Steven Kessler - The 5 Personality Patterns: Your Guide to Understanding Yourself and Others and Developing Emotional Maturity

The 5
Personality
Patterns

Your Guide to
Understanding Yourself and Others
and Developing Emotional Maturity

Steven Kessler

Bodhi Tree Press

Copyright 2015 by Steven Kessler. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotes used in a review, no portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Published by Bodhi Tree Press
Richmond, California
www.BodhiTreePress.com

Editing by Jordan Gruber

Illustrations by Christine Chrisman
christinechrisman.com

ISBN- 10: 0996343911
ISBN- 13: 978-0-9963439-1-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015908422

For information on speaking, workshops, and trainings on the Patterns, please visit www.The5PersonalityPatterns.com or
contact the author at .

Y our experience of life

is determined mostly by

your habits of attention

and the patterned flow

of your life energy.

Steven Kessler

Contents

I first want to profoundly thank Lynda Caesara, who first introduced me to character structure and has been my primary teacher of it for over ten years. Much of the material in this book comes from her teaching, supplemented by my own observations and insights. I have also drawn on material from the writings of Wilhelm Reich, Alexander Lowen, John C. Pierrakos, Stephen M. Johnson, Barbara Brennan, and Anodea Judith.

My clients and my fellow students have fleshed out the teachings by providing hundreds of real life examples of the survival patterns in action. They have been a continual source of insight and inspiration, and I want to thank each and every one of them. I especially thank the entire community of students studying the survival patterns for their years of suggestions, feedback, and extraordinary support of this project as it gradually grew from a first draft to a finished book.

I also want to thank Anodea Judith, who first invited me to teach the character structure patterns and has freely offered her help and support as I navigated the publication process.

The creation of this book has taken almost ten years and has turned into a labor of love for me. For his iterative editing, I want to thank Jordan Gruber. And for her months spent helping me find ways to illustrate the energy flows and typical body shapes of each pattern, I thank Christine Chrisman. For her work on the diagrams, I thank Jane Chamberlain. For her proofreading, I thank Sally Boden OSullivan. Lastly, I want to thank Camille Clark, who first persuaded me to begin this project.

M uch of our human suffering is not necessary. It is created by unhealthy patterns of feeling and acting that helped us survive the traumas of childhood, but then got stuck in our bodies. These patterns have shaped us so deeply that now we think thats who we are. But these patterns are not our true self. In fact, they cover up our true self and prevent it from shining out into the world.

Fortunately, there is a map of these survival patterns, a map that shows us both how we got stuck and how we can free ourselves and return to being present in the moment. This book lays out that map and shows you the path out of your suffering and back to your true self. The inner journey still takes time and effort, but once you know where youre going, it will be much easier. Without a map, you may have been walking in circles for years. With a map, you can find your way home.

The Nature of This Map

Other maps of personality, such as the Enneagram and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, describe a series of types and then refer to people as a type, for instance, calling them a Four or a Nine or an ENTJ. This map is fundamentally different: it does not describe who you are, but instead describes the survival strategies you automatically go into when you start to feel overwhelmed. It is not a set of types, but a set of survival patterns that come to the fore to buffer you from directly feeling the distress. Consequently, this map does not describe who you are, but rather what obscures who you are. It focuses not just on which patterns you go into, but also on the difference between being in pattern and being present, and on learning how to get out of pattern and back to being present. As you first learn about the five survival patterns and discover which ones you go into, its easy to forget this difference. To highlight it, I refer in this book to people going into a pattern, being in a pattern, or doing a pattern, but never say that they are the pattern.

Another important difference between this map and most other maps of personality is that the survival patterns are not based on what is happening at the surface on what people say and do. Instead, they are based on what is happening within on how the stream of life energy and awareness habitually moves through the body, especially in times of distress. The five survival patterns described here arise out of five different ways that the flow of energy through the body can be shaped in an attempt to cope with the distress. The flow can habitually:

• move away from others
• move toward others
• move in and down
• move up and out
• be constricted

These patterns of energy flow influence how a person perceives the world and, therefore, what he experiences, thinks, and feels. And they influence how the person behaves, especially when too much energy hits his system and he goes into overwhelm. These patterns of energy flow are so fundamental that they even shape the body as it grows. But the survival patterns are not based on body shape or emotions or behavior. They are based on how energy flows through the body.

This book attempts to give you a sense of what each survival pattern feels like from the inside, so that you can understand others more deeply. It will give you a window into their world, enable you to understand how they experience themselves, and help you communicate with them more successfully. It will also give you a window into your own inner world. As you develop a better working relationship with yourself, you will begin to break the hold your patterns have on you, and more easily return to being present.

The Origins of the Map

The map of the survival patterns is part of a larger body of work. It begins with Wilhelm Reich, a star student of Sigmund Freud who began his career as a Freudian psychoanalyst. During the 1920s, Reich observed that his patients displayed shared patterns of character resistances. He called these patterns character structures. Over time, as he focused on understanding his patients character structures, Reichs therapeutic method changed so much that he began calling it character analysis to distinguish it from Freuds psychoanalysis.

Reich also noticed that these character structures were held in place by patterns of chronic muscular tension in the body, and he began to look for ways to loosen his patients muscular armoring. Over time, he found that as their muscular armoring relaxed, their life energy flowed more freely through their bodies. This led to his discovery in 1935 of the orgasm reflex, which caused him to shift the focus of his therapy from the character resistances to the body itself and to change the name of his method to vegetotherapy. This name proved unfortunate, for while it was accurate in German, it was confusing when translated into English. In 1939, Reich coined the term orgone for the life energy flowing through the body and began calling his method orgone therapy.