Our enneagram strategy is something that we do, not someone we are. Our enneagram strategy is an early coping skill that we forgot to forget and still employ to handle the world. If flirting or crying or hiding worked at 4 and 14, some people try them at 44 and wonder why they don't work as well.
Healthy people do what works, unhealthy people do what used to work.
It is confusion about who they are, especially who they are in relation to other people. They confuse what others think of them with who they really are. One of the mechanisms we employ in our enneagram strategy is called polarization. When we polarize, we keep all of something out of our life. Then when any of that something comes into our life, we see it as total.