3:29pm July 30, 2014

As much as I dislike the Enneagram…

…I do have to admit that the description of a Four is as good a description of aspects of my life as any.  And I can see in myself, easily, the progression from the absolute “unhealthiest” possible Four to at or near the “healthiest” possible Four.  I hate to admit to any of this because it’s admitting that a personality test can be right about anything and I don’t like to do that because I really do fundamentally disagree with the basic assumptions involved in these tests.  It’s embarrassing.  But I do have to say this is extremely accurate.  So on with the navel-gazing…

The following is the descriptions I found on a webpage (I’d put myself currently at bouncing between 1 and 2, and at my worst, absolutely 9):

Healthy Levels

Level 1 (At Their Best): Profoundly creative, expressing the personal and the universal, possibly in a work of art. Inspired, self-renewing and regenerating: able to transform all their experiences into something valuable: self-creative.

Level 2: Self-aware, introspective, on the “search for self,” aware of feelings and inner impulses. Sensitive and intuitive both to self and others: gentle, tactful, compassionate.

Level 3: Highly personal, individualistic, “true to self.” Self-revealing, emotionally honest, humane. Ironic view of self and life: can be serious and funny, vulnerable and emotionally strong.

Average Levels

Level 4: Take an artistic, romantic orientation to life, creating a beautiful, aesthetic environment to cultivate and prolong personal feelings. Heighten reality through fantasy, passionate feelings, and the imagination.

Level 5: To stay in touch with feelings, they interiorize everything, taking everything personally, but become self-absorbed and introverted, moody and hypersensitive, shy and self-conscious, unable to be spontaneous or to “get out of themselves.” Stay withdrawn to protect their self-image and to buy time to sort out feelings.

Level 6: Gradually think that they are different from others, and feel that they are exempt from living as everyone else does. They become melancholy dreamers, disdainful, decadent, and sensual, living in a fantasy world. Self-pity and envy of others leads to self-indulgence, and to becoming increasingly impractical, unproductive, effete, and precious.

Unhealthy Levels

Level 7: When dreams fail, become self-inhibiting and angry at self, depressed and alienated from self and others, blocked and emotionally paralyzed. Ashamed of self, fatigued and unable to function.

Level 8: Tormented by delusional self-contempt, self-reproaches, self-hatred, and morbid thoughts: everything is a source of torment. Blaming others, they drive away anyone who tries to help them.

Level 9: Despairing, feel hopeless and become self-destructive, possibly abusing alcohol or drugs to escape. In the extreme: emotional breakdown or suicide is likely. Generally corresponds to the Avoidant, Depressive, and Narcissistic personality disorders.

I was definitely at level 9 for a really long time, and somehow now I’m easily somewhere between 2 and 1, and of course there’s everything in between.

This is their description of a Four in general:

Type Four in Brief

Fours are self-aware, sensitive, and reserved. They are emotionally honest, creative, and personal, but can also be moody and self-conscious. Withholding themselves from others due to feeling vulnerable and defective, they can also feel disdainful and exempt from ordinary ways of living. They typically have problems with melancholy, self-indulgence, and self-pity. At their Best: inspired and highly creative, they are able to renew themselves and transform their experiences.

• Basic Fear: That they have no identity or personal significance
• Basic Desire: To find themselves and their significance (to create an
     identity)
• Enneagram Four with a Three-Wing: "The Aristocrat"
• Enneagram Four with a Five-Wing: "The Bohemian"

Key Motivations: Want to express themselves and their individuality, to create and surround themselves with beauty, to maintain certain moods and feelings, to withdraw to protect their self-image, to take care of emotional needs before attending to anything else, to attract a “rescuer.”

The Meaning of the Arrows (in brief)

When moving in their Direction of Disintegration (stress), aloof Fours suddenly become over-involved and clinging at Two. However, when moving in their Direction of Integration (growth), envious, emotionally turbulent Fours become more objective and principled, like healthy Ones. For more information, click here.

Examples: Rumi, Frédéric Chopin, Pyotr I Tchaikovsky, Gustav Mahler, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Edgar Allen Poe, Yukio Mishima, Virginia Woolf, Anne Frank , Karen Blixen / Isak Dinesen, Anaîs Nin, Tennessee Williams, J.D. Salinger, Anne Rice, Frida Kahlo, Diane Arbus, Martha Graham, Rudolf Nureyev, Cindy Sherman, Hank Williams, Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, Maria Callas, Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), Ferron, Cher, Stevie Nicks, Annie Lennox, Prince, Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morrisette, Feist, Florence ( + the Machine) Welch, Amy Winehouse, Ingmar Bergman, Lars von Trier, Marlon Brando, Jeremy Irons, Angelina Jolie, Winona Ryder, Kate Winslet, Nicolas Cage, Johnny Depp, Tattoo Artist Kat Von D., Magician Criss Angel, Streetcar Named Desire “Blanche duBois”

Type Four Overview

We have named this type The Individualist because Fours maintain their identity by seeing themselves as fundamentally different from others. Fours feel that they are unlike other human beings, and consequently, that no one can understand them or love them adequately. They often see themselves as uniquely talented, possessing special, one-of-a-kind gifts, but also as uniquely disadvantaged or flawed. More than any other type, Fours are acutely aware of and focused on their personal differences and deficiencies.

