The Defense Mechanisms of Type 4

(might as well stick to numerical order at this point. My apologies to everyone whose types are denoted by digits associated with higher numeric values. Maybe you will find some cathartic glee in the self-humiliation implicit in this entry & the next. )

introjection /internalization

Introjection, in the most general sense, is the process of incorporating new things into the self-concept. As such it’s an ubiquitous psychological mechanism that takes place inside all of us, much like identification.

The classic example given is usually that of a child being told that they need to brush their teeth. At first, they do it because mom tells them, but eventually, the instruction becomes part of the child’s mind as a mental representation or concept.

Through this internalized mental construct, the child can now remind themselves to brush their teeth, and no longer needs reminders from mom.

This is different from identification where the external thing is equated with self and attached to.

In the case of introjection, it’s not about following an external order or example, but rather about the child putting ‘teeth brushing’ into their self-concept so it ceases to be external to the self. The child has become ‘a person who brushes their teeth’ and remains so even separate from mom, indeed, their dependance on mom is reduced and their independence increased: They know what to do without mom present.

Note also that there are multiple ways for ‘teeth brushing’ to be internalized, which is to say that the result can be highly individual. For example the child could internalize the concept of ‘healthy living’ as important to themselves. Or make a mental representation of mom to keep track of what she would say. In this case the internalized value taken into the self might be ‘pleasing adults is important’ or ‘staying out of trouble is important’.

This new value will now influence the child’s decisions wherever they go, insofar as it becomes salient – and as you might imagine this will happen in different ways depending on how the child internalized the situation. If they took in the ‘healthy living’ value, they will respond differently in the future than if they took in the ‘stay out of trouble’ value.

Their responses will be more individualized, more colored by, or filtered through subjectivity.

Every new event the child encounters and internalizes will depend on all the ones that came before, and so layer by layer a person’s unique responses, values and self-concept are built.

Also, the more embedded a value and experience is into your self-concept, the more strongly you will react to it, since it’s not just a neutral uninvolved discussion: You feel involved personally.

If your value is called into question then all decisions you made based on it are also called into question. You might have to change and reconsider your very idea of who you are.

By necessity, this must bring up a lot of emotional reaction.

If you’re an avid religious tooth-brusher and someone comes & tells you it’s pointless actually, it’s not just a neutral argument about oral hygiene methods. It’s like they’re rejecting or attacking who you are. You are going to have opinions about this!

Well, tooth brushing is a silly example here, but I think it’s clear what kind of reaction is meant when you recall people’s responses to having their lifestyle choices questioned, such as veganism, music taste, using (or not using) recreational intoxicants, religion (or lack thereof)…

To internalize an experience is to process it internally, to go over it and the feelings it caused, to fit it into the narrative of a story, to ask what it meant in the grand scheme of things, what you learned about yourself in the process.

You can probably think of a few such moments in your life where an experience made you see yourself differently or realize something important when you thought about it and the meaning behind the feelings it caused you…

And now you’re in a good position to understand what it means for 4s to be doing this all the time as a default response to adversity.

Ichazo called them the ‘over-reasoner’: They will just navelgaze & get philosophic at the slightest provocation. All the withdrawn types are somewhat contemplative, of course, out of the three freudian components the dominant part for them is not the id or superego, but the ego: The bit that does the interpretation of reality.

In the case of 4 this means ‘over-interpreting’ everything that happens but as the heart type of the bunch they’re doing it with a distinctly personal, subjective slant. Not just ‘what does this mean?’ but ‘what does this mean about me?’.

Now think about what it means for this to be used as defense, that is, triggered by things that are distressing.

Plainly, when faced with pain, the 4 tends to want a reason for their suffering. Why is this happening, and why is it happening to them, and not to others?

Combine it with a negativity bias, and you see why Envy(TM) – that is negative comparision and ‘if only…’ thinking – are such an easy temptation.

Though this might be a chicken or egg situation regarding the negativity bias because asking ‘why am I suffering?’ seldom has a shiny sparkling positive answers. All the flaws in the world, other people and yourself that could possibly cause your woes will stand out in sharp relief.

Now some of you might be thinking, ‘how is taking everything personally & noticing everything that sucks an advantage’? As I said in the earlier posts, it pays to keep in mind what each type would be defending from, what it doesn’t want.

