Personality Style FOUR: The Original Person
Core Value Tendency: FOURS are attracted to and value originality, authenticity, individuality, and artistic expression. They desire to be sensitive, refined persons, seeking to make the world more beautiful. They value the inner journey and are on the quest for the Holy Grail, their real self. Honoring your uniqueness and deeply connecting to others and to the world is what life is all about.
Adaptive Cognitive Schema: The objective vision that keeps FOURS aligned with their true nature and with reality is the realization that they are already original. They already are in possession of what they are searching for. The treasure is buried in the field of their inner self. They are already connected to their source, the ground of their being and so are already connected to their real self and to the real selves of others. They realize they belong in this world and are not missing anything essential.
Adaptive Emotional Schema: The state that accompanies the FOURS’ objective paradigm is equanimity, the experience of inner balance and outer harmony. A person in the state of equanimity feels complete and fulfilled in the present moment. Each moment they have everything they need to be perfectly happy. Events are responded to in a realistic appropriate manner without exaggeration or dramatization.
Adaptive Behavioral Schemas: The attitudes and actions that flow from an acceptance of one’s authentic inner nature and from a state of equanimity are an exquisite sensitivity, appreciation and respect for all that is. FOURS have an intuitive aesthetic sense and an innate sense for quality; that is, they have good taste and class. Their sensibilities put them in touch with their own and others’ moods, being especially attuned to pain and suffering. FOURS have a highly active imagination and fantasy life. They are romantic, nostalgic, and poetic. FOURS like to ritualize human experiences, making the ordinary extraordinary and the extraordinary ordinary. They can see the universe in a grain of sand and can turn a grain of sand into a pearl. FOURS easily attune themselves to the mood and spirit of their surroundings.
Maladaptive Cognitive Schema: When FOURS exaggerate their sensitive qualities and uniqueness, they over-identify with the idealized self image of I am special and unique. To compensate for a maladaptive belief that they are defective and faulty, and to prevent themselves from being abandoned, they seek to be special. To survive they believe they must be highly individual and make a lasting impression on people so they won’t be forgotten. They believe they must outclass their opponents. Their habit of attention goes to what is missing instead of to what is there.
Maladaptive Emotional Schema: Constantly comparing themselves to others and consistently coming up short, FOURS experience the passion of envy. Others appear to have what they are missing: spontaneity, relationships, happiness, etc. FOURS feel melancholy, apart from the main, misunderstood. Their suffering makes them special
Maladaptive Behavioral Schema: Perceiving the world as abandoning, and feeling envious of others’ qualities and possessions, FOURS are driven to make themselves special and uncommon. They become dramatic, moody, misunderstood, tragic romantics, pushing themselves to live at the edges of experience. Fantasies become more satisfying than real life. Relationships are passionately engaged in and just as intensely pushed away. Seeking connections, FOURS fear abandonment, and become aloof and feel alienated.
What is Avoided: Because they want to be special, FOURS avoid being ordinary. Being common, just like everyone else, is the worst thing FOURS can imagine. Living within the middle range of experience, without extreme highs and lows, is boring and deadening.
Defensive Maneuvers: FOURS steer away from being ordinary through uncommon experiences and expressions. No one feels as deeply as they do, no one experiences life in the same way they do. Mere words are not enough to express their responses; they need poetry, music, dance, painting, some kind of artistic sublimation to capture their experience.
Childhood Development: FOURS often felt abandoned or unwanted by a parent or caretaker. They believed this was because there was something wrong with them or they weren’t good enough. So they tried to make themselves into special persons that would be noticed and not left behind. If they made a strong emotional impact, others wouldn’t leave them. FOURS thought of themselves as living at the extremes, at the edges, instead of in the middle with everyone else. Very early on they felt different from others, as though they were delivered to the wrong planet.
Non-Resourceful State: When FOURS are under stress, they do more of the same, that is, they exaggerate their moods, feel more misunderstood and hurt, and become aristocrats in exile. They turn their anger on themselves and get more depressed. FOURS get stuck in their feelings instead of letting them energize them into constructive action. Denying their own needs and helping others instead of dealing with their own pain, they become suffering servants.
Resourceful State: When FOURS are in a resourceful relaxed state, they seek and find wholeness within them. They get connected to their real feelings vs abandoning themselves then looking for fulfillment from someone else. They stay in the present and realize that right now they have all they need to be perfectly happy. They aren’t missing anything. They re-own their goodness. Taking an action oriented, problem-centered approach, they stay with the facts and don’t exaggerate their emotional response or amplify the stimuli. They maintain their equanimity. They believe they are already original, connected, and belong. They understand they are home and already have what they are looking for. I am and so I am both unique and universal replaces I am special therefore I am somebody.
