



The 4 is one of those I jokingly call "natural enneatypes." From here: http://www.enneagramme.com/Articles/2003/EM_0310_a2.htm Theis one of those I jokingly call "natural enneatypes."

Often, extremely old people slow down and become terse and more accommodating, much like a 9, regardless of their actual personality style.

During their first twenty years, many young adults go through the natural phase of the seven when they venture into the world to taste the variety of life and its joys.

In the same way, nature temporarily transforms all adolescents into 4, the universal adolescent experience containing many elements of the psychology of the 4: a sense of alienation, a conscious search for identity, a concern of whom you are as a unique person in relation to others, an intensity in everyday experience, a tendency to find romanticism in death, the conviction that no one has ever felt what you feel and a keen awareness of the elevation sorrow and love. The famous teacher and poet John Ciardi was once asked to know if people needed to suffer to become a poet. "No," he replied, "being a teenager is quite enough."

The integrated 4 is idealistic, has good taste and greatly appreciates beauty. They filter their external reality through a rich and subtle subjectivity and are often good at thinking metaphorically - they have the ability to link facts and unrelated events, to understand and experience one kind of thing as another (according to what the philosopher and anthropologist Gregory Bateson called "patterns which connect" ).

The 4 naturally practice synesthesia, a continual mixture of senses that can produce complex and rich reactions to ordinary events. A 4 entering a new situation could see something that triggers a mental image, which in the wake evokes a feeling, which then recalls a song. The song could recall images that evoke more scents, tastes and feelings. The senses of the 4 can blend together like watercolor in the rain; they can see sounds, hear feelings, feel pictures, etc. Asked what he likes about his personality, a 4 replied: "I do not know if many other people can appreciate things, places and events with as much detail, richness and greatness. When I'm bored, it's an intense boredom."

Sensory richness is like the raw material of creativity and the 4 integrated ones give themselves ways of expressing their intense inner life. A songwriter of type 4 says, "When I write a song, it reminds me that I have an identity, it's like I put all my feelings on paper, so I can look and actually see them. They all become manageable."



"From the beginning," says another actor 4, "playing is like therapy, since I could turn my suffering into something creative." In the books on the Enneagram, the 4 are often described as artists and many of the world's most famous artists have been of this type. Yet the 4 can have all kinds of occupations, although they try whenever it's possible to make their work interesting on the creative side.

Like the 1s, the integrated 4 can be morally courageous, idealistic and work hard for what they believe in. They are more people who contribute, than people who complain; they are often committed to improving an imperfect world. Some have a distinct need to realize an inner vision in the outside world, perhaps by launching innovative projects that have humanistic or artistic goals. For this purpose, they can be bold, determined and practical. "When I'm on my deathbed," says a 4, "I hope I can look back on my life and be proud of it, I do not want to waste my life in frivolity."

The 4 are sensitive to the suffering of others and want to take care of it. "I feel like I'm in a position where I can influence others," says a 4 who was successful. "I love to give back, I have to have something that fills me with drive, purpose and passion, the service of others fulfills this function more than anything else." Another 4 adds: "Experiencing sorrow and lack has made me more aware of the suffering of others and be more generous." The 4 can be empathic, friends of the difficult times, able to understand the dilemmas of others, especially good will to be attentive to the sorrow of a friend, when others show reluctance or even turn away.

When they are at their best, the 4 expresses what is universal in the human experience for all of us, articulating and affirming the reality of the inner life, insisting that dreams and feelings are as real as tables and the chairs. The 4 can be good teachers and therapists in this regard. As a 4 states: "I feel very well the ability to describe the internal experience of others because I have gone through it myself, and to work therapeutically with others because I have imagined the ways of work on myself. "



The 4 can also be talented lawyers of passionate life. "Greed, curiosity, passion, anger - they are my conscious constructions," says a 4. "They spare me the fact of being too sad, to give up." Learning about yourself and applying this knowledge are also strong trends of well-integrated people in this profile.

Feelings envious and confused

In 1792, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a 4, begins his autobiography The Confessions in this way:



"I form a company that never had an example, and whose execution will have no imitator. I want to show to my fellow creatures a man in all the truth of nature, and this man, it will be I. I alone, I feel my heart, and I know men, I am not like any of those whom I have seen; dare to believe that I am not like any of those who exist If I am not better, at least I am different If nature has done well or not to break the mold into which she has thrown me, it is which can only be judged after reading me."

