The 5 Personality Patterns

1. Your Survival Patterns Are Not Who You Are

But these patterns are not our true self.

Beyond the patterns. Much human suffering stems from unhealthy patterns of feeling and acting, deeply ingrained from childhood traumas. These "survival patterns" are automatic, body-based reactions to overwhelm, not your authentic self. They obscure your true essence, which is pure Presence—an open awareness unburdened by past conditioning.

Presence is your essence. Being "present" means your attention is fully in the here and now, relaxed and perceiving reality without distortion. In contrast, being "in pattern" means your perceptions are filtered by past traumas, causing you to overreact as if old distress is still happening. Recognizing this distinction is the first step to freedom.

Gifts within patterns. While patterns are defense mechanisms, they also hone specific skills like creativity, love, or strength. Healing doesn't erase these abilities; it allows you to use them consciously from a place of presence, rather than being driven by unconscious defenses.

2. Overwhelm Creates Body-Based Survival Patterns

All traumatic events share one characteristic: they overcharge the body and put it into overwhelm.

Defense against distress. As children, when faced with overwhelming feelings and lacking adequate soothing, we develop defenses. These strategies buffer us from direct distress, becoming deeply conditioned into our bodies and minds. Repeated use transforms a temporary defense into a permanent survival pattern.

Body armoring. Unresolved overwhelm leads to chronic muscular tension, or "body armoring." This tension suppresses unexpressed emotions and dampens awareness, shaping how life energy flows through the body and even influencing physical development. These patterns are automatic physiological reactions, not just mental beliefs.

Self-perpetuating cycle. Survival patterns distort our attention and perception, making certain details more vivid while others fade. This skewed perception shapes our experience, which in turn reinforces our beliefs, creating a self-perpetuating system. Our identity often forms around these patterns, making change feel like a threat to who we are.

3. The Five Developmental Stages and Their Patterns

Each of the five survival patterns can be seen as the result of getting stuck in a particular developmental stage, unable to learn the skills and complete the main task of that stage.

Unmet needs, arrested development. Survival patterns originate from unmet needs during specific developmental stages in childhood. When a child fails to acquire crucial skills at one stage, they carry that deficit forward, making subsequent developmental tasks harder.

Stages and their patterns:

• Embodiment (pre-birth/infancy): Claiming the body and feeling safe to exist. Failure leads to the Leaving Pattern.
• Taking In (0-2 years): Receiving nourishment and love, feeling full. Failure leads to the Merging Pattern.
• Putting Out (1.5-3.5 years): Expressing will, acting autonomously. Failure leads to the Enduring Pattern.
• Trusting Others (3-5 years): Feeling contained and protected by a loving, larger force. Failure leads to the Aggressive Pattern.
• Trusting Self (4-7 years): Finding inner guidance and valuing one's own truth. Failure leads to the Rigid Pattern.

Compassion for stuckness. Understanding these stages fosters compassion, recognizing that everyone, including ourselves, is doing their best with the skills they have. Judgment hinders healing; understanding and support facilitate growth.

4. Survival Patterns Distort Your Reality

So the two of you were actually perceiving different realities.

Filtered perceptions. Our survival patterns act like "TV channels" in our minds, filtering and distorting our perception of the world. Each pattern highlights certain aspects while dimming others, leading individuals in different patterns to experience fundamentally different realities. This often causes profound misunderstandings and conflicts.

Reinforcing beliefs. These distorted perceptions reinforce patterned beliefs. For example, someone in a fear-based pattern will constantly scan for danger, confirming their belief that the world is unsafe. This creates a closed loop where experience validates belief, and belief shapes experience.

Shared distortions. People often gravitate towards others who share similar survival patterns, finding comfort in their shared, albeit distorted, view of reality. True resolution of disagreements, however, requires both parties to step out of their patterns and perceive the situation from a place of presence.

