Type Eight - The Chief

Profile by Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson - The Enneagram Institute

The Powerful, Dominating Type: Self-Confident, Decisive, Aggressive, and Combative

Basic Fear: Of being harmed or controlled by others
Basic Desire: To protect themselves, to be in control of their own life and destiny
The Eight with a Seven-Wing: "The Maverick"
The Eight with a Nine-Wing: "The Bear"
Potential Neuroses: Antisocial and Sadistic Personality Disorders

Key Motivations: Want to be self-reliant, to prove their strength and resist weakness, to be important in their world, to dominate the environment, and to stay in control of their situation.

Expanded Profile

Healthy
Self-assertive, self-confident, and strong: have learned to stand up for what they need and want. A resourceful, "can do" attitude and passionate inner drive. Decisive, authoritative, and commanding: the natural leader others look up to. Take initiative, make things happen: champion people, provider, protective, and honorable, carrying others with their strength. At Their Best: Become self-restrained and magnanimous, merciful and forbearing, mastering self through their self-surrender to a higher authority. Courageous, willing to put self in serious jeopardy to achieve their vision and have a lasting influence. May achieve true heroism and historical greatness.

Average
Self-sufficiency, financial independence, and having enough resources are important concerns: become enterprising, pragmatic, "rugged individualists," wheeler-dealers. Risk-taking, hardworking, denying own emotional needs. Begin to dominate their environment, including others: want to feel that others are behind them, supporting their efforts. Swaggering, boastful, forceful, and expansive: the "boss" whose word is law. Proud, ego-centric, want to impose their will and vision on everything, not seeing others as equals or treating them with respect. Become highly combative and intimidating to get their way: confrontational, belligerent, creating adversarial relationships. Everything a test of wills, and they will not back down. Use threats and reprisals to get obedience from others, to keep others off balance and insecure. However, unjust treatment makes others fear and resent them, possibly also band together against them.

Unhealthy
Defying any attempt to control them, become completely ruthless, dictatorial, "might makes right." The criminal and outlaw, renegade, and con-artist. Hard-hearted, immoral and potentially violent. Develop delusional ideas about their power, invincibility, and ability to prevail: megalomania, feeling omnipotent, invulnerable. Recklessly over-extending self. If they get in danger, they may brutally destroy everything that has not conformed to their will rather than surrender to anyone else. Vengeful, barbaric, murderous. Sociopathic tendencies.

Wings by Thomas Condon - The Changeworks

Eight With a 7 Wing
Awakened Eights with a 7 wing are often expansive, and powerful. Gregarious and generous, they may display a cheerful bravado. Can be forceful but with a light touch, funny. Often have a sense of humor about themselves. Generally more extroverted, ambitious and materialistic. May talk loud and be sociable partygoers. Sometimes driven to bring the new into being. Can be visionary, idealistic, enterprising. Willing to take risks. May think more clearly than Eights with a 9 wing; 7 wing brings an intellectual capacity. When more entranced, aggression combines with gluttony to form an almost virulent tendency to addiction. Many entranced Eights with a 7 wing have had drug and alcohol problems or tensions around addiction. Prone to temperamental ups and downs - can be moody, egocentric, quick to anger. Tendency to court chaos, inflate themselves narcissistically. Some are ruthlessly materialistic. Can use people up, suck them dry. Maybe be explosive or violent, prone to distorted overreaction.

Eight With a 9 Wing
Healthy Eights with a 9 wing often have an aura of preternatural calm, like they haven't had a self-doubt in decades. Take their authority for granted - queen or king of all they survey. May be gentle, kind-hearted, quieter. Often nurturing, protective parents; steady, supportive friends. Informal and unpretentious, patient, laconic, generally somewhat introverted. Sometimes a dry or ironic sense of humor. May have an aura of implicit, simmering anger rather like a sleeping volcano. Slow to erupt but when they do it's sudden and explosive. When entranced, the 9 wing brings an Eight a kind of callous numbness. They can be oblivious to the force of their anger until after they've hurt someone. Calmly dominating, colder; may have an indifference to softer emotions. If very unhealthy, they can be mean without remorse or aggressive in the service of stupid ends. Paranoid plotting, muddled thinking, moral laziness. Can be vengeful in ill-conceived ways, abuse those they love, don't know when to quit.

Instinctual Variants by Thomas Condon - The Changeworks

Self-Preservation
Self-preservation Eights often grow up poor or struggling. Food, home, money may be crucial. Generally seek control over their immediate environment and may worry about survival. Tend to value things over people. Maintaining order and material security are important. Eights with this subtype have a stronger connection to 5. Can be materialistic and feel deserving about it; more often have a 7 wing. Could be collectors or have prized objects. Sometimes domineering towards those within their sphere. Might preach an ethic of selfishness - justify their bullying of intimates as necessary to "toughen them up" for the hard world outside. Life is a jungle, only the strong survive. Survivalist mentality, territorial imperatives, angry at family members because they threaten household objects. Hiding in and presiding over their castle; sometimes extra Fiveish

Intimate
Want stability, loyalty and predictability in close relationships. May feel easily betrayed, and are prone to suspicion. Can love deeply, have a genuine close-up interest in and concern for spouse. Since life is dangerous they want to choose close allies carefully. Attached to the idea of being able to trust completely. Lots of testing of their partner's motives. If they pass the tests then the Eight relaxes. When entranced, this can lead to possessive obsession, and a need to dominate and control partner. Intimate Eights can get codependent, jealous, hooked into the other. Sometimes can't let go; their partner's every move is (over)reacted to. When very unhealthy, spousal abuse scenarios are possible. Stalking, vengeful vows to follow other to the ends of the earth, etc. Connected to the low side of 2.

Social
Social Eights are often loyal to a group and conceive of friendship as a pact of mutual protection. Want everyone to benefit; group's cohesion and welfare is most important to them. Often oriented to family, honest, hold themselves accountable to others. May be the group's protector or provider. Emphasis on cooperation. When healthy, they are aggressively blustery but will back down and apologize when they've been unfair. More able to say the Three Little Words -"I was wrong." Stronger connection to 2, can emotionally switch places with others in their chosen group. As friends they want to protect what's soft or young in you and appreciate the same in return. Hostility directed towards outside forces who threatens the group's welfare.