When the 4 are less well integrated, taken in what I call the trance of their Enneagram style, their creative originality is transformed into a need to be seen as unique, which is based on comparison with others and led by a sometimes grandiose self-image. The 4 are part of the trio of Enneagram types (image) who reject themselves, over-identifying themselves with roles and find it difficult to know what they really feel. The four specifically rejects their ordinary qualities and prefer to play the role of someone distinct and unique. "Unique" can mean anything, from being exceptionally accomplished to being a total misfit.

Some 4s, for example, say that they feel they belong more to another planet, as if they were victims of a mistake of cosmic paperwork that has them fallen from grace and accidentally raised as human beings. Life on earth is a form of exile and the 4 feels like a perpetual expatriate who can never return to their home planet.

Behind this ostensibly sad plot is a kind of vanity. Although this may not be obvious, the 4 are proud of this alienated condition. Being from another planet reinforces their sense of being special and exempts them from normal responsibilities. Extraterrestrials do not pay taxes, for example.

One of my friends 4, who lost his job as a literature teacher in a high school the same week his wife left him, sank into melancholy and depressed fear. For months, he sat and watched TV all day. Whenever I spoke to him, he seemed genuinely depressed and only knew how to repeat the same litany of complaints about how difficult things were. Then one day, I heard a slightly different tone in his voice. He complained in the usual way, but he seemed almost playful. I asked him, "Why does it suddenly seem to me that you seem to start rejoicing in your situation?" After a while, he said ironically, "Well, I really endured a great shipwreck ..."

After the first French anthropologists studied the native tribes of the Pacific Ocean, they returned to France, preaching the virtues of the islanders' world of life. Many popular books and newspaper articles were written about them, some recalling the book of Rousseau The Good Savage who unfavorably compared a civilized man to indigenous people. Anthropologists were praised and praised for their work, and the details of indigenous culture captivated the imagination of the French public. Anthropologists theorized that modern Europeans were descended from people such as the islanders, who had once lived more naturally and instinctively, in harmony with nature, not corrupted by modern ways of doing things.

Two years later, anthropologists returned to sail to the South Seas and began to interview the natives more deeply. They were surprised to learn that the islanders believed that they came from people who had once lived more naturally and instinctively, in harmony with nature, not corrupted by modern ways of doing things.

The 4 lives neurotically through means of envy. After rejecting the ordinary in himself, he compensates by comparing himself internally with those who have the qualities of which he missing, or that he thinks he has had before but lost. This induces a feeling of lack, of longing for what is unavailable, which is not very different from the melancholy that a single person can experience on Valentine's Day. Many people also experience this feeling in autumn, or during the holidays, or when they are homesick.

Envy is more than just the hope, for example, of having someone else's money. Basically, it is an unconscious desire to be another person, someone with the qualities you lack. In the 4, it takes two forms: to desire to be someone else, or to be an imaginary version of oneself. In their book The Wisdom of the Enneagram, writers Don Riso and Russ Hudson write with insight about the Imaginary Self of the Four, a compensatory version, sometimes grandiose, of the person the 4 would like to be. This imaginary Self is designed to counteract the feeling of being rejected; it is the person that the 4 will be a day when they will be worthy to be loved.



Basically, the 4 is envious himself.

For example, a little integrated 4 entering a seminar, can look at other participants, start to compare themselves to them, find them "normal" while she herself is unique and different, but lacks something in a way or another. Then she rejects herself internally, saying "I do not belong to this group" and she starts to list her own imperfections. Then she begins to envy someone in the seminary that seems to be the kind of person she "should" be. She could also look at a married couple and envy what she thinks is their beautiful life together. Or she might see someone attractive and unavailable and hope that person likes it.

The 4 could feel that she has to justify her presence here. She could then try to prove that after all, she belongs to the seminary, adopting the behavior and appearance of someone "normal." Or she might begin to think that she is becoming her imaginary Self, a being so unique and extraordinary that people in the group will eventually accept her after all.

