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Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart is one of the most influential books on emotions in recent years, and we're going to talk through it this June and July.

The first 2 classes are free to all free members.

Register : HERE

In this episode, Jeff highlights fifteen key ideas from the introduction that connect emotional awareness, language, and personal growth with the wisdom of the Enneagram. Along the way, he reflects on the relationship between feeling, thinking, and behavior, the importance of naming emotions, and why emotional vocabulary matters for both self-understanding and healthy relationships.

In this episode of the Reading Room, Jeff begins wrapping up Daniel Siegel’s Personality and Wholeness in Therapy by turning to one final piece of the framework: how the nine Enneagram types respond when their usual ways of solving problems stop working.

This time, Jeff compares Siegel’s “emotional regulation modes”—upregulating, downregulating, and shifting—with what Around the Circle calls coping styles. Are these simply three tools that healthy people learn to use flexibly, or are they part of a deeper pattern involving how each type moves between the body, heart, and mind? Jeff uses Enneagram Ones as a test case and considers what actually happens when we move from our centered state into problem-solving, stress, and security.

Lastly, Jeff asks what integration really requires. Perhaps growth isn't simply getting better at our favorite strategy, but recognizing when the tool we habitually reach for isn't working—and learning that we have other ways of responding available to us.

In this episode of the Reading Room, Jeff steps away from the text of Daniel Siegel’s Personality and Wholeness in Therapy to ask whether Siegel’s framework might help explain one of the strangest—and most important—features of the Enneagram: our movements in stress and security.

This time, Jeff proposes a simple theory. When we move along the Enneagram’s traditional lines, we aren't mysteriously becoming another number. Instead, just one element of our personality pattern changes: either our center of intelligence shifts or the direction of our energy shifts. Jeff works through all nine types to show how this pattern appears repeatedly in both stress and security.

Lastly, the question becomes whether the Enneagram symbol might be describing something far less mystical than it first appears. Could these lines represent predictable shifts within our nervous system as we adapt to stress, safety, and the fulfillment—or frustration—of our deepest motives?

Previously released as "The Enneagram Book Everyone’s Talking About | A Review and Critique".

Find all our material on Dr. Siegel's Book : HERE

In this episode, Jeff Cook sits down with Danielle Fuller (Scientific Enneagram) for a deep conversation on Dr. Daniel Siegel’s Personality and Wholeness in Therapy—the book many are calling the most important scientific contribution to Enneagram theory in years. Together they unpack the book’s core framework around agency, bonding, certainty, emotional regulation, and developmental pathways while wrestling with both its strengths and frustrations.

Jeff and Danielle explore where Siegel’s work reframes the Enneagram for therapists and skeptics, where the language becomes overly dense, and how neuroscience, polyvagal theory, and personality theory intersect with classic Enneagram ideas. Along the way, they debate whether the book advances the conversation, complicates it unnecessarily, or both at the same time.

This is a theory-heavy discussion for serious students of the Enneagram, psychology, and human development.

In this episode of the Reading Room, Jeff continues through Daniel Siegel and the PDP Group’s Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, focusing on how our developmental pathways become the patterns we recognize as personality.

This time, Jeff digs into Siegel’s ideas about temperament, adaptive strategies, emotional regulation, and the possibility of becoming more flexible without somehow becoming a different type. Along the way, he connects Siegel’s framework with familiar Enneagram concepts like centers, coping styles, wings, stress, and integration—and asks what the science might add to existing Enneagram theory.

Lastly, the chapter turns toward the purpose of all this work: greater choice. If personality gives us habitual ways of responding to the world, growth may not mean escaping our type at all. It may mean becoming less imprisoned by it—developing the freedom to access more of ourselves when life calls for it.

In this episode of Around the Circle’s Reading Room, Jeff continues through Chapter Four of Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, digging into one of the densest—and potentially most useful—sections of Daniel Siegel’s Enneagram theory.

This time, we look at how the three Centers organize themselves around the primal needs for agency, bonding, and certainty, and how anger, shame/separation distress, and fear function as protective emotional responses. From there, Siegel proposes three different ways we handle that emotional energy: experiencing and expressing it, containing and channeling it, or reframing and redirecting it. Together, these patterns offer a fascinating way of understanding how the nine Enneagram types emerge as adaptive strategies.

