SUMMARY: Enneagram Type 4 (PDP Pattern 4) Personality and Wholeness in Therapy
Motivation: Bonding for Connection
Attendency: Inward
Primary Emotion: Separation-Distress/Sadness
Emotion Regulation Mode: Up-regulate (Experience and Express)
Enneagram Center of Intelligence and Knowing: Leads with Heart or Feeling Intuition, Knowing, and Perception, Internal Feeling States and Environment Associations
Place in Human Body of Initial Energy Processing: Heart/Solar Plexus
Enneagram Type: The Romantic/Individualist
SUMMARY: Enneagram Type 4 (PDP Pattern 4) Core Dynamics in Therapy
The following sections use "type" rather than "pattern" as the descriptions come from David's writings.
Growth, integration and wholeness from habitual and reactive patterns to higher human capacities as a result of:
- relaxing the pattern
- renewed aspirational intentions
- moving from reactivity to pause/deep breath growth for 4
Melancholy vs Origin – The Cognitive Dynamic, Growth, and Wholeness
- Melancholy -- Cognitive Preoccupations and Habitual Narratives
- Attention on what is missing that is important. What is negative in what is present, what is positive in what is absent/distant. The longing and yearning.
- Origin -- Cognitive Higher Capacity
- Idealist for others. Appreciates life for what it really is. Sees the center of things, what matters, the core. Realizes wholeness and realness exist now.
Envy vs Equanimity – The Emotional Dynamic, Growth, and Wholeness
- Envy -- Emotional Drive, Tone and Reactivity
- Emotional energy on what others have which I don’t—wanting it. Grasping at or getting depressed over what I can’t have but deserve or don’t deserve.
- Equanimity -- Emotional Higher Capacity
- Balance—nothing of substance is missing. Emotions not dominant. Showing equilibrium regarding external circumstance. Living in harmony with what is present. Satisfied fulfilled with taking just enough.
Enneagram Type 4 Synopsis
Brief Description
The Type 4 believes you must obtain the ideal relationship or situation to be loved. Consequently, Romantics are idealistic, deeply feeling, empathetic and authentic, but also dramatic, moody and sometimes self-absorbed.
Key Interventions
Help the Type 4 overcome his or her longing for what is missing, appreciate what is positive in life now, and accept oneself as lovable, separate from his or her identification with being “special.”
Somatic Profile
Type 4s are more aware of their emotions than many types but they are biased toward sad feelings. Being happy or having fun is more challenging. They can be very expressive and dramatic, sometimes overly so; they can be very quiet and withdrawn, even to the point of depression; or they can swing back and forth from one extreme to another. It's hard to establish an emotional middle ground. Energy tends to collect in the middle of the body and may be withdrawn from the periphery (eyes, hands, feet) and can result in anxiety and hyperventilation. Self-expression through music, dance, writing, creative work, or parenting helps create emotional and physical balance.
Communication Style
Expressive of feelings, possibility-oriented, personal and self-focused. Others may perceive you as overly dramatic, self-absorbed, unsatisfied with responses and emotionally intense.
Behavioral Profile
- Strengths: Sensitivity, empathy, especially with suffering, creative disposition, attunement to feelings, intensity, romantic, passionate, idealism, appreciative of the unique, extraordinary, and singular, being passionate and idealistic.
- Difficulties: Dissatisfaction and anger with life as it is, “nothing is good enough:” rejects help, dominated by fluctuating feelings: pain is associated with the D’s: depression, devastation, disdain, drama, disappointment, deviancy; experiencing the painful side of uniqueness as a misfit who feels different from others, experiencing difficulties in sustaining a relationship or path, feeling pain associated with the self-created crisis, a sort of “addiction” to suffering; envy of those that allegedly have fulfillment
What Triggers Reactivity in Relationships
People that disappoint us. People that let us down. People that leave us and leave us feeling abandoned. Feeling unheard, unseen, and unimportant. Feeling slighted, invisible, rejected, and unwanted. Feeling misunderstood and not enough. Phoniness. Insincerity. Meaninglessness. Ugliness.
Social Profile
Type 4’s tend to be introverted due to their withdrawing energy (see energy flow Harmony Triads).
In addition, their social disposition is impacted by the three instinctual sub-types. Dominance toward self-survival or self-preservation is a focus based on me first which can lead to more introversion. Dominance toward bonding survival, the one-on-one focused relationships, tend to fall in the middle of the Introversion-Extraversion (I-E) scale. Dominance toward group survival, the social focus on groups and organizations, can lead to being more extraverted.
Enneagram Type 4 Basic Proposition and Loss of Wholeness in Childhood
Holy Origin is that original ideal state of full, deep, complete connection to all things. In essence, which after all, is permanent and unchanging, and underlies all material or external manifestation, nothing is missing, nothing is lacking. In original essence wholeness and realness exist in each moment according to universal principles. We have all had these moments when nothing is missing, everything being whole and complete. We experience equanimity. We are in complete harmony with what is present, we have no longing. The young child is permeated by essence, externally connected, in the beginning, to her own essence. We can observe the infants or a very young child connected to her essence, content with what is. So too can we observe her connected fully to her mother carried along in this fullness.
Even when circumstances change and the connection naturally comes and goes, we can observe the infant responding appropriately to the changing circumstances. Essence doesn't come and go, only the connection the personality necessity has to essence. In our enlightened moments we all can realize that the continuity of life and death goes on, that the heart fills and empties only to fill again. The equanimity we live in harmony with this life flow connected to our own essence and to that of all sentient beings, our bodies responding as much as is necessary.
What Wholeness Looks Like for Enneagram Type 4
What does greater wholeness look like when those with Enneagram Type 4 make their way on the journey of self-study and growth?
- Moving from a cognitive preoccupation that only “I do not have” to a cognitive awareness that our origin exists now, whole and complete connection exists in each moment with nothing of substance or importance missing.
- Moving from intense internal feelings to emotional balance (equanimity) with what is (and what is not), knowing nothing of substance is missing.
Integrating the higher capacity of being aware and in touch with an undestroyable, ever-present connection to oneself and all of life-origin, rather than the ever changing dynamic world where loss is inevitable is able to be present – become a therapeutic theme and daily practice. Then, there is an ability to experience living in emotional equanimity with a knowing that every human is unique and at the same time connected at a deeper level.
