Child Development and Adult Character
BFNow Self-Study Module 3 – Overview
[This is part of the BFNow Self-Study section of this site. For more about this section, please look at About BFNow Self-Study and BFNow Self-Study Orientation.]
In Module 3 we’ll focus on the influence of child development on adult character using a particular approach called Character Styles.
Using the terms we developed in the previous module, we’ll look at
adult character as a territory
the influences of child development as a layer
Character Styles as a map for that layer.
In exploring this territory, we’ll be looking at impacts on us from various childhood events, but before turning to childhood I want to offer a sense of empathy and compassion for parents.
1) As a parent, I know I was not always able to act in keeping with my own ideals. The glass of my parenting is half full and any discussion of difficulties in childhood can stir up regrets. If you are a parent and any of this module’s material stirs you that way, I hope you will reconnect with the first module’s self-compassion.
2) As a child of parents (as we all are), you may find this module’s material stirring up a sense of unhappiness and blame toward your parents in some places (and appreciation in others). While those feelings may be understandable – and let them surface if that’s what you’re feeling – in a larger system-sense, your parents were likely just passing along what they internalized from their parents, and so on into the dim past of the Empire Era. We have an opportunity now to break those cycles. I hope this module’s material will help us do so.
OK, on to childhood.
Character Styles are often presented with a focus on psychological defenses but I’m going to frame it around five emotionally significant developmental tasks:
These timeframes are not meant to be precise, merely indicative of when each task first becomes important in our lives. (These tasks often have recurring importance at later ages as well.)
Whenever there is some kind of developmental trauma that causes one of these tasks to get distorted or to not complete in an age-appropriate way, the child
misses out on developing important skills
acquires various limiting beliefs
develops various emotional landmines that can be triggered into re-evoking the pain of the initial trauma
The child then compensates by developing various defense patterns and workaround behaviors which often continue into adult life. The defensive patterns can either be acute, arising in direct response to some trigger, or they can be preemptive/anticipatory, there in an attempt to prevent triggering.
As a system, we can map it like this:
The whole bundle of Emotional Landmines, Limiting Beliefs, Missing Skills, Defensive Patterns and Workaround Behaviors is known as the Character Style.
I encourage you to look at the Character Styles as dimensions of personality that can co-exist with each other in a dynamically changing composite rather than as distinct categories where you must choose one or another.
The explorations will go through all five developmental tasks. I’ll go into the details of each task, its distortions, the resulting defenses and workaround behaviors as well as strategies for healing. The explorations will ask you to look for the defense patterns as they show up in various sub-personalities and then take some first steps toward healing.
Character Styles
This Character Styles approach is a particular map. Like any map, it is partial, selective and provisional – and since we are only dealing with one layer, it’s definitely not the whole story or the one true story. Nevertheless, after working with it for thirty years, I have found it quite helpful for understanding and healing my own wounds and for compassionately understanding other people.
I like it for at least six reasons:
It’s given me a lot of personally useful and actionable insights.
It’s empirically rooted in human development so it’s easier to see underlying causes.
It deals with issues that essentially everyone has to some degree.
It’s a safe and productive approach for anyone to use on their own, outside of a medical or therapeutic setting.
Unlike Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram or similar approaches, it doesn’t attempt to typecast (as a categorical instance) who you are. Rather it provides a language for understanding and strategies for healing the defensive patterns that move you out of your Optimal Zone when you feel stressed or threatened.
As I’m using it, it applies to your sub-personalities, each of which can have a different composite of character styles. It treats you as a territory, not an object.
Key Concepts and Terms
I’d like to continue to offer you a fresh set of key concepts and words that I encourage you to pay special attention to in this module. These are part of the shared language we are building. Many, but not all, of these are also in the titles of the explorations:
character styles
attachment
Optimal Zone adult sub-personality
Embodiment – Leaving
Taking In – Pulling
Putting Out – Enduring
Trusting Others – Controlling
Trusting Self – Performing
The last five are the core pairs for each exploration: The first in the pair is the developmental task. The second is the character style that develops in response to not completing the task.
We will also be building on concepts and experiences from the presentations and the previous modules, including:
Optimal Zone (hOS Literacy Part 5)
sub-personalities (Module 1)
defensive behaviors: projection, compensation, transference, displacement (hOS Literacy Part 5)
systems, territories and maps (Systems Literacy Part 1 and Module 2)
A visual map for this module’s content
Here’s a diagram with the titles for each exploration plus the previous explorations for context. While this module’s explorations all follow the same format, each one stands on its own.
