



The 4 can be exceptionally sensitive to their environment, which is one of the reasons why being in nature is for them a source of inspiration and well-being. From here: http://www.enneagramme.com/Articles/2003/EM_0312_a1.htm Thecan be exceptionally sensitive to their environment, which is one of the reasons why being in nature is for them a source of inspiration and well-being.

A prolific novelist 4 says: "Sometimes it is the setting and especially the appearance of the sky that gives rise to a new story."





Another 4 adds: "I am consciously and unconsciously very deeply affected by my physical environment, the clutter and the hustle and bustle depressing me, I only love cities to visit, mainly museums and zoos. When I lived in the city, I needed the space given by the view of a lake. The long car trips never bother me because I am invigorated by the wooded areas, the hills, the clouds and the birds."

Some people decorate their interior with care and choose their furniture and property, partly for their aesthetic value and partly for what the objects remind them of, as if they were creating a kind of personal museum. Objects can evoke moods and feelings or symbolize different periods of life. Others 4 design beautiful or innovative interiors for their homes, while others may deliberately choose to live in a black and romantic misery, a "noble rot" as a 4 described the decor of his shabby apartment.

The 4 can also fix on objects. A 4 bought a stereo that she exchanged three times until she got the model that exactly matched her living room. Another client 4 could never feel comfortable on the chair in my office. During the sessions, she squirmed and moved nervously. We tried another chair with the same result. Finally, she brought her own chair and let her work together. When she felt the chair was perfect, she could relax.

Some 4s have eyebrows that rise towards the middle, in an expression of perpetual desire. They can also be characterized by looking at something in the distance or appearing to be simultaneously present and absent.

Chronically depressed people, regardless of their personality style, tend to have a lot of dialogue and inner feelings. They talk to each other, have emotions, talk to each other, have more emotions, and so on. In NLP, this is called an "auditory-kinesthetic loop" and people who get stuck in it are usually unaware of the visual part of their experience. They literally do not see the world and lose their feet quite easily, especially when things go wrong. The 4 caught in the trance of their ego are particularly prone to auditory-kinesthetic loops and it sometimes makes them feel good to focus deliberately on the outer visual part of their experience.

Some 4 move very little, demonstrating the hypnotic phenomenon of catalepsy, a physical immobility found in hypnotic subjects. Catalepsy is an ability that some higher mammals have to freeze their bodies; it can be seen in the behavior of the rabbits taken by surprise, deer in the light of the lighthouses and the guards of Buckingham Palace in England known for their immobility. Catalepsy is also visible in depressed people, who generally have fewer motor behaviors, fewer gestures and a global deficit of affects.

When they are deeply absorbed in their subjective experience, the 4 , especially those with a wing 5 , can become cataleptic, standing physically immobile as if focused on their inner feelings and moods. They freeze their bodies to prevent physical sensations from interfering with inner emotions or with a carefully designed mood. Physical movement tends to cover emotional states in the same way that listening to a song on a speaker will erase a song in your head.

Find ways of artistic expression

Some types of the Enneagram are known for their procrastination, among them the 6, the 9 and the 4. The 6 procrastinates because they are afraid by taking a decisive action to provoke attacks from authority figures who oppose them. The 9, on the other hand, procrastinate because they refuse in a defensive way to admit their true desires. Having lost touch with what they really want, the 9 can not decide what to do since all the lines of action seem equivalent.

The 4 procrastinates for an entirely different reason: they cannot find the world. In the trance of their enatype, the four are lost in the sea of ​​their subjectivity and no longer make an essential distinction between their inner moods and the external reality. Often when they place themselves on the firm ground of objective reality, they become determined, hardworking and effective. It happens sometimes during "moments of illumination" during which a 4 has an epiphany and suddenly knows clearly what to do.