What 4s do not want is having a boring pointless interchangable flavorless meaningless life, and more concretely, a feeling of lifeless numbness. (ah, the unique curse of being a low energy type but also a reactive who prefers some contrast and ‘positive stress’)

If you want to avoid that, having strong opinionated reactions & feelings to everything due to the very elaborate self-concept from all the introjected stuff is absolutely a feature, not a bug.

Not only does ‘making things personal’ make your reactions specific and individualized (and thus more original/interesting/ non-interchangeable), they’ll have a reason and feel like part of something larger, like your life has a ‘cohesive plot’, like you’re a symbol of something.

Besides, being a little extra makes life more interesting… and having this way to make your decisions feel important and meaningful is also a way to feel validated, (always a big need for the heart types). In the withdrawing position 4s’ like ‘I probably can’t get them to validate me properly (or, I’m so frustrated with the way they’re doing it!) so I will do it myself.‘

Due to their frustrationy pickyness about how validation is to come, they will probably see this need to ‘do it themselves’ even in good environments, but it will be all the more desperate if their caregivers legit didn’t show any interest in them.

If no one else sees you, or at least not the real you, then you at least have to see yourself. You have to care about your story, cause the alternative is that it won’t be told or heard. (a belief that is likely going to be reinforced by your wing ‘telling’ you that ‘only the beautiful people count’ or ‘everything is meaningless’)

Another ‘secondary gain’ from introjection is how it makes you independent from external objects while still keeping a representation of the object within yourself.

4 is an ‘outer boundary type’ meaning it’s chiefly concerning with keeping its integrity from the outer world. Introjection gets you closer to this by essentially making it so you can relish the fantasy of the thing even in the absence of the thing itself.

And this internalized object can be used to comfort and soothe yourself with in the face of frustration.

There was once a study trying to distinguish people who get over bereavement within a reasonable tie frame from those who get ‘stuck’ on it. In the second group, the pleasure center lit up when thinking of the lost loved one. So in addition to the pain, there was comfort in revisiting the painful memories, as if they were a way to still be with the lost loved one and keep the connection to them.

I’m not saying the second group of people were fours or four-fixers, but rather that there’s a similar mechanism going on here in how & why 4s tend to dwell on past grievances and losses.

If something brings pleasure, it’s reinforced, so the person keeps thinking of it, keeps triggering the associated sadness, and doesn’t move on; Rather than fading with time, the memories become reinforced and etched all the more deeply into their being.

To stop ruminating on it would be like cutting that connection, losing them completely… as if it never happened and never meant anything.

It’s not for nothing that it has been said that grief is the pendulum swing of love: It’s proof of love that was there, love that has nowhere else to go and is shut up inside yourself.

The same can be said of other negative emotions such as hatred, disdain, wrath… They mark that something of value was lost or violated here, that what happened matters.

It might also feel also losing or betraying who you are, since the memory & associated feelings have been introjected as an integral part of you.

One thing to understand about the reactive types is that as far as they’re concerned the one thing that’s worse than experiencing aversive emotions is not having them when you should. Imagine there’s a big danger and you’re not scared, but take it lightly. Imagine that you are degraded and treaded upon and not being angry about it, like it’s just fine to kick & bully you & doesn’t matter.

There would be something rather disconcerting about that, wouldn’t there? You’d be missing crucial parts of your psychic ‘immune system’.

Same for 4: Imagine you lose something incredibly precious and you’re NOT sad. Imagine you’re wronged and you’re not salty. Imagine there’s something despicable and you’re not disgusted. Imagine someone wrongs you and you don’t hate them.

A funeral where no one is sad would be unnatural.

This why someone who says ‘oh, I struggled with this but now im better and healthy & happy’ just told you they’re not a reactive, because for them healthy = get rid of negative feelings.

If you’re a reactive or have a lot of reactive in you, this ‘immune system’ is valuable & important.

Where they go wrong is they over-do it because they never, ever wanna risk under doing it.

An 8 will rather defend themselves once too many than not enough, a 6 will rather worry too much than too little, and in the case of 4, feeling like you’re irrevocably broken because of an event or trait may genuinely seem the lesser of two evils compared to acting like your suffering didn’t matter.

As with most defense mechanisms, the chief danger is that you don’t know you’re doing it so that the resulting subjective experience is wholly ‘believed’, seen as the only possible way to respond.

