Introductory Primer to Enneagram Types

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Fours are vibrant. Healthy Fours possess the quality of vibrance. Vibrance expresses the four having used creative will to ‘rise like a phoenix’ over the soul-crushing experience of having felt like a nobody in the world that their fantasy persona lives inside of. Vibrant Fours enjoy culturally rich environments where meeting and talking to people gives them an opportunity to convey and communicate the ideal qualities of their fantasy persona. They do not feel compelled to identify with their former self and they do not feel connected with it but it’s still there like a
pimple on the nose.

Fours are self-creating. This self-creation of theirs just kind of comes out of some place in their intuition. Fours feel like a somebody in the world they are born into but more than that they long to be a somebody in the world that their fantasy persona is a somebody in. The Four wants to be their fantasy persona or as close to that as they can be. It fuels their emotional life, their connections with people, with family members. To this end they may even embellish details about their life with harmless white lies. This recollects one adult four from Mexico whose fantasy persona involved being Jewish. She decided to give her deceased grandmother a Jewish last name from a famous American television show that used to broadcast where she grew up. She would refer to the deceased grandmother by this Jewish last name. She would tell others that she met that this was her grandmothers’ last name even though it made no sense logically. Although other family members would quickly correct her and get frustrated by her insistence that her real last name was ugly, she never stopped with the projection of this fantasy and when she got a chance had her last name legally changed to this Jewish last name, while carrying around the name given to her at birth like a pimple on her nose. Fours are different. Needless to say, Fours develop their own unique set of habits that can strike others as weird. The key here is that fours have absolutely no shame about showcasing their "weirdness" and can even laugh at themselves and their many ironies. They enjoy confounding expectations.

Fours are uncompromising. They like to give emotional states free reign to bleed out regardless of whether they are pushing and pulling. They are an emotionally honest type but not flat-lined in their expression. They express the spikes of their feelings sometimes to the point of being difficult to communicate with and provoke a strong response to their feelings. Moreover, this is the image type least predisposed to mirroring. The Four never adjusts their fantasy persona to fit into the mainstream of society and never really changes their habits and style in the face of negative feedback.

Fours are sensitive. Fours are the least plastic of all the enneagram types. They live in the reality of themselves as flesh and bone, full of nerves. There is never any telling what might set off a four. Words that triggered no response an hour earlier now triggers in fours a feeling of being condescended to and disrespected. An unconscious facial expression, a mundane greeting, a usual way of banter, suddenly hits an exposed nerve.

Fours are depressive. The further away from their fantasy persona they are the more of a nobody they feel like. Their fantasy persona does not even have to be realistically attainable for the four to fixate on it. Their fantasy persona is composed of ideal qualities some of which they may and usually don’t possess biologically or genetically. The Four will, however, want to surround themselves in environments where those ideal qualities are prominent. The four can also switch up the ideal qualities of their fantasy persona. When the four is not seeing the ideal qualities of their fantasy persona reflected in their environment, this leaves them depressed and feeling that everything around them is dead, even if by objective measures they have it good. They are back to being a nobody again in the world of their fantasy persona and must escape their current situation. They then feel it is their destiny to be alone. They run from anybody that wants to put their brightness out and only show them a black hole.

Fours are difficult. The Four’s inner worlds exists in a tug of war between longing and alienation. They long to become a somebody in the world of their fantasy persona and they long for the things that will allow them to become a somebody in the world of their fantasy persona and they long for a person who will help them to become a somebody in the world of their fantasy persona. But this only ends in let downs. When the four lamentingly realizes that what they have been longing for is a farce and will never come to fruition, the four alienates themselves rather than leave their nerves exposed. They close up their inner world. They carry around, express and intensify their grievances. They repeat the same grievances day after day, month after month, year after year. Any expressions of love directed towards them are immediately suspect. “You don’t really love me,” the four will repeat. “I’m leaving soon,” the four promises every day month after month and year after year, mixed with longings like “I’ve put all my coins on you. Don’t let me down. I don’t want to be a nobody.” When alienating, they go further in accentuating the fact that they don’t fit in and incorporate more bizarre elements into their persona as if to say “do you really love me if this is who I am?”. This complicated game of tug of war means that the four is constantly pushing and pulling in their relationships.

Fours are envious. Fours are haunted by feelings of being a nobody in the world that their fantasy persona is a somebody in which on the high end drove them towards self-creation from the somebody they already are but on the low end drives them into the trappings of envy. They don’t see this as envy so much as just not wanting to be left a nobody but a somebody in relation to their fantasy persona. They habitually look for and dwell on reminders of what they are missing out on in life, how their life is falling short in comparison to others lives, how others have it better, what others have that they don’t. This can instantly trigger the four into an upset and disdainful reaction. They attack those who are hindering them from having the things that they are missing out on. Fours are equipped with both an emotional intelligence and also imagination that they can use to drive people up a wall and they do not hesitate to try and do it. More importantly, there is no pacifying the four’s envy by actually giving them what they feel they are missing out on. The cycle will eventually and continually repeat.