5. The Leaving Pattern: Fleeing to the Spirit World

Being shocked out of the body this way interferes with the spirit’s process of orienting itself to the physical world and rooting itself in the physical body.

Core wound: Shattered self. The Leaving Pattern originates from pre-birth or early infancy trauma, where the incoming spirit experiences the physical world as unsafe and shatters. The defense is to dissociate, moving attention upward into the head and even into the spirit world, away from the frightening physical realm.

Fragility and gifts. This leads to a fragile, fragmented sense of self, difficulty functioning in the physical world, and a constant fear of being overwhelmed. However, it also bestows gifts of psychic and subtle perception, creativity, and multi-dimensional awareness, making individuals "Masters of Psychic Perception."

Healing: Coming back. Healing involves consciously bringing awareness back into the body, grounding to the earth, and re-assembling the fragmented self. Learning to feel safe in the physical world and developing strong energetic boundaries are crucial steps to integrate these spiritual gifts with embodied presence.

6. The Merging Pattern: Seeking Love to Fill Emptiness

Instead of feeling full and pushing herself away, she repeatedly experienced difficulty filling and then lost the source of nourishment without feeling full.

Core wound: Deprivation. The Merging Pattern arises from unmet needs during the nursing stage (0-2 years), leading to a persistent feeling of emptiness and deprivation. The child learns to abandon self-referencing and focuses on others to get needs met, believing "I can never get full."

Other-referencing and giving. This pattern creates "Masters of Connection," highly attuned to others' emotional states and needs. They often engage in "giving to get," hoping that by filling others' needs, their own will be met. The compensated merging pattern involves projecting one's own needs onto others and playing the "rescuer."

Healing: Self-care and core connection. Healing requires learning to self-reference, connect to one's own core, and practice self-care. This involves completing the cycle of needing, asking, receiving, and feeling full, thereby developing a reality-based self-confidence and the ability to stand on one's own feet.

7. The Enduring Pattern: Hiding and Resisting Control

And in one last act of autonomy, he turns his own will inward to suppress his impulse to act and fight: he defeats himself.

Core wound: Crushed will. The Enduring Pattern forms when a child's attempts at autonomy and self-expression (1.5-3.5 years) are met with punishment or humiliation. The defense is to "hunker down," pulling energy in and down, resisting all external control and even internal impulses.

Passive resistance and self-sabotage. This leads to a deep-seated fear of self-expression and action, resulting in passive-aggressive behaviors, procrastination, and self-sabotage. They become "immovable objects," masters of enduring hardship and resisting change, often feeling heavy, stuck, and resentful.

Healing: Reclaiming will and space. Healing involves getting energy moving, reclaiming personal space, and learning to express will proactively. Anger work, focused on releasing buried rage in a safe, contained way, is crucial. This allows them to move from passive resistance to active self-assertion and pride.

8. The Aggressive Pattern: Dominating for Safety and Survival

What the child who develops the aggressive pattern has learned is that he must fight for what he needs, because no one is going to take care of him or protect him.

Core wound: Betrayed trust. The Aggressive Pattern develops when a child (3-5 years) faces life-threatening situations alone, learning to rely solely on their own will and strength. They conclude, "No one is there for me," and adopt a strategy of dominance and control to ensure survival.

Power over love. These "Masters of Energy" are highly charged, decisive, and pragmatic, often becoming natural leaders or warriors. They prioritize power over love, distrust vulnerability, and may project their fears onto others, seeing the world as a battlefield. Their "bullshit detector" is strong, valuing truth above all.

Healing: Trust and containment. Healing requires feeling safely held and contained by a loving, yet stronger, force. This allows them to re-own their vulnerability, integrate love and power, and learn to trust others. Learning to contain and modulate their own energy, rather than blasting others, is a key step towards genuine self-regulation.

9. The Rigid Pattern: Perfection Through External Rules

Instead, attention was focused only on their surface — on their appearance and performance — and they were taught to use an external set of rules as their guidance.