For you, hating country music is about so much more than just the music, you have all these particular shitty associations with it & you loathe everything it stands for and how those things have personally slighted you… but for the person you’re talking to, it’s like you just tore them a new one over having a different music taste.

Some personal values are well worth raising a stink over, but if you’re just automatically emotionally triggered & get reactive you’re not actually making a conscious decision of whether stating your case here is worth antagonizing the person, and might find yourself wanting them back later when you’ve cooled off.

And as with all defese mechanisms, they can be more ‘transparent’ to others – hence there may be accusations of taking everything personally, making everything about yourself, or just starting drama for shits and giggles.

4s who have become more aware of their patterns do sometimes report taking something as a personal slight when they didn’t really have to for various ‘defense’ related reasons such as starting drama to feel something, vent frustration, or as an ‘excuse’ to reject someone.

Useful Question:

What if this incident didn’t actually mean anything about you?

Is now a good time & place for a rumination spiral or longingly dwelling on a fantasy? You might not want it to hijack your day right now.

Cultivate some ‘scepticism’ around feeling personally slighted or like disagreeing and refusing compromise here is ‘crucially important’. Might there be something going on that you don’t realize? Interrogate your reasons. (but also, resist immediately reacting to the answers by internalizing something about that. Just notice how the thought pops up.)

Would moving on or letting go really be the same as acting like it didn’t matter? It’s not like the event’s effect on your life so far is going to be erased.

individuation

This one was pioneered by Lukovich; I don’t agree with all he says as is apparent from the above entries, but he’s at least partially onto something. Though I must say he doesn’t help himself by often just throwing out terms without really explaining/defining them – well. That’s probably just a fairly typical talking style influence of his 5 wing/fix, so, pot, kettle, black. I’m not so much salty because I think he’s this or that, I’m salty cause I want his intel to decide for myself if its any good ot not... Doesn’t matter, I think have figured out for myself what he means and I dare say I get it better than he does now.

Anyway, what this basically means is learning something about yourself by noticing a difference between yourself and others. One might actually consider it a fairly related procerss to introjection, (also concerned with fleshing out the self-concept) and like it, it would have been a part of most people’s journey of growing up and getting to know themselves through a few significant moments.

Around the age of 3, for example, most people have a moment realizing that they are one gender and not the others. If you’re a cisgender girl, you’ll notice that you’re a girl and not a boy, so ‘girl stuff’ is for you and ‘boy stuff’ is not. Toddler girls may have a pink princess phase, toddler boys may refuse anything girly.

Or, a little boy might decide that his mother can’t bathe him any longer, because realizing the boy/girl distinction comes with the social convention that different gender people shouldn’t be naked around each other unless they’re lovers. Cue Dad being fetched to check that he is washing himself properly/ can be trusted to do it on his own – realizing these distinctions tends to come with a sense of belonging or having a fellowship with people on the same side of the divide.

Individuation events can also build into onto each other to get a sucessively more narrow idea of what’s ‘self’ compared to not-self.

For example as the little girl grows older she might realize further differences between herself and the other girls and become aware of further sub-categories within the class of ‘girl’.

Rather than the simplistic equivalence of pink princess = girl, she comes to see that there’s multiple ways to be a girl, and some of those are ‘not her’.

Note how this is a more negativistic ‘algorithm’ for localizing or defining ‘self’.

Whereas identification says ‘yes! This!!’, individuation says ‘not this’.

The difference between the average person and a 4 (or someone with a strong 4 component) is that rather than being something that happends occasionally as part of formative moments, 4s have it going on all the time as part of the default attention pattern – walking into a room, they’re immediately aware of the differences between them and others and the distinctions in their opinions.

You can also see it when they post here in how they so often make ‘detail corrections’: “It’s kind of like this but I would say that it is actually more like this & that” & they proceed to elaborate how what you said is different from what their take would be.

To some extent this is simply the result of being all the way at the bottom of the “splitter” end of the enneagram (the ones near the top tend to be “lumpers”… thats a whole post of its own for another day) and bringing frustration “pickyness” the to realm of presentation and relating. They just have a lower threshold for how different two objects, concepts or situations need to be so that they’re no longer “the same”.

That said, what does it look like when this gets co-opted as a defense mechanism?

Usually some variant of ‘this does not apply to me because I’m different – it’s not for me.’ in response to a criticism or suggestion.

