Intensive online workshop series: The Enneagram and Trauma

Using the Enneagram as a Map to Healing and Self-Remembering

Why would you do this course?

The Enneagram and Trauma reveals Type-specific pathways to healing, presence, and recovering the instinctual wisdom of our mind, heart, and gut centres. 

Encountering powerful Enneagram teachings, as well as the latest scientific trauma research insights into individual and collective trauma, you will discover the trauma patterns that lead to the instinctual distortions behind Type, as well as understand, and be able to work with, the unconscious defences that keep us dissociated and disconnected from our own life force, creativity, and human potential. 

You will walk away with powerful keys to change in the form of new Enneagram knowledge and understanding, new personal perspectives and insights, and new skills to take into your relationships and roles, whether as a leader, coach, therapist, facilitator, or teacher. 


Course structure:

A Transformational Learning Experience in 6 Modules
Personally transform as you Develop Knowledge, Insights, Perspectives, and Skills

Course Overview: 

Module 1: The Enneagram and the Trauma Revolution

  • 21st Century Trauma Awareness: From “Hysteria” to “ACEs” 
  • Understanding the Types and Long-term Impacts of Trauma 
  • The Wounded Healer Enneagram Coach. 

Module 2: Models of the Traumatized Psyche

  • Trauma sensemaking: from indigenous to traditional, medical, psychological, and biopsychosocial perspectives on trauma
  • Trauma and the Soul Child. The Jungian work of Donald Kalsched
  • The Enneagram – a “3-Centred Being” Psychospiritual Model of the Psyche
  • Defining Wholeness – 7 Domains, the Enneagram Heart, and Levels of Health.

Module 3: Using the Enneagram as a Lens on Complex Trauma and Relationships

  • Safety and Connection – Attachment vs Authenticity – Freezing, Fawning, and Trauma-Bonding 
  • The Enneagram Heart Wounds and Object Relations in understanding Trauma-Bonding
  • Working with Grief, Rage, Shame, and Anxiety

Module 4: Trauma-Based Enneagram Ego Patterning

  • Self-Med, Addictions, Self-Sabotage and the Ennea-Type Fixations 
  • The Defense Mechanisms – 9 forms of Narcotisation, Dissociation, Repression 
  • Trauma and the Inner Cast of Characters – “There are no bad parts.”
  • The Virtues and Holy Ideas in a Trauma Context.

Module 5:  Using the Enneagram to Map the Journey to Wholeness 

  • Coaching towards the health and wholeness of the Centers  
  • Coaching towards the health and the balancing the 3 instincts 
  • Safety in the present moment – Conscious Embodiment (Wendy Palmer) and the Cultivation of the Inner Observer.

Module 6: A Map of Modalities  

  • From Talk Therapy to Somatic Psychology, SE, CI, IFS, EMDR, and BWRT, NARM
  • Expressive therapies – Art, Movement, Dance, Narrative and Drama
  • Psychedelics and entheogens
  • Narrative, Ritualisation, Ceremony, and Shamanic Practices
  • Collective and Social Processes (CTIP, Circles).

Dates: Mondays 6,13,20,27 Sept and 4, 11 October from 18.00-21.00 SAST / 9.00-12.00 PDT / 11.00-14.00 CDT / 10.00-13.00 MDT / 12.00-15.00 EDT.

Cost: R7 200 +VAT (South African residents) / $895 (overseas residents)

Limited NPO / BBBEE discounts are available. If you are interested in applying for one, please motivate for this in the sign-up form message field.

Entry requirements: Previous exposure to the Enneagram and an understanding of the model structure (Centres and Lines), Type Structure, and main Type features. This will not be covered in the course. If you need to familiarise yourself with this content prior to the programme please email Ingrid for guidance on what to watch and read online to be ready for the deeper content on this course.

Course designer and facilitator: Ingrid Hurwitz.

Ingrid Hurwitz

Ingrid’s current coaching and relationship counseling work around her clients’ self-limiting patterns invariably involves a compassionate exploration of the early childhood experiences that necessitated the “reality strategies” that are no longer working for them. Her study of the Enneagram over the last 12 years has built on her early trauma counseling training (HIV Aids and GBV) and led to an engagement with contemporary trauma theory, research, and the many new healing modalities that have emerged, including Internal Family Systems (IFS); the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM), and other powerful approaches for healing Complex Trauma (C-PTSD) and restoring connection to self and others. 

Other areas of her journey that have contributed significantly to her understanding of personal growth and psychospiritual healing include her experience as an Imago relationship counselor; a life-long immersion in creative healing modalities; decades exploring Jungian Analytical psychology; and her corporate background in Leadership Development.

She is currently a full-time Enneagram specialist – i.e. teacher, coach, facilitator, supervisor, counselor, and relationship therapist. Her deepest joy is facilitating small, intensive Enneagram-based psychospiritual, personal transformation and learning groups. She also loves developing learning communities, such as the Enneagram Community of Practice, which is an IEA-recognised group that offers regular free teaching. She has presented at three International Enneagram Conferences including the 2021 IEA, where she presented on her Ph.D. topic: “The Cultivation of the Inner Observer”, which draws on Cognitive Science, Sufism, Christian mysticism, and Buddhism. People have described her work as “life-changing”, “a watershed experience”, and “refreshingly different”.