The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge

by Beatrice Chestnut

For Fours, answering these questions means looking at how they over-identify with some feelings to avoid or deny others. It will be important for them to ask themselves if being attached or over-involved with hopelessness and melancholy serves as a way for them to hold themselves in a familiar emotional space and at the same time avoid confronting a deeper experience of pain at not getting the love they needed. If hanging out in hopelessness or sadness is operating as a defense, what are these emotions actually defending you from feeling? Having the courage to locate and feel these deeper emotions can help to set Fours free from the defensive over-identification with emotions that keeps them stuck in a cycle of depression and longing. If you are amping up certain feelings or creating drama to distract yourself from what you’re feeling at a more fundamental level, what is going on deeper down? Investigating their emotional territory in this way can be an important way for Fours to help themselves see through the potentially tricky ways they use some emotions as a defense against others.