Healthy Fours are honest with themselves: they own all of their feelings and can look at their motives, contradictions, and emotional conflicts without denying or whitewashing them. They may not necessarily like what they discover, but they do not try to rationalize their states, nor do they try to hide them from themselves or others. They are not afraid to see themselves “warts and all.” Healthy Fours are willing to reveal highly personal and potentially shameful things about themselves because they are determined to understand the truth of their experience—so that they can discover who they are and come to terms with their emotional history. This ability also enables Fours to endure suffering with a quiet strength. Their familiarity with their own darker nature makes it easier for them to process painful experiences that might overwhelm other types.

Nevertheless, Fours often report that they feel they are missing something in themselves, although they may have difficulty identifying exactly what that “something” is. Is it will power? Social ease? Self-confidence? Emotional tranquility?—all of which they see in others, seemingly in abundance. Given time and sufficient perspective, Fours generally recognize that they are unsure about aspects of their self-image—their personality or ego-structure itself. They feel that they lack a clear and stable identity, particularly a social persona that they feel comfortable with.

While it is true that Fours often feel different from others, they do not really want to be alone. They may feel socially awkward or self-conscious, but they deeply wish to connect with people who understand them and their feelings. The “romantics” of the Enneagram, they long for someone to come into their lives and appreciate the secret self that they have privately nurtured and hidden from the world. If, over time, such validation remains out of reach, Fours begin to build their identity around how unlike everyone else they are. The outsider therefore comforts herself by becoming an insistent individualist: everything must be done on her own, in her own way, on her own terms. Fours’ mantra becomes “I am myself. Nobody understands me. I am different and special,” while they secretly wish they could enjoy the easiness and confidence that others seem to enjoy.

Fours typically have problems with a negative self-image and chronically low self-esteem. They attempt to compensate for this by cultivating a Fantasy Self—an idealized self-image which is built up primarily in their imaginations. A Four we know shared with us that he spent most of his spare time listening to classical music while fantasizing about being a great concert pianist—à la Vladimir Horowitz. Unfortunately, his commitment to practicing fell far short of his fantasized self-image, and he was often embarrassed when people asked him to play for them. His actual abilities, while not poor, became sources of shame.

In the course of their lives, Fours may try several different identities on for size, basing them on styles, preferences, or qualities they find attractive in others. But underneath the surface, they still feel uncertain about who they really are. The problem is that they base their identity largely on their feelings. When Fours look inward they see a kaleidoscopic, ever-shifting pattern of emotional reactions. Indeed, Fours accurately perceive a truth about human nature—that it is dynamic and ever changing. But because they want to create a stable, reliable identity from their emotions, they attempt to cultivate only certain feelings while rejecting others. Some feelings are seen as “me,” while others are “not me.” By attempting to hold on to specific moods and express others, Fours believe that they are being true to themselves.

One of the biggest challenges Fours face is learning to let go of feelings from the past; they tend to nurse wounds and hold onto negative feelings about those who have hurt them. Indeed, Fours can become so attached to longing and disappointment that they are unable to recognize the many treasures in their lives.

Leigh is a working mother who has struggled with these difficult feelings for many years.

“I collapse when I am out in the world. I have had a trail of relationship disasters. I have hated my sister’s goodness—and hated goodness in general. I went years without joy in my life, just pretending to smile because real smiles would not come to me. I have had a constant longing for whatever I cannot have. My longings can never become fulfilled because I now realize that I am attached to ‘the longing’ and not to any specific end result.”

There is a Sufi story that relates to this about an old dog that had been badly abused and was near starvation. One day, the dog found a bone, carried it to a safe spot, and started gnawing away. The dog was so hungry that it chewed on the bone for a long time and got every last bit of nourishment that it could out of it. After some time, a kind old man noticed the dog and its pathetic scrap and began quietly setting food out for it. But the poor hound was so attached to its bone that it refused to let go of it and soon starved to death.

