When the Holidays Stir Our Defenses, the Enneagram Helps Us Return to Ourselves
- The Broken & Beautiful
- Dec 23, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: Feb 3
Patria Rector, Founder of The Broken & Beautiful and Courageous Pathways, NFTC Certified Story Coach, Certified Enneagram Coach, The Broken and Beautiful Collective
The holidays have a way of stirring things in us we thought we’d already outgrown. We step into December with mixed expectations — a longing for connection, a hope for beauty, and a quiet bracing in the body we rarely talk about. Because alongside the joy, the rituals, the warmth… the holidays also awaken the old stories our nervous systems never forgot.
Family roles we once inhabited. Expectations that were never spoken out loud but always enforced, overtly or not. Emotional landmines we think we’ve mapped, until suddenly we haven’t.
This is the season when our Enneagram defense systems flare — not because we’re failing, but because we’re human, and because our bodies read something that’s happening in this unspoken dynamic as final and fatal.
The Wisdom of our Defenses
Every Enneagram type has a defense strategy it learned early on — a strategy that helped us survive, belong, and make sense of the world. These defenses aren’t signs of immaturity or spiritual lapses. Rather they’re signs of brilliance, creativity, adaptation. At some point, when we have matured enough psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually, we are safer and therefore, the same defenses that once kept us safe can now keep us stuck. They’re still solving for old problems and aren’t “updated” to the new reality.
Without awareness, these defense systems automatically take the wheel before we even notice, causing reactions that may be confusing or damaging in relationships. They speak for us before we’ve had a chance to breathe, remember our current reality and choose something more conducive to stability and reciprocity in relationships. They certainly can run the holiday script long before we know consciously that we're in the old story.
The hope isn’t to get rid of them.
The hope is awareness — the kind that meets us with grace, not judgment.
How the 9 Enneagram Types Try to Stay Safe — Especially in December
Type 1 tightens and braces inside, trying hard to hold things together.
Type 2 over-gives, scanning for other’s needs before their own.
Type 3 performs and pushes, striving to be impressive or indispensable.
Type 4 turns up emotional intensity or withdraws into longing.
Type 5 retreats, guarding inner space and energy.
Type 6 anticipates stress, prepares for threat, and clings to certainty.
Type 7 speeds up, reframes pain, and seeks distraction from heaviness.
Type 8 asserts control, staying strong to avoid vulnerability.
Type 9 numbs, merges, or disappears to maintain a sense of harmony and/or peace.
None of this is wrong. However, when the strength of the type becomes a “must,” it is armor that keeps us in reactivity. These defenses were born from places of vulnerability — the longing to be loved, to be safe, to be valued. The holidays simply bring those longings closer to the surface.
Awareness begins in the body.
Before our more mature mind is able to logic what’s happening, our bodies instinctively know.
The tightened stomach.
The breath that shortens.
The shoulder that rises.
The urge to withdraw.
The impulse to fix.
The holidays reawaken old sensations that once signaled danger. Heck, they might still be signaling danger. The difference is that we are no longer children, and we are capable of choosing to…
Stay or walk away.
Speak or stay silent.
Be joyful and grateful for our healing anyway.
Offer healthy options to help our nervous system such as hiding in the bathroom for a minute to get our system regulated. (Usually nobody will bother you there.)
Take a walk.
Have permission slips on your phone that give you what you need to be reminded of.
Set a timer to leave at the time you need to.
Set expectations for your time together.
Give others the dignity of managing their own emotions. You sure as heck have to manage your own!
Remember the sacred pause is where empowerment lives.
Our defenses respond in milliseconds.
But this is also where grace enters.
Because the moment the body tells the truth, we are given an opening — a choice we didn’t have as children.
A chance to pause.
Even one breath of awareness softens the old story.
It’s the space where we choose presence over pattern.
Where we let grace interrupt the old map.
Where we remember that we are not the child we once were.
Empowerment grows here, breath by breath.
Under every defense is a desire worth honoring.
The Enneagram shows us the patterns.
Grace shows us the gift beneath them.
The desire to be good.
To be wanted.
To be valued.
To be authentic.
To be safe.
To be supported.
To be joyful.
To be strong.
To be at peace.
The holidays can bring the pain of unmet needs into sharp focus. However, they also bring opportunities — vulnerable invitations to practice presence, compassion, and connection.
A Holiday Blessing for the Tender and Hopeful
As you move through this season — whether surrounded by people or sitting in the quiet glow of a single candle — may you recognize your defenses with kindness. So. Much. Kindness.
May you sense the yearning and the gift beneath them.
May you pause long enough to remember your agency and your identity.
May you let grace soften what fear has calloused and hardened.
May you have permission to:
live from awareness instead of instinct,
presence instead of protection,
truth instead of the old story.
You are not behind.
You are not failing.
You are awakening.
One breath at a time.
Get in Touch with The Broken and Beautiful
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