Maybe you’ve explored the Enneagram, or taken the Myers-Briggs, or some other form of work to Zoom Out and get a high-level view of what you are. But if you’ve taken a look at the results of these from a place of awareness, you’ve likely noticed that these models describe symptoms, and miss the underlying architecture.
Perhaps the issue is thinking about personality as some sort of fixed type, rather than a set of predictable, suboptimal system programs running on old, outdated code?
It’s what I found quite magnetizing about Steven Kessler’s book, The Five Personality Patterns; it provides a framework for looking into the patterns of your Self and others in order to start getting mastery over your life.
The Core Premise: Your Personality is a Modifiable Program
Your body and mind are your internal operating system and the wetware that it drives. As we grew up into our selves it developed sophisticated survival protocols during childhood in order to endure the pressures of traumas of growing up. These ingrained, body-based patterns of feeling and action were brilliant for five-year-old you. But today, they’ve become the root friction points—the core Complexes—in the operating code of your adult self.
These patterns had served a purpose at one point, but for now they clutter your core program. They operate as Shadow Processes that tend to be beyond what you are consciously controlling, acting as a cover that prevents your true essence from coming online. It’s like a malware that is draining your capacity to operate at your full potential.
Why This Map Is Groundbreaking: A Somatic Toolset for Architecting the Self
This map of personality is fundamentally different because it doesn’t just describe what you do; it diagnoses how the stream of life energy and awareness is constricted in your nervous system.
The focus is rooted in a technical understanding of the body and nervous system, explaining how these Complexes are physically held and regulated.
Kessler highlights five patterns are defined by the habitual flow of energy in the body:
- Moving Away (Leaving)
- Moving Toward (Merging)
- Moving In and Down (Enduring)
- Moving Up and Out (Aggressive)
- Becoming Constricted (Rigid)
By laying out this clear, methodical map, we have a map of a Grounded, Somatic Toolset needed to break our old emotional loop
The Value of Knowing Your Patterns: Establishing a New Protocol
Understanding these five patterns transforms our inner work from aimless exploration into a structured, results-oriented process. It’s the ultimate framework to achieve Real Change.
This indispensable System Audit helps us Rewire for a higher operating capacity:
- Diagnose the Core Complex: Pinpoint exactly how we got stuck and how to get free. These patterns are automatic, body-based reactions conditioned by past trauma, not responses to the present situation.
- Integrate your Shadow Processes: Heal our core wounds by clearing the trauma—the block that prevents necessary skills—out of the body.
- Master the Vagus Nerve: Learn the developmental skills you missed as a child by focusing on the physiological mechanisms of safety and regulation.
- Optimize Your Communications: Understand not just what people do, but what they want and fear based on their patterned experience of reality.
- Return to Presence: Soften your conditioned habits of attention, enabling you to step out of the pattern and return to the present moment. This is how you Break Past Patterns.
By understanding this process, you stop walking in circles and start applying a structured, repeatable protocol to find your way home to your true, integrated, optimized self.
Ready to stop chasing magic and start architecting your system? Check out my Free Personal System Audit Template. Explore Kessler’s, book, The 5 Personality Patterns.