Fours are in the same predicament. As long as they believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with them, they cannot allow themselves to experience or enjoy their many good qualities. To acknowledge their good qualities would be to lose their sense of identity (as a suffering victim) and to be without a relatively consistent personal identity (their Basic Fear). Fours grow by learning to see that much of their story is not true—or at least it is not true any more. The old feelings begin to fall away once they stop telling themselves their old tale: it is irrelevant to who they are right now.

I highlighted parts that were particularly relevant to my life.  But almost all of it is pretty accurate, either now or in the past.  In the past, I saw myself as fundamentally broken and impossible to fix, but desperately wanted to be fixed, somehow.  And I felt like I had this inexhaustible longing for something I could never have, and it literally drove me insane.  I tried every possible way to escape from reality, and escape from myself – everything from drugs to this extended thing I did where I tried to make reality into a dream (I don’t know why I believed that could work, but I did).  But my connection to myself and to reality proved far more solid than anything I did to attempt to break them – which is pretty damn solid considering everything I tried.  And I was mired in self-pity, and I knew I was mired in self-pity, but I could not find a way out no matter how much I tried, for a very long time.

I definitely tried on a lot of identities.  Which is a normal adolescent thing, but it’s also a thing I took pretty far at times.  I used to be horribly ashamed of this but I am starting to see it as normal, especially for someone of my temperament who was trying to escape reality.

And I did often want to feel special, at the same time as wanting to fit in, and that was a really weird paradox.  I think it was like, I wanted to feel special because I felt bad about myself already, so I wanted there to be something unique and good about myself, and yet that just made me feel more alone and isolated in a way.

The description about attracting a “rescuer”, I have mixed feelings about.  There were times when I definitely wanted that.  There were other times when other people saw me as trying to do that, and tried to “rescue” me, and I seriously resented it because I was not looking for that, at all, and they were assuming that because I was, in one of their words, a “broken baby bird”, then I automatically wanted to be “rescued”, and that this could be my only possible relationship with other people.  Which was maddening.  But certainly other people always saw me as wanting or at least needing a rescuer, whether I actually wanted one or not.

I used to really hate reading the description of an “unhealthy” Four because it was reading about myself and I didn’t want to be that person.   But now I can see that inasmuch as anyone can be anything, I was that person, for a long time.  And there’s no shame in that now.  There used to be, though, and I’d try really hard to convince myself I was a Five or a Six or a One.  (I was really obsessed with personality tests for many years.)

But now I identify a lot with the “healthy” Four.  Like I’ve come to terms for the most part with who I am, both good and bad.  I have people around me who do understand me at a very deep level, including those parts of myself that I see as quite different from most people.  And I try to help other people find the ability to express themselves the way I’ve found the ability to express myself.  And I’ve become quite creative and stuff.  

The thing I identify with most from this description, though, is the depth of resilience that I’ve been able to draw upon to live through experiences that can and do break a lot of people.  That’s something that I’ve noticed more and more over the years.  (And it’s something I see in River Tam, too, that I don’t think a lot of people see.  To get back to that whole discussion.)  That somehow the traits that made me seem for so many years the weakest, in my own eyes and in the eyes of others, have actually made me very strong.  The thing about the “familiarity with my own darker nature” making it possible for me to “endure suffering with quiet strength” and to process things that other people would have a harder time with, sounds very accurate to me.

So basically the above description really does seem to describe both me at my best and me at my worst.  Or at least, some element of me at my best and me at my worst.  I’m not sure exactly what use it is to me at this point, given that I already know these things about myself.  Maybe just as a shorthand to explain myself to others.  If anything.

This doesn’t tell me that the entire system of the Enneagram is accurate.  It just tells me that whoever thought up the descriptions of a Four was describing an actual thing, and probably the descriptions of some of the other types are equally accurate for some people.  All the interconnecting lines and “9 types” and systems of thought around it and all that is where I start disagreeing with the whole mess.  But I do think that they described some aspects of some people’s character very well.  And if you take it as some aspects and some people, rather than an infallible system that describes everything about everyone, then you might get something useful out of it.

That said, I have a strong distrust of typology in general, and it’s been difficult to even admit that this description is accurate.  Not because of me, but because I don’t want to lend credence to the idea that the Enneagram has any sort of objective validity.  But I do have to say that it hit the nail on the head when it comes to some aspects of my personality, and that it did so consistently (as in, not that random effect where any horoscope-sounding thing is like you, but more like every single line described me, at some point in my life, accurately, with very few exceptions, and seemed to be tied together around a solid core of something).  However grudgingly.  :-P

Oh and I’m supposedly a 4w5, which means I supposedly have traits of a Five as well.  But really I think the 4 is the important part as far as describing a core element of my personality type over my lifetime.

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