The 4 protect themselves with the defense mechanism of introjection, which means taking people by themselves and connecting with them through imagination, thoughts and feelings. While we occasionally introject other people, our parents for example, the 4 introject frequently, and this ability has a specific function in their psychology. For example, a 4 will introject a loved one or someone he has idealized and who is out of reach. He then has a relationship with his fantasy of that person. The 4 holds this imaginary person between himself and the others, like a barrier, to protect himself from rejection. During this time, the 4 feels that the fantasized person is present, as if he were comforting himself with an imaginary friend.

I once asked one of my friends why he did not call me more often. "It is not necessary," he replied, "I speak with you every day." Many 4 carry their friends and loves inside of them and feel closer to those loved ones when they are physically absent. "In terms of lost love," says a 4 , "the fantasized person is always much better than the real person."

Once, when I was giving private consultations, a married couple came into my office for their first session, obviously sad. The woman was crying and the man seemed terrified. An hour before the session, he confessed to having had a sexual affair once with the wife of his main professional competitor. The wife reacted to this news with shock, tears and recriminations.

The man was a 4 and the woman a 1. At various times during the session, she became more accusing and judgmental, showing how hurt she felt. But when she reproached him, the 4 defended itself by withdrawing into the introjected memory of infidelity.

"How could you do that with her!?" screamed the bride, "especially with her, what a pathetic and sordid encounter it must have been." While dreaming, the 4 replied, "Do not talk about her that way, she has qualities you do not know, the day we spent together was one of the happiest days of my life." The more his wife accused him, the more the 4 retrenched in his memory of the "beautiful" day and defended this memory, which was exactly the wrong tactic to use with his wounded wife.

Introjection is a reaction to the present, even when the 4 withdraws subjectively in the past. Defense consists in recreating a set of feelings that were then satisfactory, as a means of dissociating oneself from immediate events. The 4 can introject places and things as well as people. The goal is to maintain something between them and the rejection of the world.

This defense partially explains why the 4 can find it exceptionally difficult to grieve the loss of someone they love. If the loved one lives inside the 4 and that person leaves him in reality, it is as if the 4 has to separate from an inner part of himself. Experiencing the loss can be felt as the surgical removal of an internal organ.

The schisms of envy

The four can be predisposed to "schisms of envy": where they subjectively divide and separate certain parts of their lives in real circumstances on the one hand and envied alternative on the other hand. Some 4 develop schisms about their work, creating a chronic conflict between their boring "conventional job" and a creative calling that the 4 would like to practice. One such 4 might say, "I'm currently working as a secretary, but someday, I'll be an illustrator in Paris." Other 4s create schisms in their sentimental life, for example seeing their mate as boring and predictable, while they fantasize about fascinating strangers. Still others create schisms between their public and private lives. They could have a flourishing career, but be dissatisfied in love, or being busy and productive during the night, but not the day.

At his 50th birthday party, a man sighed and said, "I wish I could be 20 again and know what I know now." Smiling, one of his friends replied, "Hey, just think how lonely you were." Another possible schism is between the present and the past, what a 4 could express by being usually nostalgic. The nostalgic 4 can enjoy the memories from which they derive comfort, stimulation and nourishment. When they are disintegrated, however, they can become vampires of memories, turning away from the present to constantly rebuild the past.

Whatever their satisfaction, schisms of envy are products of the creative imagination of the 4, and the old adage about envy "The grass is always greener on the other side," has a literal meaning for this profile. The 4 sees what they really have in a very different way from the one they see what they want. When thinking of his boring job, dull wife, or unattractive life, a 4 might mentally see them as gray, fuzzy, and static. In contrast, the 4 could see an alternative envied as being colorful, clear and moving, sensory qualities associated with something desirable and exciting.

One client 4 described her marriage as "safe" and her husband as "stable, trustworthy, hardworking and ultimately dull." She was attracted romantically by a beautiful writer whom she did not know well and who lived in the mountains, but who sometimes came to town.

I asked him to mentally visualize the two men. She saw her dull husband, black and white, and the writer in color. The dull husband was static, while the writer moved in an attractive way. She saw the dull husband at a distance, while the image of the writer was close to her.

I asked her to use her imagination and to change her husband's black and white image into a colorful one, to bring this image closer, and to see it move. Then I asked him to make the writer distant, static and colorless. After concentrating intensively for a minute, the 4 says, "Oooh, my husband really gets a lot more interesting."

