The 5 Personality Patterns: Your Guide to Understanding Yourself and Others and Developing Emotional Maturity Paperback – August 28, 2015

I have never written a review like the one I will now. It's been almost 2 years since this book came into my life through a recommendation from an integrative coach and long-distance friend. It's changed my relationship, my friendships, my understanding of my parents, my capacity to go deeper in meditation, and most importantly my relationship with myself - and the capacity to identify and communicate my deepest experience and feelings, often, without shame. It's true this is a verified and unique set of knowledge that leads to emotional maturity. After my wife and I worked with this ourselves, we brought it to our friends, who have transformed radically through it as well - and we used it in our somatic therapy practices - and found that this is one of the most accurate and profound sets of knowledge for helping individuals integrate their emotions and memories at the deepest level of the body-mind.For my relationship with my wife, it's transformed and deepened the intimacy and ability to navigate challenges and ability to be vulnerable (because we know what's happening within us so we can then share it). She dove into the book very deeply as well, at the same time as me. Reading the book can be a doozy if you really understand it. We laughed and cried, reading about these patterns that we've lived with all our lives (generally each person runs 2-3 main patterns) and realizing parts of ourselves and why we became the way we are. With this insight, we were able to compassionately meet each other in the deeps, again and again.We took this seriously - and that's why we got so much mileage with it. We have now introduced 45+ people to this material, and seen people's lives and relationships shift. Some people get alot more than others - because it TAKES TIME (months and months) to really marinate with this knowledge, observe yourself, try to identify your patterns - to clarify it.But you either gain clarity on these things or they WILL repeat in your life - and I have never seen anything more clear for this than the 5pp (vs. Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, Human Design, Astrology, and many other profiling approaches that all are rich and supportive).For many of us, we're familiar with the challenge of repeating patterns and miscommunication and inability to understand why we and others are doing irrational things in relationship. It's only irrational or over-reactive or doesn't make sense until we begin to understand the foundations of our psyche, which formed in our early 5 years.In this way, if both partners take this book seriously, this book lessens miscommunication between partners in a way that's nearly impossible with just practicing NVC or working on polarity or learning that men are from mars and women from venus, or boundary work - all those are supportive but in comparison to the richness and connectivity that awakens when you begin to TRULY understand your patterns, those are more tactical supports for a relationship - and this is the key foundations, in my view and the view of my wife.When you happen upon a map like this, it's worth a million points for your work life, your intimate life, your family, your friends... we're all stuck in these loops and they're deep - and it's hard to see the picture when you're in the frame - and this framework opens a rare window. Use it wisely.A big debt of gratitude to Steven Kessler for pulling together this profound body of work - and looking forward to his next book. It's important to remember that this framework of the personality patterns has been 100 years in the making, since Wilhelm Reich laid it out in the 1930's - and it has been evolved and worked on by many since then.As you might be able to tell, my wife and I (and our friends) are passionate about growth and yet we've never found a model and framework of information that is so eminently useful on a daily basis - that we're still talking about, learning from, using daily almost 2 years after first discovering it.

I have been a therapist for the last ten years, but was an editorial assistant at a book publisher for eleven years in my previous career. After getting paid to read and then paying people to make me read (for two rounds of grad school!), I have found myself burned out on books. HOWEVER, Steven Kessler's The 5 Personality Patterns is super readable--even for a burned out brain--and it really fleshed out the different safety strategies/survival styles that children develop to be okay inhabiting environments that aren't reliably able to meet certain needs. In a non-stigmatizing way, Steven explains how these strategies serve us as kids, but may not continue to be as helpful in adulthood. This book offers help to get more consciousness around our unconscious patterns, which can create internal space to allow us to make intentional, authentic choices for how we want to show up in our world(s).

This book is, hands-down, one of the top 3 most influential books I've had the delight of getting to read, in my entire life -- and I've been studying human psychology for the past 30 years.My paperback copy of this book is very-well-used, with the corners of so many pages turned down to return to, heavily highlighted, and (not kidding) referenced by me on a *daily* basis.This book, more than any other book I've ever read, changed how I think about people and how I act, enhanced the quality of all relationships in my life (both business and personal), and has helped me heal my own childhood wounds.I recommend this book to every single client of mine, and there's not a close friend of mine who's not read it or at least reviewed the main chart to understand the primary concepts.If my share here feels hyperbolic.... that's okay. I'm not sure how else to communicate the impact this book has had on my life. Forever deeply grateful to Kessler for putting this book out to the world.

I like this book. I read the books by Stephen Johnson first. The Johnson books are incredible, more educational than the Kessler book for really understanding why I made it to adulthood with no confidence and so self-defeating. The Johnson books, however, are a bit dense at times as they're written for professional therapists. They're brilliant, but I needed time and solitude to digest them. The Kessler book, however, is written for civilians. Very good information and more "how to fix yourself" recommendations than the Johnson books. I would never diss the Johnson books as they were incredibly impactful and I've returned to them repeatedly, but the Kessler book is very good at making something as complex as the psyche understandable, and the wounding from childhood quite fixable. Kudos and gratitude to Steven Kessler for making this paradigm so accessible, a Herculean task to be sure. I have been able to make great strides in healing my childhood wounding using this paradigm.