Fours are shattered. At the final straw, fours explosively self-destruct. The four’s explosive self-destruction is like a two-way mirror of aggression directed both inward and outward, with shards of glass flying in all directions. The quality is reckless needless to say. It contains arms flailing around, hitting whatever is in front of them, if inside a car on a highway hitting the car window, the windshield, trying to get out, the breathing patterns start to hyperventilate, with uncontrollable screaming. The denouement of this violent hyperventilating meltdown is a crash and burn into the rubble of self-hate, a wish for death, “I just want to die.” A four in this state usually needs extensive silence and time alone. Artistic beauty transmutes, soothes and remedies their pain, reminds them to innocently and softly say, “thank you, God”. Museums and other forms of high art helps them pick up the pieces of their soul and put themselves back together again, to perhaps one day, rise like a phoenix.

4w3s are melodramatic. 4w3s dramatize reality by pretending things and people are worse than they are actually, feigning broken bones out of pinches of the arm. Imagination and sense memory are further sources of intensifying emotion.

4w5s are refined. 4w5s have an aversion to crudeness. They do not like vulgarity.

4w5s are headstrong. The 4w5 mind cannot be captured. They are cantankerous and dismissive in argument.

4w5s are hoarding. Every photo they take, every item they pull in off the street, every mundane thing in their cabinets, like a box of matches, comes to symbolize something more than just simply clutter, but for the four, each ‘thing’ has its place. Throwing something away on them provokes an alienating response, especially if the Four cannot retrieve what has been either deleted or thrown out.

Distinctions:

Fours dwell in their inner worlds. Two usually avoid it. Twos want to be a somebody in the lives of others. Fours want to be a somebody in the world that their fantasy persona inhabits.

Threes disengage from their emotions and act out the emotions of their chosen winning image. Fours dwell in their own emotions. Threes insulate themselves inside the roles that they play, as if they wanted to turn their roles into who they are as a person and this leads threes into a plastic type of existence. Although Fours fill their emotional life through fantasy personas, Fours still know who they are, they have a clear sense of the difference between themselves and their persona. Furthermore, threes are more goal-oriented than fours and focused on winning. Fours are more comfortable with their emotions than fives, and fours are more involved with people at the level of emotional engagement.

Fours are more trusting of people than sixes are and less oriented towards putting up walls. Fours can even be blindly trusting whereas sixes sleep with one eye open. Paranoid sixes can express the existence of a fantasy persona that is intended to fend off attacks, and so the articulation of this fantasy self in their inner world might be a source of confusion with fours, but the six’s fantasy persona tends to be more crude and unrefined in nature and is more or less a self-serving attempt to prop themselves up as strong and capable of fending off attacks, a deterrent.

Sevens and Fours can be confused for each other due to the stormy emotional life and moodiness both types can inhabit. However, the seven’s stormy cycling through moods lacks that nuance of fragileness that characterizes the four’s merry-go-around of feelings. Another source of confusion is that both types can instigate “revolt.” However, the seven’s subversion of the environment is based their position against “God”, doing what they want, not suppressing their impulses in the name of society and crude expressions of emotion. The subversive effects of the Four’s more introverted character type comes about purely through a revolution of the imagination, through the four’s striving to become a somebody within the world that their fantasy persona inhabits.

Although both types are strongly motivated by deprivation, eights instinctively turn their deprivation into action and drive (i.e. empire building) Fours remain more locked inside the emotional pain of their deprivation kicking and screaming. Its as if the four were more concerned with the emotional intensity that being deprived fuels them with and less concerned with actually obtaining those things that they have been deprived of. Also, although both types can be quick to disagree and argue, Fours don’t enjoy fighting. They don’t like to get into arguments and they don’t quickly forget about the arguments they get into it. It can weigh on their nerves, cause them to go inward and reevaluate their relationship with the person they got into the argument with. For eights, getting into an argument is not a big deal and something easily forgotten.

9w8s typically do not mistype as Fours. However, 9w1s can confuse themselves for fours because some 9w1s have formidable imaginations. However, 9w1s are more flat-lined and ruminating in their emotional expression. Fours are more provoking and vibrant. 9w1s are also more averse to conflict than Fours and are content to be ordinary, nobody special. The idea of being a nobody to a Four is dreadful and something they counteract by provoking strong emotional responses from people. Fours are also okay disrupting and not giving priority to other people's agendas for the sake of their own expression of feeling. Nines typically merge into the agendas of others and are not so intruding. Nines are also subconsciously in search of a powerful figure that can take control and responsibility over important aspects of their life. Fours do not want to be rescued. They hate having to depend on people and have a clear and unique sense of direction for their own lives.

Ones and fours might be mistaken for each other for a variety of reasons. One source of confusion is that both types can be highly sensitive which is a triggering source of interpersonal conflicts. However, what triggers a four usually does not have any apparent logical origin whereas with Ones the issue is fairly obvious. Ones also carry grudges far more to the point that their unresolved anger festers into hate (i.e. the passion of wrath). Fours don’t carry grudges with people so much as they have just determined to go their separate ways from certain individuals who have wronged them. Ones are also far more mechanically logically in debate and argument than Fours are and their own personal philosophy emphasizes rigid compliance to a right way of doing things, whereas Fours have a more fluid style of existing in the world. Ones also place a greater emphasis on controlling others in their interpersonal relationships.

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