So you’ve done the personality tests - maybe the Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, or some other framework that promises to reveal who you really are. And if you’ve sat with those results with any real awareness, you’ve probably noticed something: they’re describing symptoms, not the underlying architecture.
Here’s what I’m learning: maybe the problem is thinking about personality as some fixed type - like we’re characters in a video game with predetermined stats. What if instead, we’re running predictable, suboptimal programs on outdated code that hasn’t been updated since childhood?
This is what drew me to Steven Kessler’s The Five Personality Patterns. It offers something different - a framework for understanding the patterns of your Self (and others) as a pathway to actually getting some mastery over your life.
Your Personality as Modifiable Software
Think of your body and mind as your internal operating system - the wetware that runs your whole experience. As we grew up, this system developed sophisticated survival protocols to navigate the inevitable traumas of childhood. These body-based patterns of feeling and action? They were brilliant for five-year-old you.
But here’s the thing: today they’ve become the root friction points - the core Complexes - in your adult operating code.
These patterns once served a vital purpose, but now they’re cluttering your core program. They run as Shadow Processes, operating beyond conscious control, creating a veil that prevents your true essence from coming online. It’s like malware draining your capacity to operate at full potential.
A Somatic Approach to Self-Architecture
This framework is fundamentally different because it doesn’t just catalog what you do - it reveals how the flow of life energy and awareness gets constricted in your nervous system.
We’re talking about a technical understanding of the body and nervous system, explaining how these Complexes are physically held and regulated in your actual flesh and bone.
Kessler maps five patterns 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)
With this methodical map, we get a grounded, somatic toolset for breaking those old emotional loops that keep us stuck.
The Value of Knowing Your Patterns: Establishing a New Protocol
Understanding these five patterns transforms inner work from wandering in the psychological wilderness into a structured, results-oriented process. It’s a framework for actual change - not just insight.
This system audit helps us rewire for higher capacity:
- Diagnose the Core Complex: Pinpoint exactly how you got stuck and how to get free. These patterns are automatic, body-based reactions conditioned by past trauma - they’re not responses to what’s actually happening now.
- Integrate Your Shadow Processes: Heal core wounds by clearing the trauma - the blocks preventing necessary skills - out of the body itself.
- Master the Vagus Nerve: Learn the developmental skills you missed as a child by working directly with 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 those conditioned habits of attention, stepping out of the pattern to return to the present moment. This is how you break past patterns.
By understanding this process, you stop walking in circles. You start applying a structured, repeatable protocol to find your way home to your true, integrated self.
Ready to stop chasing the next shiny framework and start doing the real work of rewiring your system? Check out my Free Personal System Audit Template. Explore Kessler’s, book, The 5 Personality Patterns.