"One possibility is that the parents cannot hold and contain the child’s energy.

They collapse in the face of the child’s tantrums and give in.

As this child repeatedly wins the fights and gets what he wants, he concludes that fighting works.

Naturally, he will continue fighting, and his aggression will develop from a strategy into a survival pattern.

He will like feeling big and strong and start to do whatever he can to maintain that sense of himself.

However, he will also feel alone. The experience of being able to overpower his parents is disorienting and unnerving for a child.

It takes away his sense that there is something larger keeping him safe.

"The two most obvious defense strategies used by merging-patterned people are playing the baby and playing the mother.

When playing the baby, they identify with the needy, helpless state and try to get other people to fix it for them.

When in this role, they will typically act helpless, play the victim, and avoid responsibility for their actions and overall life circumstances.

They are staying the baby in an attempt to finally attract the nurturance of the Good Mother.

This role is the essence of the pure merging pattern.

When they shift into playing the mother, they project their need and helplessness onto someone else and declare “I will fix it for you.”

Then they start tending to the other’s needs and playing the rescuer to the other’s victim.

They are giving what they need to get, which somewhat diminishes the pain of not getting it, and creates an unconscious hope that the other will reciprocate.

This role feels better because they get to feel like the big, helpful one, but it is still a survival strategy, rather than a real service, because it is motivated more by their own need to give than by the other’s need to receive.

Shifting into the Giver role also diminishes their fear of abandonment, because now the other needs them.

"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. (…)

 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

"However, enduring-patterned people also automatically resist impulses from the inside — their own impulses to move and act.

So, “you can’t make me” turns into “even I can’t make me.”

As soon as they form an intention and begin to marshal their will to act on it, it starts to look like someone else’s intention forcing them to do something against their will, and they feel compelled to resist it.

This is the mechanism behind their automatic self-sabotage.

It causes them to resist all attempts to move them, even their own attempts.

This confusion is created by their deeply-conditioned habit of selfnegation, their habit of turning their will inward to suppress their own impulses, instead of outward to act on impulses. (…)

This is essentially a “me/not me” problem. Because they are unable to recognize their proactive will as their own, their survival mechanism tries to fight it off.

"Since parents who remain identified with their inner critic cannot value their own beingness, they cannot value their child’s beingness, either.

They cannot value and love her as she is. Instead, they value and love the idealized child that they are trying to turn her into.

For rigid-patterned parents, improving their child replaces loving their child as she is.

The child becomes a project, rather than a being, and managing the project replaces trusting the child’s natural growth and development.

However, since the parents are focused on their image of the ideal child instead of on their actual child, they are often unable to accurately assess her current stage and abilities.

They tend to expect too much, pushing her into situations she’s not ready for.

As she tries to keep up, she gets ahead of her natural rhythm and timing, takes on too much responsibility, and begins to act like a little adult instead of like a child.

"They found others to be the source of their pain, not the salve for it.

So, as adults, they tend to avoid emotional attachments and even contact with others.

As you can imagine, joining a monastery or going on long, silent retreats can provide the perfect cover for this psychological defense.

Claims of spiritual detachment can mask real fears of personal attachment.

When choosing an inner work practice, it is always important to explore what you’re avoiding, as well as what you’re pursuing.

I have known of people who were able to meditate alone for years in a monastery cell, opening deeply into states of bliss and boundless love, but then felt terror when they returned to the world and fell in love with a real, live, physical human being.

Letting their ego boundaries dissolve was tolerable, but the attachment needs aroused by sex and personal love were terrifying.

The withdrawal of awareness from the body up into the mind is essentially the same strategy, but used internally, rather than externally.

Since the body and heart seem to be the source of the pain, the person moves her awareness away from her body and up into her head.

Verbally, this withdrawal from the body will appear as a tendency to talk in abstractions and generalizations, instead of talking about specific personal needs and feelings.

The illusion of the leaving pattern is “I am my mind, not my body.”

In psychology, this withdrawal of awareness from the body is called dissociation.

Fantasy is a further withdrawal into the mind.

In this case, all of physical reality is left behind and an entirely new world is created to replace it.

Usually, that new world is a much more appealing one, a place where the person can be creative and even magical.

On the other hand, this facility with abstract thought, coupled with the ability to collect ideas from other fields and even other dimensions, also accounts for the fact that most of the seminal thinkers in every discipline do this survival pattern.

"If we look at how they process their experience — at whether they prefer the visual, auditory, or kinesthetic channel for their mental processing — we see that they typically prefer the visual channel.

This is the channel that is the least connected to the physical body as well as the one in which mental processing happens the fastest.

As a result, people who do this survival pattern have a fast rhythm of thought, movement, and speech.

They can rapidly process new information, work out all the possibilities and options, and see the implications.

They are able to connect the dots and get to conclusions faster than other people.

However, if they don’t lay out how they got to a conclusion, others who aren’t able to follow them are likely to become frustrated and impatient.

This rapid thinking also leads them to talk faster than the average person.

From the outside, it often looks like the motor inside them simply runs faster than it does in most people. (…)

The mind chatter of those caught in the leaving pattern is “Gotta get away,” and when they go into pattern, their attention does actually go away from their body and from personal, present moment experience.

This means that they lose touch with the sensations in their own body that would help them figure out “what I feel” and “what I want.”

It also disconnects them from the resources that could help them get out of their distress — both the resources already within them and the resources of others that they could ask for help.

For them, however, the internal experience is not that they themselves went away, but that the resources went away.

"Most people process their experience as sense perceptions, that is, as images, sounds, sensations, tastes, and smells.

They experience the world and the self initially through the five senses, and then struggle to put their experience into words.

For them, the words are only a way to communicate their experience to others, and the experience is often more complex and nuanced than they can find words for.

This is quite different from the experience of people who are deeply caught in the rigid pattern.

They tend to experience the world at a slight remove, through their internal words more than through their senses.

Because they were trained to ignore their body sensations and feelings, they focus on the words and often have little awareness of the underlying sense perceptions.

When remembering the past, they tend to recall their experiences as words, rather than as raw sensations, sounds, images, etc.

Instead of struggling to find the words to describe the immensity or nuance of their sensory experience, they already have the words.

For them, it is the sensory experience that is missing.

However, they have no idea how much of the experience they’re missing.

The only experience they’re aware of is the one named by the words in their mind, so the words needed to describe it are immediately available to them.