Quite a few times I observed the following scenario: there is a character who, over the course of their difficult life filled with uncertainty and betrayal, has learned that they cannot trust people, that they are ought to navigate the dangers of the world on their own, and that everyone is out to get them. And every single time such a character is typed by the Enneagram community as Six or as having Six somewhere in their tritype. I'm sorry, what?

These people don't seem to realize that when their favorite Enneagram expert brings up trauma... they don't mean the one described in the DSM-5. Absolutely nothing in the Enneagram has anything to do with the kind of trauma that people discuss with their psychiatrists. In fact, I would even go as far as to remove this word from my Enneagram vocabulary because of how misleading it is.

You can live your life in abundance, not knowing true pain for a second, never experiencing hardship or any kind of traumatic event... but you can't NOT have an Enneagram type. Why? Because trauma is not the catalyst. Your Enneagram type is a choice of a survival strategy that your brain makes based on your life experience, but this experience doesn't have to be traumatic. The reverse is also true: a traumatic event won't affect your Enneagram type whatsoever.

Let's dissect the "Paranoia = E6" example to find the reason for this confusion. The core of the problem seems to lie in the way people understand the Enneagram as a whole, so here's a reminder: Enneagram is about the why, not the what. Being distrusting of other people is the what, not the why. You don't even have to be distrustful to be a Six, as the being has nothing to do with the Enneagram. Yes, Sixes tend to be on the distrustful side because they use reason and cognition to manage their fears, but the important part is after the "because". And herein lies the error.

People pick up on the shallow personality traits from descriptions online because it's the easy thing to do, but you can't understand the Enneagram that way because this particular typology is not about the traits. There's no easy way around this; Enneagram deals with the innermost parts of human psyche. There are no shortcuts to the subconscious, I'm afraid.