I can tell you: because they’re built to do different things. And being asked to choose one as the vehicle for personal growth and development is a lot like if you went car shopping and the dealership asked you to choose between an engine and a transmission. Sure, technically you could pick one. But you wouldn’t end up going anywhere.
What the Enneagram Actually Is
The Enneagram is a motivational system. Not behavioral — motivational. It's organized around core fears and core desires. The things drive behaviors, not the behaviors themselves.
In recent years, however, most of what’s online about the Enneagram is behavioral. It's type descriptions. Traits. Memes. The "you're such a four" jokes. Celebrity and TV show character type analyses.
But that's not the Enneagram - it’s what the internet did to the Enneagram when it tried to distill the whole thing down into bite-sized reels and carousel posts (which, unfortunately, is how most people encounter and “study” the Enneagram in recent years). In doing so, the most important part of the Enneagram went missing: the motivational architecture at the core of everything.
Which begs the question, if all of what’s on Instagram isn’t actually the Enneagram, what is it? As Elyse Myers would say, Great question - I’d love to tell you:
The Enneagram is about 9 different ways of seeing the world. 9 different sets of core fears and motivations. 9 different orientations to time (past, present, and future) and 9 different places to focus our attention (things like tasks, ideals, danger, needs, knowledge, power, etc.).
When you can see the glasses on your own face (identify your type), suddenly what looked like 47 separate, unrelated problems starts to funnel down into one or two repeating patterns.
The argument you keep having with your partner? The way you stall on certain decisions? The resentment that keeps showing up in your closest relationships? The Enneagram says these aren’t different problems - they’re the same pattern in different places.
And that’s not nothing. Knowing the pattern, knowing its shape, knowing which fears and desires are running it, gives you something real to work with.
But what the Enneagram doesn't give you is a way to actually work with it.
What IFS Actually Is
Internal Family Systems therapy is an experiential model. And just like “motivational” is core to the Enneagram, the experiential nature of the work makes or breaks it. Without it, you get what we’d call intellectual IFS, which winds up basically just being a more sophisticated vocabulary for your stuckness.
The premise of IFS is that you're not a single, unified thing — you're a system. And inside your system are various parts of yourself, each with their own role, their own logic, their own history. Some of them are protecting you. Some of them are holding old pain. Nearly all of them are living in 1999. (It’s not their fault - no one ever came back to get them).
Which is why, unlike the Enneagram, which is a framework for understanding yourself, IFS is a process for being in relationship with yourself.
What IFS gives you is a way to actually connect with those parts of yourself - and not so you can understand them in hindsight, or manage them better now, or reason them into compliance. So you can have a conversation.
And not just any conversation - the kind of conversation like when a kid who's been “acting out” gets to talk to someone who actually wants to understand them. The kid doesn't need to be fixed. They need to feel heard. And when they do, they soften. (And so do you.)
The change that comes from that kind of connection is different in kind from insight. It isn't conceptual. It's real.
But the work to form and build those kinds of connections can be slow going at times. I find this to be particularly true for my clients - partly because they are what we’d call “high-functioning” (which is therapist-speak for everything-sucks-but-nothing-is-wrong) which can make it hard to know where to go looking within the system, and partly because my clients tend to be analytically sharp, already fluent in their own patterns, genuinely good at figuring things out (which sounds like an advantage — and it is, until it isn't because in IFS work, figure-it-out mode often keeps the mind narrating over the parts instead of listening to them).
So the work becomes exploratory by necessity — not because IFS is an inherently slow model, but because when you don't know where to look and you're too good at thinking to just listen, you end up learning the terrain the long way by following whatever activates. But for women who have already done years of personal growth work, that can feel a lot like starting over.
The Integration of Internal Family Systems Therapy + The Enneagram
Now, here's where I get excited — because what the integration of IFS + the Enneagram makes possible - how it kind of solves for each model’s inherent limitations - this is the stuff I can't stop talking about lately.