Core wound: Unseen inner life. The Rigid Pattern forms when a child's inner life and feelings are not reflected or valued (4-7 years). Instead, emphasis is placed on external rules, appearance, and performance. The child learns to suppress "incorrect" impulses and strives for perfection, believing "I am my performance."

Order, control, and criticism. These "Masters of Form" excel at organization, logic, and problem-solving, but often experience life through words rather than direct sensation. They fear imperfection, disorder, and making mistakes, leading to constant self-correction and criticism of others. Their inner critic is often fused with their self.

Healing: Feeling and authenticity. Healing involves learning to feel and value one's own inner experience as a source of guidance. This means disidentifying from the inner critic, exploring pleasure and spontaneity, and accepting imperfection. Bodywork and conscious rule-breaking can help soften rigid internal structures.

10. Basic Skills for Inner Work: Witness, Sensation, Energy, Critic

The inner journey still takes time and effort, but once you know where you’re going, it will be much easier.

Map for inner journey. To navigate inner work effectively, four basic skills are essential. These skills provide the foundation for understanding and transforming survival patterns.

Core skills for healing:

• Inner Witness: The ability to observe your thoughts, feelings, and actions without judgment, like a neutral recorder. This helps you see patterns clearly.
• Attending to Raw Sensory Experience: Shifting attention from mental interpretations to direct bodily sensations (texture, pressure, temperature, etc.). This reconnects you to the "Now" and your authentic self.
• Basic Energy Skills: Learning to manage your life energy through:
  • Core: Feeling your body's center for a sense of self.
  • Ground: Connecting energetically to the earth for support.
  • Edge/Boundary: Creating an energetic membrane around your personal space.
  • Me/Not Me: Differentiating your energy/feelings from others'.
• Disidentifying from the Inner Critic: Recognizing the critical voice as separate from your true self and learning to defend against its attacks.

Foundation for change. These skills are not just therapeutic tools; they are fundamental to healthy adult functioning. Developing them allows you to consciously choose presence over patterned reactions.

11. Healing Involves Reclaiming Missed Developmental Tasks

In order to heal our patterns and become able to thrive in the present, then, each of us must fill in the holes in our developmental skill sets and finish whatever developmental tasks we did not complete as children.

Re-parenting yourself. Healing a survival pattern means returning to the developmental stage where the wound occurred and acquiring the skills that were missed. This "re-parenting" process allows the psyche to complete its arrested development.

Tailored healing. Each pattern requires specific healing approaches:

• Leaving: Embodiment, grounding, developing boundaries, recovering from shattering.
• Merging: Self-referencing, self-care, developing will and strength, completing the "filling" process.
• Enduring: Getting energy moving, claiming space, expressing anger cleanly, proactive action.
• Aggressive: Feeling contained, re-owning vulnerability, integrating love and power, learning self-containment.
• Rigid: Valuing inner experience, disidentifying from rules, exploring pleasure and spontaneity.

Embodied transformation. Healing is not merely intellectual; it must be a felt, bodily experience. Engaging in practices that physically shift energy and awareness helps integrate new learning at a cellular level, making the changes lasting.

12. Disidentifying from the Inner Critic is Essential for Freedom

But the voice of the inner critic is not your own voice. It is only the voices of the people who raised you.

Internalized authority. The inner critic, part of the superego, is an amalgamation of parental commands and judgments. Its job is to keep you "good" and safe by policing your impulses, often through shaming and devaluing attacks.

Separation for authenticity. Many people remain identified with their inner critic, mistaking its voice for their own. Disidentifying from it is crucial to hear your authentic inner voice, feel your true desires, and create internal space for new experiences and growth.

Defending your self. Learning to recognize and push back against critic attacks redirects energy from self-suppression to self-empowerment. This weakens the critic's hold, allowing you to develop a healthy ego and an authentic self, free from constant internal judgment.

Last updated: December 17, 2025