NVC and the enneagram – layers of needs

My old article from 5 years ago is here: “False” needs? Enneagram and NVC.
I’ve now used AI to flesh out my thinking, and this is the result.

NVC treats needs as always valid, which is correct – at the core level. But Enneagram adds the idea that for each type, there’s usually:

1. a core existential need (often implicit, pre-verbal), that we seem to have trouble believing can be met.
2. a strategy-shaped need that becomes foregrounded and named, as our best attempt at meeting the first need.
3. a quiet assumption: “If I get (2), then (1) will be taken care of.”

The relief of meeting the strategy-need is often activating (and brittle); core relief is settling.

For me, the best way to get to the core need is to ask “If I had THAT (eg belonging, mattering, etc), THEN what would I have?”. You can ask it again and again, with each deeper need that appears. (You don’t have to go ALL the way down – In practice, I always end up at “safety”, a need to survive. I think because everything comes down to that in the long run – our brain’s job is to keep us alive, not happy.)

I’ve come to understand that conflict happens when we respond to something with one of the three core aversive emotions common to all mammals – fear, anger or distress (FEAR, RAGE and PANIC/GRIEF from Jaak Panksepp’s research), and that switches on the “threat circuit” in the brain, where our brain shuts down cognitive and emotional flexibility in order to focus on survival, and so comes up with a quick short-cut way to understand what’s going on, and it almost always involves figuring out who’s to blame, and how to stop them, i.e. comes up with what’s going to be a tragic strategy! NVC is the process for taking people OUT of threat circuit, and into what’s called the SEEKING (curiosity about what I want) circuit and CARE (care for self and others) circuit. Now, sometimes people get stuck along the way, especially when they MISS the first feeling and focus only on the secondary, defensive feelings, and then they get to the wrong need, and then nothing really lands, they never get to “the shift” we talk about.

Now, HOW they respond to (and cover up) the “first feeling” depends on what we might call their regulation strategy – with any feeling, we can respond to it in three different ways – express/move towards, suppress/move away, reframe – thus giving us the 9 types. So, a type 9 (me) might feel initial anger, but attempt to cognitively reframe it to make herself feel safer in the moment, so disconnect from the anger and just feel the discomfort, and then rationalise that away with numbness and resignation. Then, looking for the need under THAT, she thinks she needs peace – when what she really wanted was possibly agency (the core need of the anger triad). She can try to get all the “peace” she can, but it never really gives her what she’s truly needing, what will truly help her settle.