This is one in a series of posts about my recent interest in the “Enneagram of Personality,” and how Type Four is a perfect fit for me, and also offers me insight and potential growth. For more information about this series, see the first post here.

“Fours don’t have feelings; they are their feelings.” (Ian Morgan Cron & Suzanne Stabile, The Road Back to You, 155)

It’s not always easy to discern which number on the Enneagram you fit into. This is the quote that sold me on being a Four. When I read this, I stopped and read it again. And just sat there, staring at the words on the page. “Fours don’t have feelings; they are their feelings. Their feelings form the basis of their identity.”

My next thought was: “Wait, isn’t that true of everybody?” Apparently it isn’t. A little side-track here: I just started reading a book about synesthesia. Synesthesia is a brain condition that somewhere between 1% and 25% of people have. (Probably closer to the former.) With this condition, the sense-centers of the brain engage in cross-talk with each other, which results in people seeing sounds, or tasting sights. In a very common form of synesthesia, there is a particular color associated with every letter of the alphabet, and the person simply cannot see, say the letter “A” without seeing it colored bright pink. In another form, there’s a visual image of geometric shapes that appears in the person’s field of vision whenever they hear music. Apparently, synesthesia is almost always a lifelong condition, not something that comes or goes. One of the things that synesthetes often say when they learn about synesthesia is something like, “Wait, doesn’t everybody experience life like this?”

I had a similar thought a few months ago when I read: “Fours don’t have feelings; they are their feelings.” I know exactly what that’s like. When I am overwhelmed with an emotion, I simply cannot see beyond it. When I am depressed and think back on the past, every memory is colored completely by the emotion I have at the moment. Same thing when I’m happy – every memory is filled with happiness. I’ve never been sure if my feelings about those memories change with my emotions, or if I just remember different things based on how I’m feeling.

I often imagine my thoughts working like this: my neurons dig pathways through my brain as they fire and think thoughts. Like riding a mountain bike through the woods, the more I think about a certain thing, or think in a certain way, the deeper and more pronounced that pathway is. Some thoughts have dug deep ruts in my mind, and become easier and easier to slip into. I always figured it was like this for everybody, and the particular “ruts” that have become deepest in each of us are the coping mechanisms we have developed and practiced most, whether helpful or not.

Now, with this insight from the Enneagram, I’m wondering if perhaps I have multiple sets of ruts in my mind, like lanes in a highway, and perhaps what my emotions do is determine which lanes are open and which are closed, like those traffic lights above toll booths telling you which ones are open. And depending on how I’m feeling at the time, that determines what memories and thoughts I have easy access to. And it gets very hard to go down those other paths – I have to break through the gates, drive over the cones – it gets dangerous and difficult.

This also shines some light on why it’s so hard for me to answer when someone asks me, “How are you feeling?” It’s not that I don’t have access to my emotions. On the contrary, I have too much access to my emotions. Cron, a self-professed Four wrote, “I have so many feelings in a day it’s hard to know which ones to pay attention to first” (The Road Back to You, 148). Yes! This makes it so hard to journal sometimes, so hard to bring my therapist up to speed on how I’m doing. I can be absolutely convinced at 9 am that today is a miserable day, that my depression is flaring up intensely. At 10:30, I can feel excited about something going well in the office. At noon, I can be back to depression again. It changes constantly, and I never seem to be able to find the “neutral” state behind the emotions. I guess this is why, when I was a child, I was convinced that I had bipolar disorder.

This is so helpful for me to understand – that I am connected to my emotions in a way that not everybody is. And that at the same time, that connection isn’t a pathology – it’s just a particular way of being that describes me. A particular quirk of my personality makeup leads me to identify naturally with my emotions more than the average person. That identification is a very, very deep rut in my brain. But I don’t have to keep driving down it. There are other paths – I so often say that my true identity is as a baptized child of God. Recognizing this challenge for what it is makes it seem a little more manageable to stand against it. I can build other ruts, and I can stop going down the same ones over and over.

It’s not easy, but it is so very, very possible.

Image made by Bing Image Creator.