A common scenario is that the 4 starts venting/complaining about their frustrations & probably they really just wanna vent & Have An Emotion & just be listened to, but the other person thinks they’re expected to fix or solve the issue.

It doesn’t help if the 4 isn’t self-aware about that motivation & then reacts in dissapointment when the other person doesn’t ‘save’ them especially if there was some idealization leading up to that.

Either way what tends to happen is the listener brings up various solutions which the 4 then all dismisses as not applicable or inacceptable.

Maybe this works for others, but not for them, because they’re different; It might be ok for others to do this but not for them, because they refuse to be like the sort of people who are ok with this.

Say you haven’t been able to make progress on a project & just keep getting frustrated with the results, and you get various tips for goal-setting, motivating yourself etc. and you’re like, ‘no that’s for extroverts’, ‘that only works for type A people’, ‘I don’t have the money for that’, ‘it’s easy to say when you haven’t experienced what I have’ etc.

Or you’re complaining that you’re in a rotten mood and they come at you with ‘exercise, drink water, go outside, do yoga etc.’ and you’re incensed. They’re not listening. They’re acting like it’s so easy when they don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re making light of your problem by portraying it as just some little commonplace malfunction that could be fixed with water, like you’re just a complicated houseplant or mechanical robot & your suffering was just totally meaningless & mundane.

So some common lines that would be taken as supportive by others can actually have very much the opposite effect, like saying ‘XYZ helped for me’ (“...and because it helped for you you assume it helps for everyone?”), ‘could it be X common issue’ (“don’t put me in a box!/ tell me who I am!”) or ‘XYZ person struggled with this too but overcame it’. (“...but unlike them, I didn’t manage to, so thanks for rubbing in my face how inferior I am compared to them.), pointing out how the experience could make you stronger (“Well, it didn’t! Maybe others got strong off it but I’m just screwed up. So I even screwed up the correct way to be traumatized, huh?”) or trying to find a a silver lining. (“Are you saying this shitty thing happening to me was GOOD?!”)

& in all those cases what happened is that rather than feeling inspired by it, the response was rather a negative comparision (EnvyTM) and to guard against the pain of that, the response is to look for another difference to point out, to argue it’s an apples to oranges comparison and therefore not a fair judgement. ‘You can’t compare me to this guy, unlike me his parents weren’t divorced’ and if you bring up another divorced guy it’s, ‘but I was younger when it happened’.You can always find something if you look hard enough.

What is being defended against is often the painful shame of coming up inferior in an apples to apples comparison (and often there is the pessimistic assumption that thatwould definitely happen) – or the shame and/or dissapointment that would come from giving it a try and then crashing and burning, seeing not just your inferiority confirmed, but your dreams of what could have been ‘if only’ thoroughly popped.

At the end of it, you’d still be in the same pathetic situation, but you’d have lost what little made it bearable and know: It’s not that deep, you just suck without you do, you’re not secretly a baby swan that shouldn’t be judged by duck standards, but just an actual ugly duckling - just a defective product spat out by a random whim of the machine.

It’s the withdrawing strategy of picking the thing no one else wants or picking something different than everyone else so that there’s less competition.

Maybe you wouldn’t per se dislike more popular sweets, but you’re going to emphasize your love of the controversial liquorice because then no one else is going to snatch it.

Besides the threat of competition, traits or preferences that are more common are seen as less significant because they ‘narrow it down’ less when it comes to defining what makes you you. (does it really describe you to say you’re a citizen of country X when there’s much about X culture you disagree with and many Xers totally different from you? So many X-ers too, that doesn’t tell you anything. How can such a crude label be “who you are”, when you are so much more?) - it also means less explanatory power. If other X-ers feel different than you about Y issue then being an X is not the reason for your feelings, really. X isn’t so meaningful really.

Picture for example that you always made a big deal about how you like rainy weather, and you felt this made you meaningfully different from the others, maybe you associated a personal meaning with it, various concepts, values, memories… it was a part of you. You weren’t shy to give people an earful about how much you hate the sun and how it’s overrated though everybody seems to love it.

