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.

“Instead of feeling less, the power of Four is rooted in feeling everything and this is one way to define the virtue of equanimity. It’s not about feeling fine when everything goes awry or placidly accepting the wild ups and downs (or boring lack thereof) of being human…it’s feeling everything without pushing this way or clinging to that.” (Susan Piver, The Buddhist Enneagram: Nine Paths to Warriorship, 111)

Each of the Enneagram types is said to have a virtue and a passion. According to Susan Piver, author of The Buddhist Enneagram, this virtue and passion are flip-sides of one another. She writes that part of understanding the enneagram is learning to move on “the so-called arcs of transformation, the journey each type makes from its passion (or neurosis) to its virtue (or brilliance). What is important to note here is that the passion is not gotten rid of and replaced with a virtue; the passion and the virtue are two sides of the same coin” (The Buddhist Enneagram, 34).

So the passion of Fours is defined as envy or longing. Certainly it’s easy for me to relate to what it’s like to long for things. I spent most of my high school and college years longing for romantic love. I have spent most of my life longing to be free of the Dark Voice who speaks to me. I’ve spent time longing for all kinds of things.

And the virtue of Fours is defined as equanimity, or contentment. I can certainly see how contentment is the flipside of longing. When you receive what you long for, you feel content. At least that’s the theory. I’ve certainly known a lot of kids who longed for a new toy, but found that a few hours after receiving it, the longing returned. (And of course, I was one of those kids.)

It’s interesting how Piver says Fours can get to this virtue. If I understand it right, it’s not a matter of giving up the longing, it’s a matter of leaning into it, and allowing it to be. Accepting that you long for everything, and learning to be okay with that. And it reminds me a lot of something I’ve been working on in my therapy for the past few years: radical acceptance.

Radical acceptance is a concept that grew out of dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT). It’s the attempt to accept whatever situation you are in, no matter what it is. DBT teaches that the worst of our feelings come about not directly from our situations, but from our responses to those situations. Sometimes we fail to accept that situations are really happening, as though we are demanding from the universe that things should be different. And that makes everything worse, at least in our brains. Radical acceptance means accepting that things simply are the way they are. That doesn’t mean you like it. It doesn’t mean that you can’t work to improve it. It means that you have to start from a place where you accept what is as what is.

I first discovered radical acceptance when I was in the two-week partial hospitalization program at Lehigh Valley Hospital in 2021. The moment I heard about it, I was astonished — it seemed so simple, but so meaningful, and it seemed like something that could really help me. I blogged about it a few times that week. Check out this link and this link to read what I wrote about it then.

I’m not surprised to find this connection to radical acceptance in this particular Enneagram book: The Buddhist Enneagram. After all, the concept of radical acceptance is very similar in some ways to the goal of Buddhism, to let go of all attachments. But I find it fascinating to read it here, as a description of how Fours can make the journey to a healthier life, because when I first heard about radical acceptance, I got so excited about it. I couldn’t stop thinking or reading about it – something there just clicked for me, and I wanted to explore it. Seeing that it’s so similar to my “hero’s journey” as a Four makes so much sense of that immediate connection.

Now if only I can get good at it – it’s hard!

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