Type 4, The Individualist

Triad (Corner):     Heart (image, feeling)
Core Issue:          Shame
Personality runs on:      Frustration
Values:       Emotional Reactivity
Style:    Withdrawn
Passion:    Envy
Virtue:    Equanimity

Description: Creatures of emotional extremes, fours are awash in a stormy sea of emotions. They are all about relationships and seem to be always beginning, ending, or analyzing relationships. They feel frustrated in their search for connection to others. As children, they didn’t feel like the parents really understood them or were there for them emotionally. Whether or not this was really true is beside the point. They feel like they were born into the wrong family and continue to seek out people who will nurture them, mirror them, and rescue them from their suffering.

Fours are not content with the ordinary, in any sense of the word. They like to look stunningly beautiful or completely unique. Their living quarters must be tasteful or artistic. Ordinary emotions won’t do, they like to have the highest of emotional highs and lowest of lows. They live their lives moving between ecstacy and despair.

The passion of the Four is envy. Ironically, they envy certain qualities of other people, such as their happiness or their relationships, while at the same time feeling disdain for those same people’s ordinariness.

Fours are so identified with their feelings that they believe they ARE their feelings. They believe that they are flawed, different or special and form their identities around these feelings. They tend to view people of other types, especially 3s or 7s, as shallow, and themselves as deep. The problem is that fixated fours don’t really feel their feelings. They create all the drama precisely to avoid feeling the real pain of their lives, and so are as shallow as every other fixated type.

Fours withdraw from others, often with high drama, so that others come and find them. They also withdraw to protect themselves from getting their feelings hurt. When unhealthy, they are so reactive that others feel they need to walk on eggshells around them. They also can become overly helpful and intrusive, like average to unhealthy Type 2s.

When healthy, fours learn to stay with the ordinariness of their real feelings – to actually feel the real pain, grief, sadness that comes with living. As a result they are also able to feel happiness and joy. Healthy fours learn to stop identifying with their feelings, gain some objectivity, and be ordinary. As Don Riso said in a recent workshop, referring to his nine levels of development of the types, “A four at level 3 (healthy range) can shop at K-Mart. A four at level 4 (average range) can’t.”

When fours stop identifying with their pain, and start feeling it and letting it go, they become extremely gifted at seeing the beauty in all of the raw emotions of life. If they have an artistic streak, they use their understanding of emotion and their aesthetic sensibilities to create works of art, and are able to put those works of art out there for others to experience.
 
At their best, Fours find dry land on which to stand, incorporate objectivity into their psyches, and gain wisdom like a healthy 1. They learn to ground themselves in present reality instead of dwelling on past suffering. They achieve equanimity. And when 4s incorporate the healthy side of 2, they can be magnificent therapists, helping others navigate through their own difficult feelings.


Examples of this type:  Johnny Depp, Nicholas Cage, Anthony Hopkins, Cher, Frasier, Judy Garland, Sylvia Plath, Prince, Bob Dylan, Edgar Allan Poe, the Goths, the Drama Queen, France.

An exercise for Type 4:  Notice when you move from reality into fantasy. What is in your fantasy world that is not in your real world? What emotions do you feel there? Spend some time in your imagination.

Now breathe deeply into your belly. Feel your body. Pay attention to your feet, your legs, how your body is supported by the floor or the chair. Now breathe deeply into your chest, into your heart space. What emotions do you feel now? Try to discern your real feelings from your imagined feelings.