Then you find out that falling water has a mood lifting effect due to changing the compositions of the ions in the air. Same reason why people like meditating near waterfalls or being in gardens with fountains. Your love of rainy days wasn’t due to your values, memories & sophisticated taste after all! Everyone would feel the effect. And now you might feel ashamed for ever espousing your love of rain or thinking it was meaningful. Maybe you won’t be mentioning it anymore or starting to treat it as a trivial mundane externality… either way you can’t go back to how it was before: Either you keep liking rainy days & live with the cringe that it’s predictable, or you renounce it & give up on all the treasured meaning you thought it had…

Because of this one may be tempted to avoid this choice and not have that shame come fully into consciousness… and here too, individuation can quickly be summoned up as a defense to explain how you’re different from the other person after all. Oh, your favorite character is actually fairly popular? Oh, but you have a different interpretation of him & you dislike the most common ship, so you liking him means something, you’re not lacking your own opinion (...right?? right??)

Distinctions just feel safer, because, having this ‘fine-grained’ perception you know no people are 100% alike and sooner or later you’ll hit a difference, and then what. Will they reject you because they were under the mistaken impression that you were the same? Best to make it clear where those distinctions are.

Of course, from the perspective of others who don’t share the same filter as your ego, this can look like you’re just trying to be different for the heck of it, or like you’re unnappeasable & looking to keep creating problems – ‘they just wanna be mad /frustrated’ etc.

They might feel like their genuine attempts to help got them roped into a ‘why don’t you, yes but’ game or take the fact that you’re ostensibly trying to separate yourself from them as thinking you’re too good for them or depreciating them (particularly for those for whom relating is the default), and this is not at all helped when you don’t realize you’re doing it/ don’t owe it and, when prompted, aren’t too shy to state that you think your opinions are right and the stuff you like is best. (honestly, most people believe their opinions are right & their tastes great, they just feel a need to be polite)

You may have had the painful experience of having some authority figure say that you “just want to contradict” and that’s so invalidating because your beliefs have so many reasond reaching deeply into who you are & your opinions are not about them, but at the same time maybe some part of you was giddy that a chance to contradict them came up, because you do in fact hate them & wanna reject them so it maybe said that they sensed something that wasn’t in your conscious awareness as a motivation.

Useful Question:

If you find yourself repeatedly shutting down suggestions to improve your situation as not applicable: Are you trying to wriggle out of something? If yes, why?

Are you splitting hairs? If yes, why?

You may feel that traits which are shared with many others are less significant, or that having someone predict exactly what you meant could be a sign that you’re too “simple” & feel tempted to avoid/disown that, but consider that stopping something because others do it too is not much more authentic than starting to do something because others do it too.

retroflection/ “turning against the self”

Each of the reactive types has it’s own, subtly different thing about defensively taking on negative labels which, in moderation, leads to above-average realism, honesty & self-awareness, but in excess may rather produce self-hate and/or self-destructiveness. In all the cases there’s a sense of control in it, the idea that it doesn’t hurt as much if it’s coming from your own mouth and you know it’s coming – ‘better the devil you know’.

The flavor typical of 4 might be thought of as the reactive/withdrawing or ‘damage control’ approach to image management:

Unlike the 2’s positivity amplification and the 3’s compensation by striving for improvement, the 4’s aren’t so optimistic about convincing you (or themselves) that they’re the best thing since sliced bread. They wouldn’t believe it very much when others do that because they know very well that reality isn’t always sunshine & sparkles. As for all reactives, positivity is suspect and potentially fake. But where 8 and 6 are more concerned about being duped and dominated by others in the outside world, 4 is on guard against the shame and dissapointment of being the dupe.

4s may well carry many ideals they wish to live up to but they’re not identified with the superego ideals, but the ego that is hounded by and sees itself falling short of its demands.

A positive label makes them think about how they’re not living up to it at all times.

That’s painful, and hence, threatening.

There is a resistance to or suspicion of positive labels or even labelling temporary positive states because if you don’t live up to it you will be ashamed and if it’s taken away from you you’ll be dissapointed.

And if an individual has been through serious crap, the sense that ‘happiness just sets you up to have it ripped away’ can be very strong. Hapiness itself can trigger defenses, and then depending on their awareness the person can either just viciously blame everyone around for dissapointing them, or, in the more average range, realize that they ripped it all up by their own hand but not know why, and figure that happiness just isn’t meant for them. Having everything explode feels familiar & comfortable, somehow.

But the 4 (or 4 fixer) is still going to want to have some control over how they see themselves or present to others. How can you be an independent person and act consistently if you don’t sort ‘me’ from ‘not me’ but just take whatever people yell at you?

