Helen Palmer
Psychologist
6
MENTIONS
3
EPISODES
3
PODCASTS
Search complete. 6 mentions across 3 episodes found for "Helen Palmer".
Oct 20, 2026
Beatrice ChestnutGUEST
But I happened upon the Enneagram because a very close childhood friend who I'd grown up with, his father was a psychiatrist based at Stanford, Dr. David Daniels.
Beatrice ChestnutGUEST
And he was one of the first kind of more mainstream psychiatrists that got really into the Enneagram in the late 80s and actually started one of the first schools dedicated to Enneagram study, along with Helen Palmer, who was one of the first authors of one of the first books to come out in the late 80s.
Beatrice ChestnutGUEST
And so when I read about my type, it really changed my life because I hadn't really been interested in psychology because to me, I was always really interested in people.
Beatrice ChestnutGUEST
But the study of psychology seemed a little bit like, I don't know, there's something about it that seemed just obvious and just giving, you know, assigning jargon to things that seemed sort of commonsensical.
32 MINS LATER
Beatrice ChestnutGUEST
And that's also that's probably a good thing to do in concert with with, you know, connected to test, take a test, take a test, but then get a good book and read the description and study it a little bit more deeply to really see which one really fits with who I really am at my core.
Tami SimonHOST
All right, I think this is the time where I'm going to talk about me now.
Tami SimonHOST
So it was at least 35 years ago that Sounds True recorded an audio series with Helen Palmer.
Tami SimonHOST
And so Helen came to the studio and she was like, okay, what type are you? And I was like, oh, I think I'm a three.
Beatrice ChestnutGUEST
And so I got to know Dr. Daniels and he shared the Enneagram with me and that it was his calling and told me he thought I might be a two.
Beatrice ChestnutGUEST
So I got interested and I read some of Helen Palmer's first book and was just totally blown away by how accurately it described me to myself.
Beatrice ChestnutGUEST
I just never thought anything could exist like that.
Beatrice ChestnutGUEST
at all.
Beatrice ChestnutGUEST
And there, I had a cousin who lived there who was also into the Enneagram and also into some of the esoteric wisdom behind the Enneagram.
Beatrice ChestnutGUEST
So he gave me the book by Auspensky called In Search of the Miraculous, which was about Gurdjieff, who talked a lot about the Enneagram symbol and its connection to ancient spiritual traditions and esoteric knowledge.
Beatrice ChestnutGUEST
And so that got me even more deeply interested, so much so that after I finished graduate school and moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area, I decided to go through the Helen Palmer, David Daniels, Enneagram training program.
Beatrice ChestnutGUEST
And that got me even more interested such that I went back to school to become a therapist based on my deep interest in the Enneagram and the personal growth journey it had allowed me to enter into.
Karl HebenstreitGUEST
So I found out about it just quite randomly because it wasn't even part of the curriculum.
Karl HebenstreitGUEST
I was going for a PhD in organizational psychology, and I was-- I had the fantastic fortune, I didn't even know it at the time, that my professor knew Helen Palmer, who is a big name in the origins of the Enneagram and coming into Western civilization and getting out in the, in the, the, the modern world.
Karl HebenstreitGUEST
And she invited her to come in for just one class, one night, one night only.
Karl HebenstreitGUEST
It wasn't even an entire semester, where she just introduced this system to us, and I was just fascinated seeing that the motivation was being described as one of nine possible human motivations.