Singer-songwriter Paul Simon, himself a 4, alludes to the sensory qualities of envy in his witty and subtle Kodachrome song: "If I take all the girls I knew when I was alone, and that I take them all together for one night, I know they will never compete with my sweet imagination, and everything seems worse in black and white."

Hypermnesia and regression in age

Envy and introjection are supported by the ability of the 4 for hypermnesia, an exceptionally vivid memory, the opposite of amnesia. The 4 can remember past eras and places with so much sensory detail that they can enter a sort of time slice where what they remember seems to be happening right now. As a 4 describes it:



"It's really easy for me, when I look back, to color and exaggerate experiences, especially those related to travel or nature. I remember a perfect moment: it was the full moon and it was far more lush than anything you'd find on postcards or on the pictures of a travel catalog. I'm sure I described this experience to many people. It's just a part of my chemistry, the most important thing is what I see now, the past is always there."



Hypermnesia is also active when the 4 talk about their childhood and remember it as a very promising time, or when they tell each other sad stories of their past, or lament the missed opportunities.

When a 4 practices hypermnesia, he sees the situation passed through his own eyes, in the first position, as things had been seen at that moment. This means that the 4 again experiences all or most of the feelings he felt when the event first occurred. If a 4 remembers being traumatized or rejected, he is often unable to do more than copy what he was during the original experience. Make the contrast with reliving a memory by seeing yourself in the picture, as by looking at an old photograph from your current perspective. You tend to feel a lot less feelings than you had at the time and you get to keep your current age with the full range of your adult abilities.

Returning to the past so completely often produces a regression in age, the experience of feeling younger than your actual age. When you relive an experience as it happened, you are returning emotionally to that age. In the 4, age regression can lead to immature life attitudes in which the 4 feel like a child or a victim. The famous and unfortunate French poet Baudelaire defines genius as "childhood found at will," because his own childhood was withered by the rejection of his mother towards him and by his jealousy of other men vis-à-vis the second husband of this one. As his biographers have pointed out, Baudelaire did not need to regain his childhood, because he had never been out of it.

Hypnotic Induction of Pain Creation

So an elephant and an ant meet and instantly fall in love with each other. They spend a wild and frenetic night under the stars making love madly and passionately. In the morning, the ant wakes up and discovers that during the night, the elephant is dead. "Misery!" the little ant went, contemplating the vast body of the elephant. "It's always like that things happen: a night of passion and now I have to spend the rest of my life digging a grave!"

While the seven try defensively to control their suffering by staying in a good mood and making lemonade with lemons and molehills with mountains, the four disintegrated does the opposite. Instead of controlling suffering, they practice the act of the creation of suffering, the ability to induce self-hypnosis of suffering. The 4 creates emotional, and sometimes physical pain to satisfy a variety of their unconscious needs.

A need is to exist. In the trance of their Enneagram style, the 4 are centered on emotions, identified with them and focused on their feelings. In fact, they often believe that they are their feelings. Unable to find awareness of their real feelings, they create pseudo-feelings of suffering that anchor and sustain their identity. If a 4 does not suffer, he does not exist. No grief equals no self.

The four also create subjective suffering to maintain their sense of being special. Their unconscious logic is: "If I stop suffering, I will be just fade away like everyone else: ordinary, another dull and anonymous piston of the social machine. My pain distinguishes me and gives me my sensitivity, my intensity and my creativity. "

The feeling of being special is then connected to the feeling of being loved. If he does not suffer, then he is not special and he may be unworthy of love. One client 4 reported that she felt harassed by her inner critic, an angry voice that produced a feeling of constant inner pain. When I asked her to focus on that voice, she suddenly saw the image of a monkey sitting on her shoulder. She asked if I could help him get the monkey away or make him silent.

I reminded her that love took many forms and that we carry with us old and even punitive versions of love. I asked her if she had the feeling of being deficient, as the 4s often feel. She answered yes. I asked her if this feeling of disability made her feel different, special, unique and even loved. Smiling, she conceded yes.

"So, the monkey criticizes you for helping you feel loved, and you want me to send the monkey off or shut up, so you'll stop feeling loved?" The woman laughed and recognized that perhaps her monkey - and her self-criticism - had a purpose after all.