Lastly, Jeff goes around the circle, testing Siegel’s descriptions against established Enneagram theory—finding some remarkably insightful connections, raising questions about Fives and Sevens, and considering what all of this might mean for stress, security, and genuine growth. If our personalities began as automatic strategies for navigating the world, what happens when we become capable of choosing something more?

In this episode of Around the Circle, Jeff continues the Reading Room through Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, turning to one of the biggest questions in Enneagram theory: Where does your type actually come from? Daniel Siegel and the PDP group propose a biological and developmental framework in which personality emerges from fundamental motivational systems connected to agency, bonding, and certainty—and the emotions of anger, separation distress, and fear.

This time, Jeff follows the science behind the nine types. The chapter connects the traditional Body, Heart, and Head Centers to underlying motivational and neural systems, then combines those three systems with three directions of attention and energy—inward, outward, or both—to explain how nine distinct personality patterns emerge. Type, on this account, becomes a developmental pathway reinforced through temperament, experience, emotional regulation, and increasingly established neural networks.

Lastly, the conversation turns toward what all of this means for growth. If our personalities are adaptive strategies written into increasingly familiar neural pathways, those pathways don't have to determine our futures. Neuroplasticity, emotional regulation, and greater integration may allow us to loosen the grip of our dominant patterns and develop more flexible ways of responding to life. What if understanding your Enneagram type means understanding not only who you are, but how your brain learned to become that person?

In this episode of Around the Circle, Jeff continues the Reading Room through Chapter Two of Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, examining Dan Siegel’s emerging framework for understanding the Enneagram as nine patterns of inner experience. The conversation begins with both appreciation and skepticism: How strong is the scientific evidence for the Enneagram, and what can thousands of first-person narratives actually tell us about personality?

This time, Jeff digs into Siegel’s claim that personality develops through the interaction of temperament and experience—and that repeated patterns of attention, emotion, and behavior can become increasingly automatic. He considers Siegel’s preference for “patterns” over “types,” the role of the Centers and affect groups, and the idea that our greatest strengths and greatest liabilities may be two sides of the same coin.

Lastly, the episode turns toward what makes the Enneagram valuable in the first place: self-awareness gives us greater freedom over the motives and habits that might otherwise run our lives. Growth isn’t about escaping your personality; it’s about recognizing excess, seeing your blind spots, and developing greater integration across heart, mind, and body. What becomes possible when we understand not only what we do, but why we do it?

In this episode of Around the Circle, Jeff continues the Reading Room with a deep dive into Chapter One of Daniel J. Siegel’s Personality and Wholeness in Therapy. Siegel is attempting something ambitious: translating the Enneagram into a scientifically grounded, clinically useful framework that connects our inner motivations, personality, and patterns of behavior.

This time, Jeff explores Siegel’s three fundamental ideas, including the relationship between temperament and experience, the three emotional systems of anger, separation distress, and fear, and our underlying drive toward agency, bonding, and certainty. The discussion also gets into how repeated experiences may reinforce neural pathways—and how those pathways could help explain both the development and persistence of Enneagram type.

Lastly, Jeff considers what all of this means for growth. Perhaps the goal isn’t to escape or change our type, but to recognize when our patterns become excessive and develop greater flexibility and integration across heart, mind, and body. If neuroscience can help explain both why our personality sticks and how we can become healthier, what might that mean for the future of the Enneagram?

In this episode of Around the Circle, Jeff launches a new season of the Reading Room with a deep dive into Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, Daniel J. Siegel and his collaborators’ ambitious attempt to bring the Enneagram into conversation with neuroscience, developmental theory, and psychotherapy.

Drawing on tens of thousands of first-person reports, the book asks what science can—and cannot—tell us about the nine personality patterns.

This time, Jeff approaches the book as a philosopher, asking what it actually means to say that the Enneagram is scientifically supported. He examines different kinds of evidence—from personal experience and explanatory power to clinical usefulness, prediction, measurement, and replication—and considers why a theory can be valuable even before it has been conclusively validated.

Lastly, the conversation turns toward the purpose of the Enneagram itself. Siegel's framework suggests that personality doesn't have to be a box that confines us; understanding our patterns may instead create greater flexibility, integration, healthier relationships, and freedom. If the Enneagram really can help us understand how we perceive and engage the world, what might it reveal about who we are—and who we can become?