Like Lichenous Growth, Your Bitter Best, and the Fear of Fours

The Enneagram Type Four spreads like lichen, a few square inches per annum. Fours are compounded by a sun-catching alga interspersed in the filamentous mycelia of a rot-living fungus. Two elements, neither of which make it on their own, feeling through defects of their own. The blanching fungus sucks up the soup of metabolites on a substrate, and satisfies with a meager repass brought to it by ejecting its enzymes for the hang-dog lapping up. The rootless moss fixes light in the tangle of false roots ensuring its self-conscious sustenance in the darkest dark. One is trying to gain a foothold, while one is reaching for the one exposed bulb, and each is searching for a spot treatment to allay their troubled sleep in a coldwater room. Their bitter dance is rather a clutching to keep from falling over, shins hitting the low bed. They are susceptible to the strange wind regular to us now.

Type Fours, according to Don Richard Riso with Russ Hudson: "The Four is the personality type which emphasizes the subjective world of feeling, in creativity and individualism, in introversion and self-absorption, and in self-torment and self-hatred. In this personality type we see creative artists, romantic aesthetes, and withdrawn dreamers, people with powerful feelings who feel different from others because self-consciousness blocks them from getting outside themselves. ... In the creative moment, healthy Fours harness their emotions without getting lost in them, not only producing something beautiful but discovering who they are."

"The more intensely they feel something, the more real they feel. Thus, average Fours begin to employ their imaginations to "stir up" their emotional life. They can take even the most transitory encounter with a person and dwell on it for hours to extract all of its "emotional juice." The problem is that it becomes difficult for Fours to sustain their moods and fantasies if they are still interacting with others or taking care of practical needs."

"Increasingly, they begin to withdraw from life and real relationships and experiences, both to prevent others from interfering with their strong reveries and moods, and to avoid potential embarrassment and humiliation."

"More than any other personality type, healthy Fours are the bridge between the spiritual and the animal in human nature because they are so aware of these two sides of themselves. They sense in themselves the depths to which human beings can descend, as well as the heights to which they can be swept up. No other personality type is as habitually aware of the potentials and predicaments of human nature: human beings are spiritual animals occupying an uneasy place between two orders of existence."

"Because the formative relationship with their parents was primarily one of disconnection, Fours also begin to develop a sense of ego identity based on their difference from others. There were few qualities in their parents that they identified with, so Fours began to inventory all of the ways in which they were unlike the people around them."

"Of course, Fours also experience hostility toward others. They can become enraged if others seem to question or dismiss their self-image or emotional states, but they tend to express this by "dropping" people, suddenly and without explanation. The creativity of Fours can also be employed in sarcastic, withering remarks directed at those who have wounded their sensitivities. ... More often, Fours will simmer and seethe in silence."

"As soon as Fours devote themselves to a search for self by withdrawing from life, they are going in the wrong direction. No matter how necessary this search may seem to them, they must become convinced that the direct search for self is a temptation which eventually leads to despair."

"On the other hand, what makes healthy Fours healthy is not that they have freed themselves once and for all from the turbulence of their emotions, but that they have found a way to ride that current to some further destination. Healthy Fours have learned to sustain their identities without exclusive reference to their feelings. By overcoming the temptation to withdraw from life to search for themselves, they will not only save themselves from their own destructiveness, they will be able to bring something beautiful and good into existence. If they learn to live this way, Fours can be among the most life-enhancing of the personality types, bringing good out of evil, hope from hopelessness, meaning from absurdity, and saving what appeared to be lost."