LY #50 Type Four

Creating characters with the Enneagram.  Necessary Writers.

 

 

So this morning I went to an Enneagram discussion group held at Dudley's Bookshop Cafe and led by Kathleen Paterno of Enneagram Discovery.  Once again, Enneagram isn't science, though Paterno said something about "research is being done."  So I take all the Enneagram material cum grano salis.  When I mentioned, during the discussion, that it was philosophy and not science one of the fours brought in as examples poo-pooed my concern with science saying that what one learned about oneself was real and true.

There were three Type Four women there as examples for the other attendees.  They talked a lot about their experiences and seemed proud of their big emotions and intensity.  As I listened I thought, "Really, is that me?"  It was not a completely pleasant thought.

As a teacher, I also thought about how I might have run the session a bit more tightly than Paterno did, redirecting conversations that went off case, but then it wasn't my class.

Paterno handed out a one-page overview of Type Four and there is so of this personality type that rings true for me.  It was interesting this morning to hear about many qualities of thinking and behaving that I've sometimes assumed were signs of mental illness simply listed as aspects of personality.  I'll share with you some of what I found most telling on the handout from Enneagram Discovery, LLC (with much borrowed from Don Riso and Russ Hudson of the Enneagram Institute).

"Common Childhood Scenario -- They were not particularly cose to their parents, often feeling misunderstood or even rejected.  Having a solitary childhood, they enjoyed escaping into a world of make believe.  They somehow got the message that 'It's not okay to be too functional or too happy.'"

Certainly true for me.  I pretty much divorced myself emotionally from my parents around 6th grade.

"Relationships - At their best they are empathetic, supportive, gentle, playful, passionate and witty.  They are self-revealing and bond easily.  At their worst they are self-absorbed, jealous, emotionally needy, moody and overly critical.  Feeling misunderstood causes them to isolate. "

While I like to think that I am as described when at my "best," I know that I am as described at my worst.

The dominant emotion of Type Fours is shame:  "they experience an unconscious envy that others feel okay or happy with their lives.  Is there something wrong with me?"

Although 27 years of instructing interpersonal communication has taught me that almost no one has an ordinary life, I still can get electrical jolts of this envy at unexpected times.  (Like sometimes when I'm on Facebook.)  And no matter how much work I do on myself I have yet to shake the "Is there something wrong with me" question. 

Is there anything more to the Ennegram than to Astrology?  There are some scientific types who are seeking and writing about the links between the Enneagram and Neuroscience.  Dr. David Daniels has an essay linking the Enneagram to the Triune Brain and Attachment Theory.

I still don't have enough of what I would consider evidence to say that the Enneagram is more than a high class example of the Barnum Effect.  And yet....I've sometimes been asked why I perform behaviors that make me stand out and at least now I have an excuse....I mean a reason.  I can say, "Well, I'm a Type Four.  We're just like that."

Or I can blame it on the bossa nova, the dance of love.

LY: #20: Whiny, Pathetic, Narcissistic, Loneliness - 1988

A sad part of those 1988 Bendnotes is the shouting loneliness of the person writing them.  My young self had a strange idea that these long, digressive, overwritten missives were being read.  In the September 22, 1988 note she, I, write(s):

       "As I enter the second week, I shall continue to keep the old eyes peeled for interesting happenstance.  Since all but one of you have ignored my last set of notes, and that one merely commented that s/he thought it was well written (a sign more of my lack of style than of his/her perspicacity, I fear), I shall simply write what I think interesting."

In the following note, written in late October, has an opening more appropriate to someone who might be writing a weekly editorial, not a set of photocopied letters.

           "Well gentle readers.  Perhaps you have noticed the lateness of this episode.  Perhaps you wondered whether or not the woman you knew had given up her attempt to reconstruct her experience in this strange new world.  Perhaps you though I had abandoned you.

          "But never fear.  This process by which I hold back, hold off the reality of my experience by continually conceptualizing it as a construction I send to you keeps me from being truly caught up in the ineluctable substance of the moment.

       "At least it did until a short while ago. . .."  After that line, my use of metaphors and Monty Python references spirals out of control as I say that I've been watching too much television while I'm not at work.  I also refer to an old Wayne and Shuster comedy routine about television addiction which I'm sure none of my friends had even heard of by using the line, "the gal with the golden eyeball." 

If I look at these old letters with the eye of my therapist I see an Enneagram 4 whose "basic desire" is "to find themselves and their significance, to create an identity out of their inner experience." (This is from Riso and Hudson's The Wisdom of the Enneagram).   Or I could see someone with a "narcissistic wound," (this concept also courtesy my current therapist) who is caught up in the importance of proving she's just as important as she thinks she is.  What I've also learned about myself since two decades and 1/2 ago is that I score very high in "uncertainty avoidance."  Any situation that is unstable and unknown (like a brand new job) sends me into high stress mode and I see that too in these letters.