I’ve been doing some exploration of the “Enneagram of Personality” lately, and I have discerned that I am very clearly an Enneagram Four. This has been a fascinating journey, as I’ve found insights about who I am, why I might be this way, and how I can grow. This is one of a series of posts reflecting on my experience with the Enneagram. For more information about this series, see the first post here.

“As children, Fours came to believe that there was something fundamentally wrong with them.” (Suzanne Stabile, The Path Between Us, 112)

When I was in college, I discovered the album The Globe by Big Audio Dynamite II. One of the songs, “Rush,” had been a huge hit about two years prior, but it was in college that I first heard the whole album, and I fell in love with it. I listened to my roommate’s copy of it over and over again. (He insists that I actually always listened to Tom Petty, but that’s a different story for a different day.)

Mostly, I just really liked the band’s sound. But one song spoke to be on a much deeper level. The song was called “Innocent Child,” and I listened to this song again and again and again. It begins with a sample from Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight,” and remains melancholy and wistful throughout. The lyrics seem to be a lament about someone who has lost their innocence, perhaps becoming hurt or cynical or broken. The singer seems to be wishing for the chance to see that someone (a friend or a romantic partner, perhaps?) before they had lost their innocence. The chorus goes like this:

I wish I could’ve seen you
When you could run wild
I would’ve liked to know you
As an innocent child

This song haunted me. The more I listened to it, the more it ripped deep into my heart. And I loved it. I loved that feeling of gnawing melancholy that this song gave me. Was it healthy to give into it so much? Maybe not – but it really felt good.

Over time, I started to realize what it was that I was hearing in the song. I was hearing, “I never was an innocent child.” I thought back to my childhood, and I considered when exactly it was that I was “innocent.” When was that time for me? It wasn’t when I was in first grade, an arrogant snot of a kid who used to go up to other kids and ask, “Do you know what 100 times 100 is? They’d usually say “200” or something like that, because they were, you know, six years old. Then I would always respond, “No, it’s 10,000. That means I’m smarter than you.” Innocent? Or was it when I was three years old, when my sister was an infant, and I ran to my mother, so proud of myself, saying, “I poked Christy’s eyes out!” Innocent? When?

No, I was never an innocent child. So I heard this song as an indictment of myself, an indictment that I’d always been guilty, always been broken, always been sinful, always been wrong. And I would listen to it whenever I wanted to feel that, whenever I wanted to swim in the melancholy. I made a lot of “mood music” mixes (I write about this in my book Darkwater), and “Innocent Child” was always on it.

So, I learned that Fours on the Enneagram usually feel like something has been missing their whole lives – and yeah, that’s me all right! For me, what’s been missing is a sense of innocence. But discovering that this is a particular thing that all Fours experience has been very powerful for me. It gives me some evidence that the reason I’ve felt guilty my whole life is NOT because I’ve been guilty my whole life. It’s just a feeling, and it’s a feeling that has a different explanation. That is not exactly new to me; in a way, it’s what therapists have been trying to teach me for the past thirty years. But it’s very powerful to read that it may simply be a quirk of my personality, an expected quirk given who I am. That gives me more hope that I can continue to overcome it, at least sometimes.

I don’t need to listen to “Innocent Child” today. 

Image by cuilei2016 from Pixabay