Module 3 Explorations
Trusting Others – Exploration 4
Supplemental material about this Module
Benefits
I’d like to provide some additional context and motivation for this module’s series of explorations. It really comes down to two big benefits:
1) At a personal level, if you can make progress in the module’s five areas, you can cut through a huge maze of psychological issues and move much more comfortably into your Optimal Zone. Specifically, the five keys are:
Learn to feel reasonably comfortable and safe in your body. (Embodiment)
Feel confidently nourished and supported from a variety of sources, including those within yourself. (Taking In)
Grow into your own creative, expressive capacity. (Putting Out)
Settle into a comfortable sense of support and resiliency via appropriate trust of others and of life. (Trusting Others)
Discern your own inner direction and know how to follow it. (Trusting Self)
None of these are entirely easy but progress can be made on all of them and, worked on together, their combined effect is pretty amazing.
2) At a world level, Empire Era cultures tend to use child-raising practices that block the completion of the development tasks and steadily generate all of the defense patterns. These cultures then exploit these wounds for the purposes of control. One of the most transformational things you can do is to heal your own wounds, remove the Empire Era hook-points, and then help others do the same. In the spirit of Buckminster Fuller, you make the old ways obsolete.
If we are to create new ways of living, we need to first walk this path for ourselves. Otherwise, regardless of how cool or clever the new ways may seem, they will still be inhabited by people caught (and driven) by the old patterns.
History of the Character Styles approach
The Character Styles approach was originated by Wilhelm Reich, one of Freud's students who went on to become a colleague, in his book Character Analysis (1933). Its value got somewhat eclipsed by the later controversies around Reich, including his research into what he called orgone energy, but it nevertheless has continued to be developed and refined. I think of it as a largely hidden gem, obscured for decades by mainstream psychology’s negative orientation to Reich’s work and their eventual ostracism of him.
I first encountered this approach thirty years ago through Barbara Brennan’s Light Emerging, where the defense patterns are referred to as Character Structures. I got to know this approach more fully through my wife, Lianna, while she was a student at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing from 2012 to 2016. These Character Structures are a core component of the Brennan School’s curriculum.
Beyond that, in preparing for the original Bright Future Now online course in 2016, I delved into Stephen Johnson’s Character Styles (1994) and Steven Kessler’s The 5 Personality Patterns (2015). Since then, I’ve also discovered The Childhood Conclusions Fix (2010 in Dutch, 2017 in English) by Lisette Schuitemaker.
What you are getting in the explorations is my own particular synthesis and retelling, informed by my own experience, geared toward the needs of Planetary Era Cultural Co-Evolvers. I hope you’ll find them useful.
Resources for going deeper
I recommend both Kessler’s and Schuitemaker’s books. Kessler is more comprehensive although from the perspective of a therapist. Schuitemaker’s book is perhaps more in tune with the spirit and intention of Module 3 and may be a better resource to start with for many people.
Kessler’s book provides an extensive but accessible introduction with lots of exercises based on his therapy practice. My one big divergence from Kessler is that I’m using a sub-personality approach. He looks at people as units (objects), like most people do, and sees at most two character styles for each person. That may be useful for your most prominent sub-personalities – and may be a helpful focus when your main interest is personal healing – but I find it too limiting when the goal is both self-understanding and understanding of others.
Lisette Schuitemaker isn’t a therapist. She’s been a successful entrepreneur, a coach, a Brennan-trained healer and a former chair of the Findhorn Foundation Trustees. She uses this diverse background to give the book an approachable, often personal, description of how to understand and then transform your “childhood conclusions” which are still limiting and shaping your life. There’s a strong emphasis on the gifts that each Character Style has to offer once cleared of these childhood conclusions. To give you a sense of the flavor, here’s a slight adaptation of how she summaries the five Character Styles in the table of contents (my additions in []):
Welcoming our existence [Embodiment]
Embodying sensitivity, spirituality, vision and a sense of beauty by turning panicky self-talk – which wants us to believe a mistake has been made as we are not welcome and don’t belong in this brutal, harsh world – into feeling welcome.Living to give [Taking In]
Overflowing with abundance, curiosity, generosity and vivacity by turning around incessant self-talk of not being [sufficiently] attentive, critical, determined, efficient, funny, generous, good-looking, kind, positive, tall, thin, well-educated or whatever [into a peaceful sense of being] enough.Willing to create [Putting Out]
Liberating creativity, compassion, playfulness and joy from under layers of resentful self-talk that sighs that there is no other way than to do other people’s bidding, keep our anger down, our creative exploits and plans hidden and show the world our good humor.Noble hearts [Trusting Others]
Coming to trust and live in integrity with passion, chivalry and charisma by turning around domineering self-talk which holds that no one is to be trusted, that we have to know what comes ahead, strategize and be in control of situations and people.An authentic fit [Trusting Self]
Relaxing into essence, unconventionality, ingenuity and authenticity by turning around the rigid self-talk that gives strict orders to conform, follow suit and put on a perfect performance at all times so as not to be found out as a fake.