Enneagram 4
Brokenness and Shamefilled
I have known about the Enneagram for awhile and I knew that I was a four, but on my long drive home from the Gulf Shores, I listened again to a podcast with Enneagram teacher, Suzanne Stabile, and understood my 4-nature a bit more.
Fours have a great desire to be understood—in a world where we feel chronically misunderstood—and we have a deep need for connection and relationships. We often feel default shame about ourselves (there’s something inherently wrong with me) and we do a lot of feeling and thinking, and thinking about our feelings. (Very true).
There are two things that I really like about the Enneagram:
The first thing is that it provides us a template for how different people see/motivate/behave and overall operate in the world. In doing so, if we read about other numbers, it helps us build compassion for them. Because while I am not the other numbers, in having it all laid out and reading about them, it helps me see how others operate in the world. And I grow in understanding and building compassion for others that I do not otherwise understand.
The other thing that I like about the enneagram numbers is that they tell you where your work is. For me, it’s to focus on the doing. I get too much in my head and I do a lot of feeling and thinking and not enough action. So I need to do more doing, of the mundane and everyday things. And of the things that require discipline; we need to do more structured things (housework and chores, regular exercise and my academic writing comes to mind).
That is all fine in a vacuum.
But we humans do not exist in a vacuum, and so—
I also think about how this all works in conjunction with my very emotional Cancer self and my C-PTSD-self. All of these different identity markers confirm that I am a deeply feeling and emotional person. The PTSD part of me reinforces that feeling of shame, brokenness— that there is something deeply wrong with me, that I should have cured or healed already. That I am fundamentally shattered.
One of the videos I’ve listened to on Fours describes how we see the beauty in the brokenness of others, and yet we fail to see the beauty in ourselves, only the brokenness.
Ooph.
No pun intended, but I “felt” that one.
And I am still sitting with that.
How true it is.
Overall, as I piece parts of me together, I see how all of these identity markers reaffirm my deepest sense of Self—why I am a deeply feeling and hurting person in this broken world (and perhaps this is my nature, despite my family’s story, that just reinforced my feelings). It all makes me deeply compassionate and humble, and yet, it also sometimes makes me feel too much—I feel all the good and I feel all the bad, very, very intensely.
My deep desire—to make peace of myself, rather than to see myself as in pieces.
I, too, often find myself thinking about how the truths in these various frameworks of self intersect to create the unique me. I'm an Enneagram 5, an Aries and a Monkey living with double depression.