My client Hélène was depressed and uprooted, working as a secretary, a job she found meaningless and unsatisfactory. She had recently moved from another city and had made no new friends, which added to her sense of disaffection. Like other 4s, Hélène said she felt like she was coming from another planet or being a monster from a genetic error. She also said she felt mired in her emotions and occasionally suicidal. For a year, I tried to be a stable and friendly contact for her while she was building a new life and going through her depression. We focused on different issues, reviewing her story, setting goals for her future, and helping her regain her sense of humor and taste for life.

After several months of this process, luck also played its part. One day, Hélène was walking in a flea market when she fell into a hut on a man who was selling jewelry supplies. He had a wide range of multicolored beads made of glass and different types of stone. Hélène was flabbergasted by the beauty of the pearls and she remained there, hypnotized. Then for an hour, she pressed the man with questions about making jewelry. She bought beads and other supplies, went home, and that evening began making necklaces and bracelets. She was so excited that she began doing each night. She worked for hours, so full of energy and absorbed in the process that she sometimes forgot to sleep.

Hélène continued to make necklaces and bracelets to satisfy her own taste. One day she suddenly realized that they were as beautiful as those she had seen in the shops. She decided to sell them. Two weeks later she had taken a business license, printed business cards and created a brochure. She began selling her jewelry through various outlets: the flea market, galleries and gift shops and through a network of friends and acquaintances she created.

Hélène kept her secretarial work until she could afford to continue her creative work full time. She also expanded her business from jewelery to sculpture, painting and later to web design. As for many 4s, her talent was "transversal," in the sense that she could express herself through many media. Her initial difficulty was not "deciding to act," but connecting with a world in which her actions have meaning, place and utility.

If you are a 4, it is particularly important that you find and practice ways to express yourself, even if these means are not explicitly artistic. You have imagination, energy and intensity, and all that needs to go somewhere. Otherwise the reactions you have at different levels will bubble up creating sterile pain, or you will translate them into chronic identity crises and melodramas in your emotional life. Essentially, you have to choose between doing art or turning your life into bad art.

A business traveler was taking the dull pictures of the hotel rooms out of their frames, adding bizarre and inventive details, then lining them up and hung them up on the wall. An insignificant pastel of ducks flying over a river sported in one fell swoop a group of cackling grotesque trolls, hiding under a bridge, firing at the ducks with slingshots. Even if degrading the property of a hotel is not recommended, creating the extraordinary from the ordinary and expressing yourself in small but satisfying ways are two good ideas for the 4 =)



Another 4, a therapist, became the boss of a crisis intervention center. Although his new job appealed to him, he found paperwork and administrative information depressing and uninspiring. He decided to redecorate his office, draping differently the windows, and hanging new paintings to make it aesthetically to his taste. Then he began sending routine memos on papers of different colors. He also applied himself to spice up ungrateful and repetitive tasks; when he needed his colleagues to submit the timesheets - something they often rejected - he would write little poems or haiku to remind them.

Another 4 who hated declaring his income, realized one day looking at his tax forms that filling them up was like telling a story in numbers. As a born storyteller and writing novels in his free time, filling out his tax returns suddenly became pleasant, even amusing. Another one says, "I made a montage of fifty from magazine cuts, I had this thing hanging on my wall, and then later, it struck me how much this collection of 'images and diagrams was meaningful and so I brought it to a photography studio which made me a good negative so that I could use it for my Christmas cards. felt that I should do this, but I do not consider myself a person with an artistic sense."

Everything can be your art form, shopping, cleaning the house or doing the accounting. The key is how you approach it. A therapist who paints for pleasure says, "There used to be times when I felt bad if I did not paint, now the possibilities are more open. Painting is one thing, doing creative work creatively is another, and make therapy another, all of them help."

Many 4 mistakenly believe that routine tasks should be performed, as a 1 would do, in a certain order; so they reject their natural creative strategy. But in fact, it actually helps to tackle trivial tasks in a non-linear way; cleaning the house is much easier if you do it as if you were making a painting. Solving practical problems is more effective when you allow your subconscious to work on the problem and let the answer emerge later; or when you ask that a solution come to you in your dreams. As the saying goes, freedom is not about doing what you love, but loving what you do.

