People who are receptive to their environment and play down their own presence. When healthy they often are loving, modest and trusting. When unhealthy they can be stubborn, lazy and soul-dead.

Unlike Eights, who directly express their anger, Nines tamp their anger down. Their central defensive strategy is to self-efface, to blend with and accommodate their environment. This tactic requires that Nines suppress their rough edges and conceal any part of them that might seem disagreeable. Most Nines resent the consequences of this strategy: people overlook them but even their anger comes out in indirect ways. 

Since most Nines have taken on the coloration of their environment, there is a confusing variety to people with this style. They can have a wide range of occupations and outwardly appear much different from each other. What they share underneath, however, is a distinct tendency to fall asleep to their inner needs. When you are trying to identify a Nine, you need to look for the absence of something rather than an obvious definite quality that the person asserts.

Nines have sometimes been described as the common people of the Enneagram. When healthy, they possess a deep personal modesty and an elegant simplicity of thought. Healthy Nines are even-tempered, stable, unassuming, nonjudgmental and comfortable with who they are. They often have a cheerful Seven-like outlook, though they live in the present and not the future.

Many Nines have a calm, egoless focused power that they bring to bear on whatever is important to them. This power is generally rooted in love whether the Nine thinks of it that way or not. Most healthy people with this style want to give to others freely and administrate their world in a way that benefits those they care about.

Nines are natural diplomats and mediators and can be highly skilled at resolving conflicts. Since they seek peace, union and harmony, it is often easy for Nines to find points of agreement between warring parties. From there, a Nine might patiently negotiate a settlement that builds on small positive steps. Healthy Nines are gently dynamic, suffused with a highly integrated sense of self and implicit mission. Most are also flexible and able to state blunt difficult truths in useful ways that somehow don’t make others defensive.

When less healthy, a Nine’s modesty devolves into self-concealment. They begin to merge blindly with the wishes of others and play the roles their environment wants them to play. In the process, they erase their own needs, priorities and ambitions, hiding their opinions and preferences to keep an apparent peace. The more a Nine absents herself from her own life, however, the more passive, unfocused and ambivalent she becomes. 

Less healthy Nines tend to see all sides of a situation and identify equally with each outside perspective. They often focus on absurd or irrelevant details and lose the big picture or forget the original purpose of a task. They can be overly responsible but under-perform, obsessively complicating simple tasks even as they minimize the consequence of not getting important things done. Going in circles relieves them of the necessity to make decisions and personal choices, to take responsibility for having a self that they think might be rejected by others. 

Nines often have trouble overtly saying no, but will say it in other ways, usually through silent stubbornness and passive aggression. Nines usually blame others explicitly or indirectly for the life they feel they can’t really have. Deep down there’s an angry, depressed nihilism in most unhealthy Nines. They have given up on their life and see no reason to rouse themselves to play what they are convinced is an empty, fruitless game.

When deeply unhealthy, Nines can sink into depressed self-neglect and a kind of lazy oblivion that is an imitation of death. They may be apathetic, habit-bound, callous or numb. They could talk incessantly about what they know they should do but then never bother to do it. They might try to avoid conflict but accidentally provoke it through bursts of disassociated nastiness. They might be disorderly, chaotic or cluttered and offer convoluted, ill-formed rationales for their irresponsibility. Deeply unhealthy Nines can do great harm to others through neglect, broken commitments and passive-aggressive behavior while stubbornly believing that their actions have no consequence. Drug and alcohol addiction can also be problems at this stage. 
 

About the Contributor:

Thomas Condon has worked with the Enneagram since 1980. He has taught classes at schools like Antioch University, and the University of California, Berkeley, as well as hundreds of workshops in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. He is the author of 50 audiotapes, 19 videotapes and two books, soon to be more. You can find more information like this, his books, and his tapes at his wesite here.