The 4 also suffer to protect themselves. Expecting to be rejected, they beat the world with their fists, anticipating the judgments of the world with even more devastating self-judgments. They feel safe and, paradoxically, the possibility of being accepted seems threatening. As a 4 describes it: "I reject myself before you can do it. I will only have to assume that I am sad and unwanted. If I see any sign of your disinterest, I will provoke this disinterest, for avoid the surprise of your real reaction to me. "

Sometimes the suffering of 4 is connected to the image he has of him being a victim. A 4 remembered having subleased a friend's tiny apartment, in exchange for feeding locusts to his friend's tarantula. "It was a sad metaphor for my life," he said with a smile, "you start with five locusts early in the week, and their song is that beautiful and joyful sound when you go to bed. As the days pass, the sound becomes more and more light, until it was only a frightened and pathetic peep, and I felt like that poor song. "

The four also create inner suffering to discover how they really feel. If a man does things of sufficient intensity, all the illusions in which he is taken will break forth, and the 4 will arrive at their true foundation; it is an attempt to cut one's own emotional confusion. As a 4 says: "Creating an inner drama ignites energy, creates a mood and a sense of oneself in the body."

People who self-injure physically often have this purpose. "Cutters" as they are called, slice their skin to design, break their own bones or otherwise self-mutilate. A "cutter" 4 explained the purpose of methodically slashing her arms and legs until she was hospitalized: "The main part of that was knowing that I was there, with blood dripping down my arm, I was real."

The 4 can also put suffering to avoid intimacy. Being in relation to others can reveal the ways in which a 4 is absolutely ordinary, an entry into the shadow of 4. Suffering keeps others at bay. It can also be the price to stay connected to an introjection. It is safer to miss another unavailable person than to risk being rejected by someone close to you.

The 4 also induce suffering to punish (the memory of) intrusive or distant relatives. When 4 multiply self-destructive and imprudent actions, a small child in them often says, "I will punish you by hurting myself, I will be ejected from my horse and killed, and then you will be sorry. After I left, you I'll haunt my funeral and look at you for tears, inconsolable because I'll be gone." This fantasy is hostile and punitive, a little revenge for a child. The 4 can also punish people in the present in a similar way: "I will make you needy and miserable until you love me unconditionally."

Being in pain also gives the 4 the right to blame, which helps them to remain a child. A therapist reports, "I had a client who was very attached to an image of her as being lost and defective, she was brilliant and liked to read the biographies of other bright and tormented people. A family that was very dysfunctional and had been abused by many adults, if she had forgiven the people of her past, it would have somehow cleared them, and would mean that they were not such bad people. would no longer have left anyone to blame. "

Suffering may also give the 4 a paradoxical sense of "home," the way expats savor a bittersweet melancholy when they yearn for their distant homeland. Some expatriates always avoid returning to their home country, because they are afraid that the actual experience will disappoint them, compared to the memories and images of their remembered "home." Despite their feelings of suffering, the four remain connected to their roots and exile becomes their "home."

Keys to change

The 4 can be motivated to change for multiple reasons:

conflicts about their identity,

the desire to resolve their sense of alienation and inadequacy with the outside world,

blockages of their creativity,

the desire to overcome the psychological suffering born of their poor self-esteem and hatred of them,

mysterious or bizarre chronic diseases.

Many are "learners," especially about their inner lives, and some seek the help of therapy to deepen their self-knowledge. Their curiosity about their psychological functioning can be both a motivation and an ally in the work of change. While they are often very aware of the feelings generated by their images, roles and stories, the 4 may not be in touch with what they actually feel. They can come to therapy as part of their quest for real identity and authentic living. A 4 says: "So many things can be expressed in the word 'authenticity.' My experience is that I am simply not real, I act from all these roles and ask myself: Who am I? My real self? "

Some 4 are motivated by boredom to change. They say that living in their feelings, memories and emotional fantasies becomes boring. Their inner core of sadness is always the same and going back constantly bores them more and more. "Nostalgia is not what it used to be," laughs a 4 , echoing the old joke. Reality, by contrast, begins to appear more interesting because it changes constantly.

Problems presented to therapists and consultants may include: depression, feeling of torment or alienation, dissatisfaction in their relationships, wanting to know each other better, resolving a feeling of chronic sadness or inner weakness, mysterious medical symptoms or anorexia.