6 and 8 have other solutions to this, but for 4 it’s to ‘spin it’ or personalize it.

So if you see it explained anywhere that 4s internalize negative labels ‘as is’ and that’s why they may have low self esteem, that’s not totally correct. (I think Naranjo and Lukovich were both 2 cm from getting it, (from opposite directions of inside & outside the house), but not quite. Almaas has it right with the ‘specific reaction’ of control, though he is of course very ‘repent sinners!’ -y in his presentation as is evident in his very word choice. )

So a negative label is sort of accepted, but not its meaning. The 4 gives it their own meaning, thereby retaining control over the narrative of their life as well as their view and presentation of themselves.

They might be beating themselves up with a negative label and genuinely feel agony and frustration over it, but at least it’s a negative label of their choice.

That’s what makes it a defense. Both because you know the pain is coming (“There was nothing you could do that I had not already done to myself.”) and by controlling the content away from something that would hurt even worse. (again not necessarily because its true, but because it hurts – but sometimes it hurts because it feels true.)

Yes, you fucked up this interaction, but you’re not insensitive, you’re bad with people.

Yes, you failed to do the task, but you’re not lazy, you’re bad with pressure…

and of course whoever complained about you ‘doesn’t get it’. But the motivation here is not so much for others to get you (not if it would mean compromising on the ‘specificity’ of your expression) but that you want to correct undesired perceptions of yourself.

It’s about not wanting to be misrepresented. ‘I’d rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I’m not’, and so on.

To an outsider, it may seem either like an excuse, or like masochism. Especially if it’s someone who has no reactive in them they might react by trying to pep talk/ cheer you up.

But consider also the following example: Someone says you’re ugly.

The 2-ish response may be to say ‘no I’m beautiful’ or focus on your other good qualities; The 3 response may be to compensate & hit the gym or make up shop.

Both of these involve expending a lot of energy & possible anxiety to “prove” you’re beautiful and find people to agree. And while some will be willing to generous validate you ‘everyone is beautiful’ talk, there will always be those who won’t.

It involves making your self esteem depend on others.

Now how about this instead: “Yes I’m ugly but so what? Beauty isn’t the be all end all of beauty, it’s a shallow superficial thing just anyone can get because of luck. Being ugly is even better because I know no one will want me just for my looks.”

With this, you’ve sucessfully defended against spending all your adolescence (and possibly beyond) stressing about beauty.

You don’t need to compete, and you depend only on your own opinion.

There was once this very obnoxious social worker at out school who had a thing about teaching kids to “accept compliments” by saying “yes, I think so too”.

I thought that was disturbing because you’re essentially giving the other person power to define you – you must agree to whatever just because it’s positive?

Disagreeing with her transparent praise tasted like freedom, even superiority.

Of course, this can also go wrong. For starters you can become very defined by those negative labels and there can be its own bogus pressure to avoid looking like you want anything else.

Like not going to the gym lest anyone think you want to be pretty like those beauty-obsessed bimbos, when it might have other benefits like being able to lift stuff or spark neuron growth.

Negative traits may be seen as unchangeable, or changing them may be seen as a self-betrayal even when it has become feasible to escape them.

Another issue is full-on destroying yourself to spite others – usually, because it feels like the only way to have any sort of control over others, or over your own circumstances.

This is also often what’s going on in scenarios where someone who feels lost, bored, numb or insignificant will either start shit or touch themselves off to agonize over their tragic backstory for 3 hours again because better feel pain than nothing, or better this pain than that other pain.

An extreme form of that might be cutting or anorexia – people who suffer from that often report that it’s about having a sense of control and escaping apathy or deeper issues with a controlled, deliberate torment.

That said, sometimes the literature overemphasizes this as if there’s nothing to 4 but low self-esteem; It’s not even the only type that tends toward inferiority as a pitfall (its just as common in 9s or 6s) and by no means all there is to 4 or what makes it what it is. I’m inclined to agree with Ichazo that Riso’s work is in some ways ‘a 7s take on 4’.

Retroflection lends itself just as well to an outcome that looks more like defensive superiority. In something similar to the beauty example, someone who gets crap for being thin might say ‘at least I’m not like those gross fat uggos’ whereas a more porty individual might say ‘at least I’m not like those thinness obsessed models’ – the defensive nature of it, the need to turn the negative label into something meaningful, the sharp separation from he others and the employ of disdain as a kind of counter-shame (which is seen with all the heart types to some degree, but 4’s the reactive one) can result in no-holds-barred lambasting, putting down & tearing of others, especially if no 9 fix is present.

