The following are brief descriptions of typical behaviours displayed at each of the nine emotional health levels. Remember that increasing emotional health is represented by moving to a level with a lower number, so level 1 represents the highest level of emotional health while level 9 represents the lowest.
Level 1 – Presence. At this level, a person has a quiet mind and is fully in touch with the present moment or the ‘now’. They 'are' happiness. They have total behavioural freedom. They are ‘present’ in all they do; each moment they are in is the most important and they are fully available to it.
Level 2 – Wisdom. At this level, a person has long periods of being ‘present’, however there are still moments when they experience a ‘default’ response rather than making a conscious choice. They are able to integrate their experience, knowledge and life’s learnings and lead by example in ways that inspire and motivate others.
Level 3 – Social Value. At this level of emotional health, a person has a high degree of balance in their life. For the most part, they move their concerns to others and broader social interests, as opposed to being concerned for their own wellbeing. We say that at this level they lose most of their self-centredness, finding an almost natural tendency to embrace the ‘greater good’ for their community/communities. They increase the number of opportunities to be ‘present’ and further understand how to use their ‘inner observer’ to further raise their own consciousness.
Level 4 – Recognition. A person moving to this level from level 5 starts to recognise that they have choices with all of their behaviours. They begin to observe these on a more regular basis. Their level of consciousness increases as they begin to observe themselves more often. They also begin to recognise that they can start to create moments of ‘presence’ under certain circumstances. However they also still use, and find it easy to fall back into, past defence mechanisms and coping strategies and need to constantly work at moving away from them.
Level 5 – Automated Response. At this level, which represents roughly the level of the Western population on average, a person is dominated by a range of automated responses to what is occurring around them. These responses are mostly defensive and are about controlling their environment (including the people in it) in order to get their perceived needs met. There are still times when they make decisions about their behaviours, however the automated responses tend to take over in the moment.
Level 6 – Exaggeration. At this level a person is more ‘demonstrative’ in their defences than a person at level 5. Their behaviours are exaggerated as they over-compensate in response to their internal conflicts and anxieties. The majority of their responses occur automatically, without thinking or from their mind taking over from a distorted perspective.
Level 7 – Survival. At this level of emotional health, a person’s internal feelings become intolerable as they start to realise that their defence mechanisms are not working. They tend to employ a survival tactic as a self-protective response. They have started to lose all control over making reasonable choices and become fixated on the survival tactic they have chosen.
Level 8 – Preoccupation. At this level a person starts to lose touch with reality, and their thinking, feeling, perceiving and behaviours all become severely distorted. They are out of control. This is considered to be a full pathological state.
Level 9 – Delusional At the lowest level of emotional health, a person is delusional, out of touch with reality and willing to destroy others and themselves. This includes states of extreme psychosis where they are totally uncontrollable and unreasonable. Their mind obsessions take over their life completely.
For more details about each of the emotional health levels, and the context around them, refer to our book Working with Emotional Health and the Enneagram.