Assets
Their lifelong familiarity with suffering makes Romantics particularly suited to working with people going through crisis or grief. They have unusual stamina for helping others go through intense emotional episodes and are willing to stick with a friend through long periods of recovery. Fours often say that by focusing on someone else’s needs, they are able to shift attention from their own.
Mourning and abandonment are the keys in which my life is set, however, those are not depressing experiences to me. The dark moods are what interest me most and have given me a real talent for the shadows inside people’s minds. If something dramatic, or dangerous, or deeply disturbing happens, then I find myself immediately present.
My husband has had an assistant for several years, and I’ve been cordial to her, but have never been attracted to knowing her. Suddenly her marriage dissolved when she was five months pregnant, and with that news, she has become a central figure in my mind. I am much more likely to become disturbed when life gets too predictable than I am when a disturbing event occurs.
The search for depth of meaning often misleads a Four into the belief that lighthearted relationships are lightweight and therefore not worthy of consideration. There is a great attraction to people who are caught up in the most intense human experiences, such as birth, and death, and encounters with the dark unconscious. Fours feel far more real at those moments when life and death are close companions, because those events are so intensely demanding that their full attention is brought into the present moment. The following statement was given by an organizer for suicide hot lines.
Happiness is incidental. Is a moth made happy by the flame? I am a counselor myself and was in analysis for years. I faithfully tried to see myself that way, but I have developed a suspicion of my insights, and an impulse to resist what other people see in me. I feel that passion holds a greater possibility, that I truly exist only at the center of my deepest feelings.
As a counselor I’m attracted to crisis work: to battered women and people on the borders of sanity. I have started a hot line for our county and find an instant rapport on the phone with some stranger who’s out there on the edge with a revolver or a bottle of pills in his hand.
Attractive Environments
Fours often have two jobs: “my money job and my real job as an artist.” They are attracted to environments that require body discipline as a way of conforming to special standards. Dancer, chanteuse, magazine model. They are atelier owners, interior decorators, antique collectors, and owners of excellent secondhand stores.
They are metaphysicians and depth psychologists; they search for a connection to higher planes of mind. They are grief counselors, feminists, animal rights activists. They are attracted to religion, ritual, and art.
Unattractive Environments
Unattractive environments include mundane jobs in ordinary settings. “I work in an office, but that’s not me.” Close work with people who earn more or have more. Service jobs, anonymity. A job where special talents are not seen.