In this case the retroflection turns the thing others considered a “flaw” into something that actually makes you better – to others, the jump straight to “better” can transparently betray the defensiveness behind it, though, a reactionary reversal of the initial sense of inferiority.

Sometimes this is fueled by sour grapes. ‘Oh, I don’t want to be pretty & popular anyway, pretty people are so shallow and brainless and have it so easy…’ & consciously the person really doesn’t want it (as that would be incongruent with the conscious belief that not being that way makes you who you are), but there is some partial longing or resentment for what the popular ppl have & how you can’t have it, that is at odds with the conscious repudiation & fuels this disproportionally defensive behavior.

As some french(?) philosopher once said, spiteful resentment is sometimes frustrated desire.

(this may be more common in w5 ppl, who might have decided they should ‘do without’ the figurative grapes.)

Other times, the 4 is 100% genuine about feeling their trait/’flaw’ makes them better and they don’t lowkey envy the others, but still feel some inferiority or shame about the trait despite loudly proclaiming the opposite (more common in w3 individuals, as there might also be a wee bit of negation going on here...), and that’s makes the lambasting so sharp, the cornered animal lashing out, confirming & feeling their existence in rejecting “not that” and “not self”.

Either way, hating what one hates can truly be seen as a part of one’s identity, which probably will get some toxic positivity folks up in arms about how this can only be dysfunctional, but don’t some things or people deserve to be disdained or hated?

One time in a type me thread there was a person arguing that surely everyone would become subdued, muted and yielding (ie. unhealthy 9-like) if faced with enough trauma – after all, the abusers are always shaming you for speaking up, having preferences… wouldn’t everyone eventually cave?

Not if every time they put you down and make you feel shitty about yourself, you just psychically transmute it into more hate and keep loudly being yourself out of sheer spite.

The loathing keeps you separated, keeps you from being influenced and ‘contaminated’.

Of course that comes with its own long-term problems just as much as the 9 going along to avoid more abuse would.

So many people judge themselves for how they responded to abuse, but really abuse is a morton’s fork, no matter which response you have it screws you somehow.

It’s hard to let go of things that your ‘survival’ once depended on.

That said, generally withdrawn types don’t expect others to agree than them & are cool with everyone just doing their own things in their own corner & just letting ppl live – even the “healthiest”, most aware 4 would probably strike most people as opinionated and negative, but because they feel no need to get away from the negative in themselves, they can be some of the most open-minded and accepting of the revilved and controversial. It’s just not the wholesome, comforting kind of acceptance but the sort that comes from not needing that.

Note also how the mechanisms can act in concert: The conclusions about the self produced by retroflection and individuation are often prompty introjected as permanent parts of the self-construct, and the resulting elaborate construct in turn provides more fuel to think of distinctions, reinterpret negative labels and imbue the conclusions thereof with a sense of meaning.

Useful Question:

Maybe next time you find yourself going ‘it’s not like this it’s actually like that!’ in response to some criticism, consider if the criticism set off a defense. Try to honestly consider it without immediately trying to “take control of the narrative”. Maybe you can come up with a third perspective where both your feelings and the other person’s can be valid.

Also, it might be an interesting exercise to try to think of & write down all the positive stuff that has been said about you – note, this does not mean you have to accept it or be beholden to live up to it, just consider mindfully. Don’t worry, you are not going to run out of negative stuff – your brain keeps track of that for free.

If you’re thinking of doing something inadvisable to spite someone… well I’m not going to tell you to think of others or how ‘survival is the real victory’ because that’s probably just going to piss you off more.

From personal experience (for whatever that’s worth) the only thing that ever helped is internalizing that they wouldn’t care even if you went down in the greatest excess of shakespearian grandeur.

That seems like a terrible waste of a death, or a person really.

Though I know don’t wanna let them win, and like, I’m not even a 4 core so I probably can’t imagine how much worse it probably is to some of you.

But seriously, lean into that competency wing and cut them off.

You won’t get the ‘King Claudius suddenly being shamed’ reaction, not in reality. Everyone always thinks they’re Dumbo.

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