I’m at my parents’ house this week in the French Pyrenees. They are very much getting on in years. My dad turned 88 on 1st March, and my mum is halfway between 86 and 87. Anyone who follows my writing will know that, while I have lost two brothers, they have lost two sons. With all of my own losses — and there have been many — I cannot begin to contemplate losing two children. I simply refuse to let my mind go there. My heart cannot fathom it.

So it’s hard. I love them deeply — and like many of us with ageing parents, I can still find myself triggered by old patterns.

My mum, for example, finds it incredibly hard to accept help. She will speak of all the tasks she has to do — shopping, cooking, tidying, sorting — the endless domestic choreography that feels burdensome at any age. I offer to help. I even surreptitiously take on tasks (which carries its own risk, because I may mix the colours wrong, misunderstand the system, or disrupt some invisible plan). She refuses. Or she says she’ll do it herself. The pattern is so familiar I can recite the script before it plays out.

Seeing a pile of bath towels at the top of the stairs:

Emma: “Mum, shall I take the towels down? Put them on to wash?”
Mum: “No, don’t you bother. I’ll do it. I’m going downstairs anyway.”

Through the lens of the Enneagram — and the core strategy of Point Two — I see something recognisable and tender: a lifelong orientation towards being the giver rather than the receiver (there were five kids, after all, born within seven years!); coping through self-reliance; conflating accepting help with a subtle loss of control. It is such a deep and protective pattern. And like all protective patterns, it is also limiting.

In earlier years, irritation would rise quickly in me. “Why complain if you won’t accept help?” Even this week I joked that the hardest part of going to three separate shops on a Sunday was persuading Mum not to do it herself, to let me go instead. My own pattern has historically been to persuade, then convince, then become pushy and argumentative — and finally withdraw, exasperated.

What I notice now — and I do attribute this at least in part to microdosing — is increased capacity. Not just to recognise my own patterns (which I know well from years of Enneagram study), but to remain present to my mum’s while mine are activated. A kind of meta-pattern awareness.

Capacity to feel my own activation without being overtaken by it. Capacity to recognise hers without needing to fix it. Capacity to name what I see and, when she resists, to let it drop without huffing and puffing. Capacity to return again later, irritation wiped clean, warmth intact, and wait for the moment she may finally acquiesce. Often she doesn’t, but sometimes she does. All is not lost.

From volunteering with people in the end-of-life hospice, I can spot a mile off those people (invariably women) who have spent a lifetime doing things for others. Their resistance to accepting support at the hospice can be painful to witness and can trigger any number of ego-patterns among the volunteers, myself included! We all have protective patterns, after all!

Microdosing does not remove our patterns. They are too ancient, too protective, too well-practised for that. Nor does the Enneagram, in and of itself. Real work is required alongside both.

But together — Enneagram wisdom alongside careful microdosing — something subtly softens. The grip of the pattern loosens. As the default mode network relaxes, the space around the strategy widens. The pattern’s strings feel more like silk and less like barbed wire. There is more room between trigger and response. I can hold my lifelong strategies in view, and my mum’s at the same time, without needing to manage either.

In my deeper, more transformational microdosing containers, I bring in Enneagram wisdom not to pigeonhole, but to offer a map of our habitual coping strategies under stress. When the nervous system has even a little more flexibility, those strategies become visible sooner. And when they are visible, we have more choice.

This isn’t at all about becoming “better”. It’s about becoming more available — more relational, more adult, more loving — especially when we are triggered.

If you’re curious about microdosing from an educational, psychologically grounded perspective — including how it intersects with self-awareness frameworks like the Enneagram — I’m hosting the next complimentary session on Tuesday, 10 March from 9h30–11h00 CET / 8h30–10h00 GMT. Registration link is here.

We’ll explore what microdosing is (and isn’t), how it may influence nervous system capacity, and — if you choose to work more deeply 1–1 — how to increase capacity around formerly limiting patterns.