Generally, the right goals for change are: to learn to take the raw material of your subjectivity and turn it into something tangible, to find satisfying forms of self-expression, to accept objective reality and to learn to love the real, including its imperfections, contribute to making a positive difference in a world from which you would feel detached otherwise, express your anger in a constructive way instead of turning it against you. The 4 who want to change must often define the conditions under which they can accept themselves, and take responsibility for it. They may also need to be honest about their attachment to self-rejection, and the benefits they have in keeping themselves in pain. Although some 4 are not hotter than the idea of ​​a cat bathing, regular exercise is especially helpful for people of this type, as is the development of a good sense of humor.

I once heard a story about a whimsical prince who became depressed and called all the sages of his father's kingdom to assist him. He asked them for a magic object that could balance his moods. So when he was depressed, he could look at him and become happy; when he would be happy he could see the magical object and remember the sadness of life. The wise men paid a craftsman to create an ordinary ring with the inscription "This will also pass." Learning how to smooth feelings and put things in context and perspective is especially important for the 4. People of this style need to learn to use their subjectivity lightly, respect it and consult it, but avoid basking in it. When integrated, the 4 specialize in contentment, the emotional opposite of envy.

Therapists and consultants who do not know the Enneagram can unintentionally describe the 4 as their most difficult and disturbing clients. Very disintegrated 4 clients may be reckless, impulsive and tormented in a melodramatic way. At worst, they are emotionally demanding, they do not respect professional boundaries and blackmail therapists with their implied threats of self harm or suicide.

Clients 4 may give therapists too much responsibility, first to glorify you romantically as their savior and later be disappointed and defeat you. Either of the poles indicate a lack of responsibility and motivation (the client is trying to turn you into a parent) and you may wonder if the 4 is in your office to actually change or just to manifest even more dramas. Occasionally, clients will believe that they are a fascinating case to take care of, or they will display their torment so that you think they are a unique challenge. They can also develop imaginary rivalries with your other customers.

The 4 are often good hypnotic subjects and can be goodwill explorers of their inner life. Although they are capable of rich positive experiences, they can also collapse spontaneously into painful memories. If you practice hypnosis, guided imagery or any therapy with an inward focus, it may occasionally be necessary to use anti-hypnosis to help a client 4 get out of the trance of his subjectivity. You may also want to discuss a number of positive experiences that you can recall later if the 4 were to get bogged down in painful memories.

Some disintegrated people are able to invent historical explanations to explain their reactions, feelings and moods. However, it is usually more useful to put them in touch with the immediate present that causes their reactions - "I am depressed because my girlfriend criticizes me in the morning for breakfast" - rather than global causes of the past - "Even when I was quiet in the womb, I knew there was something wrong with me."

A therapist can also lead some clients 4 away from "Why?" Questions like "Why am I as I am?" and rather focus on questions like "How?" such as "How do I create my present difficulties and subjective reality with the help of memories?" or "How does having my problem help me in some way?" Any awareness arising from these questions would lead the world towards a 4, rather than moving it away.

To a large extent, when you work with disintegrated 4 , you are dealing with depression and any successful approach you have to working with depression may be relevant or modifiable. Hypnotherapist Milton Erickson used to give depressive clients behavioral tasks that invariably propelled them into participation in life and connected them with others. He once asked a depressed, lonely woman who loved gardening to grow a dozen potted plants and give one to each member of her church. Surprised and grateful church members responded by inviting him to eat and including him in social events within the church. The woman made many new friends and was released from her isolation and integrated into her community. This kind of approach could easily work with a depressive client.

Work with sadness

There is a therapy group that meets regularly at a retreat center where I sometimes teach. Their sessions typically last from Friday night until Sunday morning. On Fridays, members arrive at the meeting enthusiastically, as a group of friends happy to meet again and free themselves from their busy lives where they operate with energy and skill.

At lunch, Sunday lunch, however, something had changed. The members of the group had begun to talk while muttering and seemed to have dehydrated affects of ghosts. They walked quietly around the retreat center, looking and acting just as if they had just given their blood. They had also regressed in age; while on Fridays, they were mature adults, one day later they had lost decades and acted as if they were between one and nine years old.

The basic assumption of the therapist who leads the group is that the present limitations are caused by unresolved trauma of the past, which is not an unreasonable therapeutic premise. According to him, the solution to these limitations is to remember and totally relive past trauma, a less certain notion. The workshop framework includes lectures and exercises, but there is a major rule: if anything reminds a group member of an early childhood experience, especially a painful experience, the whole group must stop everything. and focus on that person. He or she is then encouraged to relive the experience as it happened, to feel all the feelings again and express them verbally, emotionally and even physically, practicing what Robert Ornstein once called "angry yoga."

