Style Four

If Threes are about success, Fours are about authenticity. Fours have a deep and wide range of emotions and trust their subjective experience to make their life-decisions. They are frequently highly esthetic (not in talent, necessarily, but in concern), because they have a highly developed ability to think symbolically. This coupled with their emotional richness cries out for artistic expression.

When healthy Fours make a personal statement in many things they do, from the way they dress to their choice of Impressionist paintings. They rather enjoy not being part of the crowd and have a natural sense of aristocracy. Taste, they maintain, is not determined by votes.

When they are less healthy, their speech becomes lamentation as they claim their uniqueness because of their suffering. They often develop a spirit of entitlement to compensate for a feeling that somehow they are defective. This defect, paradoxically, is the basis for their claim that they deserve love. They make a claim on their friends' love because they have suffered and this suffering has made them more authentic - and so more lovable.

Fours you may know: Shakespeare, Dennis Rodman, Nicholas Cage, Marlon Brando, Ann Rice, (Vampires are depicted as Fours), Kate Winslet, Vincent van Gogh, Eric Clapton, Michael Jackson, John Malkovich, Thomas Merton, and Allen Watts.

Recognizing Style Four

  1. They may come because of unsatisfactory relationships, usually feeling they are not authentic, profound or satisfying enough.
  2. They may be in despair over what seems no big deal to you.
  3. Their lives may be structured by tangled relationships.
  4. They see things as either/or, especially relationships.
  5. They ay take a secret pride in their laments. (Listen for a bragging tone).
  6. They may present a cycle of longing/getting/rejecting.
  7. They may have a present/absent push/pull pattern.
  8. They may attach themselves to church or tradition for identity reasons.
  9. They may seem hypercritical with a scorn of mediocrity.
  10. They may present a great deal of dramatic pain.

How you can help

  1. Identify some areas of satisfaction.
  2. Recommend a study of some lamentation psalms. Note the dynamic.
  3. Point out the preoccupation with what is absent and unavailable. This rationality is a good balance for the dramatic unreal emotions they may present.
  4. Allow them to ventilate their feelings.
  5. Probe for which feelings are real. Where are they in their body?
  6. Have them read books by other Fours (Merton, Therese of Lisieux, John).
  7. Reframe their longing as a longing for God.
  8. Get in touch with their emotional center. Centering prayer is good.
  9. Explore feelings of shame. Note the flip side of arrogance.
  10. Their melancholy has a sweetness about it, linking them to past or future