The Enneagram Is A Shortcut…
When I know a client's Enneagram type, it's like this cheat sheet to knowing exactly how someone’s system works. Honestly, once I know a client’s Enneagram type, I stop listening to about 75% of what my clients say. Not because I don’t care - but because I’m not listening to content, I’m listening to pattern. When you understand someone's Enneagram type at the motivational level, the pattern announces itself constantly. You just have to know what you're listening for.
That's what I mean when I say the Enneagram is a shortcut. It doesn't just tell us where to look — it tells us which thread to pull, and maybe more importantly, which threads not to get pulled by. What might take months of exploratory IFS work to surface, the Enneagram hands us directly.
(It’s important to me to take the time to say that none of this means that all twos are the same, or that I think I already know you just because I know your enneagram type - gross. Your Enneagram type is not who you are, it’s how you see - and that pattern of seeing is common and shared among your type. But, the parts work stuff is where we discover what’s unique and individual to how that universally pattern specifically plays out in your life. And that part is always surprising.)
…And Ifs Is What You Do With It Once You Have It
A nine who has done solid IFS work might spend years getting to know angry parts — noticing when they activate, understanding what they're protecting, appreciating them for it. That work is real.
But, the Enneagram tells us that anger in a nine is almost always downstream of issues relating to autonomy. Specifically, blocked autonomy. The sense that their wants, their preferences, their right to take up space and have authority over their own life keeps getting overridden — sometimes by others, sometimes by parts of themselves that learned long ago that claiming space wasn't safe.
Without the Enneagram, a good therapist might eventually find their way there, to the autonomy stuff, by following the angry parts and waiting to see what they're protecting, etc. But with the Enneagram, we’re starting there. (Not at the wound - with a baked-in appreciation for parts that get angry because we already know they’re protecting an autonomy wound, which, when you know the 9 pattern, makes complete sense).
When I’m working with a 9 client, I’m not working with the angry parts hoping they'll lead somewhere useful. I already know where they lead. That work can still be slow - but it’s taking it slow in the place where we need to be, not in the process of getting there.
That's the difference between mapping a system and moving with it. And movement is the whole point, right?
So - Which One Should You Choose? Both.
An engine produces power. A transmission converts power into momentum. But movement only happens when both are working together, each doing the specific job it was built for.
And, when they do, it’s not like the engine becomes more powerful. The transmission doesn't become more capable. What happens is the creation of a separate, third thing that each one is required for, but neither one can create on its own: movement.
Integrating Enneagram + IFS gives us something altogether new — a model for knowing exactly where and why a person is stuck and the how for helping them get unstuck.
For people who’ve been at inner work for a while, it’s a relief to learn some locks require two keys. One is the Enneagram. The other is IFS.
Start Integrating the Enneagram and IFS Therapy in St. Louis, MO
If your Enneagram knowledge is solid but nothing is moving, it's time to stop mapping the pattern and start working with what's holding it in place. If your IFS work has been real but slow, the Enneagram might be the thing that finally tells you where to look.
It's not that the frameworks failed - it's that they each got only half the job.
So, if you've been wondering why all the work you've done hasn't worked the way you thought it would — you’re who Good Woman Therapy is meant for.
Other Services Offered at Good Woman Therapy
Curious to learn more about IFS therapy? Send me a message! As an IFS therapist, I love helping women and fellow therapists navigate their everyday lives with greater ease using Internal Family Systems Therapy, and I specialize in therapy for stress & overwhelm, inner critics, perfectionism, peacekeeping, and relationship concerns. My office is located in Ballwin, MO and I help everyday women navigate their everyday lives with greater ease by offering both in-person counseling as well as online therapy to clients throughout Creve Coeur, Ladue, Town and Country, Chesterfield, and St. Peters. I also provide online therapy Missouri-wide to clients outside the St. Louis and St. Charles County area. You can view my availability and self-schedule a free, 20-minute consultation on my consultation page.
