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

To avoid the bad feelings, the child slowly learns to identify only with what he thinks of as “good” and to deny anything “bad” as part of who he is. He actually starts limiting his identity to only include what he has come to believe is “acceptable” in the eyes of his parents. Yet another child may despair altogether of getting any good strokes fr

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When a parent-figure denies a child’s reality, they are unconsciously teaching the child to reject their intuition, their “gut feeling.” The more we learn to distrust ourselves, the deeper this intuitive voice withdraws, becoming harder and harder to hear. This results in lost intuition and internal conflict. We learn that our judgment cannot be tr

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Maladaptive coping strategies, often learned from our parent-figures, give us a brief distraction or reprieve from the discomfort (say, by drinking alcohol at a wedding, as I did) or avoiding any emotional reaction (as I also did when I dissociated). Either of these attempts at relieving our distress, however, ends up in more disconnection from the

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Driven by fear and desire, these behaviors will continue until we get a response that reassures us the relationship is intact. Even though our partners have now responded, Little Me’s core wounds are not healed by this temporary return, so inwardly we remain on guard for the next sign of possible abandonment. It is very hard for Little Me to find t

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