Sometimes speaking can mean just talking to friends. The four report that sharing their feelings with an understanding friend reduces the size of these feelings, bringing them back to manageable proportions instead of the mountain they represented: "The negative side of my type 4 is to choose to wear things and not to solve them, so they fester and get bigger, it helps me a lot to say how I feel about someone who just listens and has no bias or prejudice, even if it's I do it in a very informal way, I easily magnify the negative aspect of something, it can be dissipated in half a second simply by a few words."

Physical beauty and aesthetic appreciation are also important for the 4 . Walking in nature, seeing the glowing blues and greens of a resplendent spring can be particularly nourishing for them. That art is part of their lives is also a key. As a 4 explains: "Art fills my life with joy, violins and horn make me cry, Picasso's paintings have a different effect than Edward Hopper, but they change all two my perspective on life. My life has been filled with the joy of these creations -- without art, all hopes and dreams fly out the window."

Voluntary controls

One day, one of my clients 4 began to passionately defend the fact that he was too sensitive to keep a stable job. I replied with something that I had already said to people who speak this way, who have a sense of humor and with whom I have good relationships: "Well, you may be too sensitive to keep a steady job, or you may be an irresponsible asshole." The client seemed shocked, became more and more thoughtful, then smiled and said, "You know, I could love that, it looks like a choice ..."

In the trance of their enneatype, the 4 can feel victims of their own sensitivity and imagine defenseless, belonging to the world of delicate people, broken by the rock of life, victims of their own moods, unable to function in the world. normal world. So it is often useful to put the 4 in contact with their unconscious power to modify their inner experience, through what might be called "voluntary controls". Since the four create their suffering with their imagination, they can learn to reframe their suffering in the same way.

Marlene sat down to work wrapped in an aura of isolation and melancholy. Professionally, she had succeeded and was very busy, but she said that her personal life was tarnished by sadness. She attributed this feeling to child abuse, but I was not so sure, since she had also said that she had worked this point for years with many therapists to try to overcome it.

Marlene had a cold, blonde beauty that she had used to her advantage in her relationships with men. However, beyond the shell of her attractive appearance, she felt unwanted, valued solely for her beauty and professional achievements. She described sadness as her "identity" and said she had endured severe periods of depression. Since we only had one session together and were limited in what we could do, I decided to bring up a symbol that she could use to ease her day-to-day sadness.

I asked her where she felt the pain in her body and she answered that it was in the solar plexus. I then asked her to use her imagination to remove the suffering from her solar plexus and see her as a picture sitting on her right knee. She focused for a moment, then saw a red balloon about the size of a tennis ball that beat rhythmically. As she saw it beating, I asked him if it had any other qualities. She said it had moving lips, but no voice.

I suggested that she increase the size of the ball by 25%. It immediately became green, and her sadness began to diminish. Then I asked her to increase the ball size again by 25%, and it turned blue. The lips kept moving but still did not produce sound. I asked Marlene if she could sing. She said no, but she had a nice voice and she had always wanted to take classes. As she said that, music started to come out of the ball. The lips narrowed and began to whistle a song, Singing in the Rain. Moments later, Marlene found that her sadness had disappeared, replaced by a feeling of light-heartedness. She found the exercise funny and amazing.

We could have gone further and, say, burst the ball, but it seemed like too much for a session. Instead, I suggested to Marlene to choose the color of the ball she preferred. She decided to keep it blue and let it continue to whistle. Then I asked him to follow a simple commitment: to visit the ball twice a day for the next two weeks.

When I spoke to her six months later, she said the picture had stayed with her. The ball was still whistling when she felt sad and sometimes he was singing funny words to cheer her up. In total, she says that using the image had significantly reduced her overall mood. It had also allowed her to dissociate, to see and hear hear sadness rather than to feel it.

Exercise: directing your inner film

Think of a sad memory that is familiar to you. Take a few moments to try to revisit this memory in detail. How is he, how does he sound, what impression does he give? What is the most imperative part of this memory?