The members of the group express their regression in age by suddenly becoming incompetent to adult tasks. One Saturday afternoon, for example, a woman from the group tried to use the large Italian coffee machine in the retreat center. When the machine worked badly, which sometimes happened, the woman replied, moaning, helplessly and silently. The owner of the center, an affable and sensible woman, fell on the stage and took the woman in a state of regression by the shoulders, stared into her eyes and ordered her to "Stop!" The woman obediently obeyed and stood passively while the machine was repaired. After a day of therapy, she was about two years old.

The group has a large barrel of moist clay that they use for a ritual exercise on Sunday mornings. Each member is invited to carve a scene from his childhood. While few sculptures are happy scenes, most are nightmarish. The retreat center occupies an old building that is furnished with antiques and filled with nooks and irregular hallways. More than once, as I wandered through the halls, I turned to a corner and was frightened by a grotesque silhouette of tortured-looking clay drying on a table in the open air and looked like the painting The Scream of Edvard Munch.

You could imagine that the group should have something ceremonial and therapeutic with the sculptures and the pain they symbolize. Intuitively, it might make sense to dive them into a lake. Instead, at the end of the workshop, the sculptures are broken and returned to the barrel to be saved for the next workshop. The rule of the group is that the same clay, and therefore the pain it symbolizes, must always be used and reused.

I'm sure this type of therapy might work for some people, but it does mimic exactly how the four maintain their personal trance. Recycle memories of suffering is a neurotic tendency of this style, and although some 4 say that reliving past traumas can be a helping step, as a general approach, this type of therapy joins the way the 4 use their hypermnesia to strengthen their story, regress themselves in age and feel victimized.

The 4 can overestimate awareness and lose themselves in quests to consciously understand how they operate unconsciously. Excessive introspection, especially about their internal feelings of imperfection is often a trap. This rarely resolves the suffering of a 4 or his feeling of impairment; in fact, it usually increases it, causing new attempts to go back into the past, seeking the key awareness that will solve their problems and reveal their true identity. While the goal is to resolve feelings of sadness and alienation so that the 4 may someday become both lovable and functional, this research can also become an excuse: while the quest for 4 is self-understanding, he does not have a chance to live fully today.

In general, if you are a 4 , you should consider the approaches to change that bring you:

to go out of the past to be in the present and to go out of yourselves to enter the world.

Many self-aware 4 echo this and offer their tips to achieve it. One is to move physically. As a 4 explains: "If you and I are seated friends talking and I have a problem or a strange inexplicable sadness, I do not think it's appropriate for you to ask me 'How do you feel- you? It would be more efficient to say, "Let's go from here. Moving physically breaks my emotional state." Several 4 mention that they find value in a light but regular exercise, which is generally helpful with depressive tendencies and to regulate moods.

Others 4 affirm the value of the work: "My best remedy for sadness is to voluntarily engage in something, go to school, have a job, for me the activity has helped me. something concrete and earthly, which has a shape and a configuration, a beginning and an end, which gives the impression of advancing, which improves something, heals something, or builds something. " Another 4, with a history of immobilizing depression, says that if things go wrong, she will visit hospitals and voluntarily give her time to a shelter for the homeless. A widow, 4 who had become rich by the sudden death of her husband, found a thankless job which she kept until she was cured of her grief.

The spiritual teacher, Alan Watts, a 4 , was once challenged by a furious student to know how he reconciled his spiritual and aesthetic teachings with the way he openly marketed his products: "It's a fruitless question," replied Watts. When the 4 grow up and change, they often need to learn to get away with the practical details of everyday life, which William Blake, another 4, called the "minute details." Many who languish in their subjectivity and wake up then become enterprising and curiously effective in practical tasks like managing money and evaluating fees for their services. In addition, when the material details of life are properly managed, you are more free to be creative. A 4, an inspired singer who had often ignored practical subjects, finally realized: "I had to do things to make my music live, so my music could eventually make me live." Another 4 emphasized the importance of living in the present: "You must be attentive to the present moment and make it the best possible. Make it count, I tried to do that. I am a happier person."