Now experiment with it using the sensory qualities of memory, starting with what it looks like. What happens if you change your point of view, for example if you float above the memory? Or if you look at it from a distance? If the memory is in color, try to put it in black and white. Or pass it sepia color as in a nineteenth century photograph. What happens if you look at the memory as if you were watching a movie? What happens if you project the souvenir film upside down?

Now add some music to the memory. What would be the most appropriate music to accompany this memory? Add it and listen to it for a moment.

Now change the music. In background music of remembrance, play something funeral like Beethoven. Now change the soundtrack for samba and watch what happens. Now try sitar. Now try some circus music.

Exercise: life stories

Since the 4 can become particularly attached to their autobiography, another good thing to discover is your power as a storyteller.

Write an autobiography of three to five pages, the story of your life, told entirely from your point of view as a 4 . Drop the jargon and official descriptions of your enneatype and simply write with the voice and point of view that you have when you are at the pinnacle of your state of 4 . Then write another three to five-page autobiography, told entirely from the point of view of your deepest and most authentic self. Then write a third story of your life told purely according to your joys, even if there were only a few. Now compare your autobiographies. What did you choose to omit and include in each? Which is true? Which one do you prefer?

Reject rejects

Renée, a 4 with a wing 3, wanted to work on a conflict she had with a colleague 3 in her government job. Renee reported that her colleague often took credit for her work and told others that she was lazy. Renee was annoyed at being described this way, but she admitted it was probably true. She added that many recent organizational changes at work had made her feel like an undesired outsider. As a result, she was less motivated to work hard, although she was very capable and intelligent. She identified emotional pain in her upper chest that she associated with the situation, although she also described it as an "old injury" .

I asked Renee to explore the pain of being unwanted, to try to give her a voice, and to find an image that expresses that pain. Quickly, she saw a little girl with sad eyes. I asked her to talk with the girl and learn more about what she wanted. Renee closed her eyes for a moment and then said, "Take care of me, as Papa said." Renee blushed then and seemed uncomfortable. When I asked her what she was feeling, she said, "I'm embarrassed, I just realized that this little girl in me feels she should not have to work."

Renee saw the image of a young princess sitting alone in a garden. The princess was privileged, stubborn ... and on strike. When Renee communicated with the picture, the princess explained that her father had promised her that she would never have to work because there would always be someone to take care of her. She was waiting for that promise to be kept and was not concerned about how long it would take, or what chaos it would create in practice.

Renée's painful drama of being unwanted was in fact a projection of her own refusal to work. Behind all this, there was the part of princess in her who was sitting in her garden, waiting for us to take care of her, with a feeling of just anger. When I asked Renee what effect it made her to realize that her suffering was a consequence of her own choice, she said, "Horrified, but honest."

Almost immediately, the torment about his job faded away. Instead of feeling like a rejected outsider, she recognized that she was creating her own dilemma by acting unconsciously as a privileged person. This honest self-image, though unflattering, was a more powerful position than that of the rejected and defenseless victim.

As with other types of the Enneagram who tend to see themselves as victims, it is important for the 4 to relate to their power of choice. In particular it helps the 4 to come into contact with their anger, which can be that of a child who sulks to punish others. In the trance of their type, the 4 may subconsciously imagine themselves to be of royal descent, not kings and queens, but princes and princesses, privileged sons and daughters rather than strong and responsible adults.

Exercise :

Make a list of three situations in the past where you felt rejected. Examine each situation and reverse your hypothesis, imagining that somehow you were rejecting it and the result reflected what you really wanted. If a situation has involved the loss of a companion or a job, try to imagine that you are glad that he has disappeared. Find three good things in getting rid of them. What are the new possibilities, arising from being rejected, which you are happy about? Is there a situation in your current life in which you feel rejected? How does your perception of this situation change if you are the person who, in fact, rejects?

Exercise: fishing for compliments