Unraveling Personality Patterns with Inner Child Expert & Somatic Healer, Anat Peri

Welcome back to the RealLife Momz podcast. It is time to take a break from all your to dos and take time to focus on you. I'm Lisa Foster, your host, and today I have a fellow mom with me, Anat Peri. She is an inner child expert and a somatic healer,

And today we're discussing the five personality patterns and how they show up in our lives. So hi, Anat. Thank you for coming on our show today. Yeah, thank you, Lisa. Great to be with you. I'm excited to talk about this. Personality patterns and types really intrigue me because think they do affect how we show up and also the people around us, how we should be like reacting to them.

So I would love to hear what your thoughts are. Like, what, what do you consider is a personality pattern? And Why are they so important? So to give credit where credit is deserved. This isn't something that I created. There's a great book by Dr. Steven [00:01:00] Kessler called the five personality patterns.

And so if you want to deep dive into it, Get his book. It's more something that I have been studying and actually had a call with him years ago. And use with my clients and with my students and my certification program and is such a huge part of knowing how to support someone through their trauma or towards their healing or move through any difficult situation.

I've come to realize that you cannot coach., each person the same way. You can have great modalities and tools, but if you don't know what their primary and secondary personality patterns are, then they might not feel safe enough to actually heal, to move through what they need to heal. So in the past , four years that I've been working with the five percent patterns, it's a game changer professionally.

And I'd say it's a game changer for [00:02:00] anyone. Professionally, whether you're dealing with a boss or coworkers, or even personally from your kids to your partner, to your in laws, it just, when you know, and understand this stuff, oh my God, what a difference it makes. Wow. Yes. Okay. Well, I'm excited about this.

And yes I deal with clients as well. And yes, I hear you when a person can feel safe. There's a lot more healing that can happen. Right. So I'm excited to learn this a little bit. So would you mind taking us through some of these? There are five of them, is that right?

But they cost as five. Yes. There, there, yes. There's five and there's one that has kind of like a secondary, but yes. So first off, I'll say that these patterns. out of a developmental need that was not met. And when that developmental need was not met, [00:03:00] this strategy, you can call it, got formed because We always look to survive to feel safe.

And how and when it shows up now in your life is in overwhelm when you're in a state of overwhelm in any way, whether it's a, you're in a fight and disagreement, or you're just super stressed out is most likely when it shows up. And. There's beautiful gifts to all of them. And how, how can you get to accessing more of the gifts as opposed to the, the distortion of it is learning how to cultivate safety, learning how to feel safe within yourself so that you don't need to use the pattern in order for your nervous system to feel safe, you feel safe.

And so therefore you're tapping into a lot of the beautiful gifts of it. So. So the first pattern got formed as a developmental need to feel safe to just come into this world. And so if mom had [00:04:00] rough time in her third trimester, or if labor was really challenging, anything like that, a lot of times, or there was some kind of separation between mom and baby for the first few days or week, or mom just wasn't able to really be there to usher you into this world and this world.

safest way, then the leaving pattern gets formed. And it's basically not feeling safe to occupy Your body to be in this world that it feels safer to not be in this world to be in your either in your imagination or Really out there you know connecting with, you know guides and spirits and all that and not You Dissociating a lot from the body and so it can look like some of the gifts of it, I should say.

It can look like someone that's really, really creative, writers, you know performers because they're, they're, they're, they're channeling a lot of that beautiful [00:05:00] stuff. But what could be challenging about it is that our systems, our nervous systems are very sensitive, very frail. And so we don't do well with big energy.

Anything that feels intense pulls us out of our ability to be in our body and stay there. So that's the leading pattern. We tend to talk really fast. Because, again, we don't need to be in our body, we're just in our head, we're all the way up here. It actually informs your body type, it could be like a, like your, your, it tends to be more, more frail, more skinny, more slim, like yoga body.

It's really fascinating how the energy forms that. The, the second pattern is the merging pattern and this one got formed out of a developmental need for nurturance. If you did not get the nurturance that you needed, whether that was. Literally getting enough of mom's breast milk, getting enough food.

This is from like, [00:06:00] Three months all the way to like three years old. If you didn't get that or emotionally mom wasn't there to nurture you or even physically not there then this distortion of There isn't enough And so it feels like I'm not enough, there isn't enough, and the only way for me to feel safe is to get what I need.

And so it becomes this, I need. to merge with other people. It's the tendency to be like needy, clingy, and to feel this hollowness, this emptiness inside. And this is my primary pattern. And I know what it feels like because for years, I felt like this black hole in my chest that could never be filled as much as I was.

Needy from others and getting from others. It was just never enough. It can never be filled. And there was a lot of anxiety and a lot of [00:07:00] inability to be with myself and always needing someone to save me and always needing someone to process things with me and to dump my, you know, my stuff. my, my stories on or my sadness or anything like that.

So that's one part of it. There's also like a secondary part to the merging pattern, which is the merging compensated, which is came from the same distortion of I'm not enough, but how you get safety, how you get it https: otter. ai

The merging compensated is the savior, but both of them feel not enough. One just fully, you know, doesn't know how to give to themselves and gets it from others. The other one just abandons themselves and gets fulfilled by others. So it's, it's a giving, but [00:08:00] a giving from empty. Now the gift of this pattern is we're the healer a lot of times.

We're the lover. We have, when we learn, which I have, how to fill that void, how to nurture ourselves, how to give ourselves what we always needed and never learned how to. And we fill that gap because I never feel that black hole anymore. We have so much capacity to give. We've so much compassion, so much love. So a lot of, a lot of us in the healing are. tend to run one of these patterns. So can I ask you, like, I know we're going to go on to the other ones, but what was it for you that helped you fill, I guess, that black hole? Because that seems really deep. Yeah. Yeah and this is a lot of what I work on with my clients.

It's like, once you recognize, oh, this is their primary pattern, it's like, First [00:09:00] and foremost, even if they came to me to work on their relationship or, or their career, it's like, we have to get you out of this pattern because this pattern runs your life. Safety, right? We have to learn safety. And what, feel safe and learning how to work with the nervous system to feel safe, to feel our feelings, to nurture ourselves.

Specifically, like for the merging pattern, it is to learn how to nurture yourself instead of running to someone else. When you feel panicked, instead of falling into hopelessness. Instead, when you feel that hopelessness, you feel it and you hold yourself through it. You learn how to mother yourself, how to nurture yourself, how to love yourself.

So that is specific to that one, even though it may seem universal to all [00:10:00] the others, to everybody. Doesn't everybody need to learn how to do that? Yeah. But specifically for this, pattern. Like for the leaving pattern, it's just learning to literally occupy your body. And so the work that I do a lot with clients that that's their pattern is.

A lot of nervous system regulation, a lot of just creating safe, sensual touch. Like, can you give yourself a massage right now? Can you massage your arms or caress yourself or tickle yourself and just start to create sensation that feels safe. safe so that you can start to feel safe to be in your body, helping them to slow down their breath.

So a lot of nervous system regulation happens with that. Third pattern is the enduring pattern. And this one, the developmental need was to know that you have choice. And this happens around the age of three, four, when, you know, the [00:11:00] child starts to realize. Oh, I can do things on my own.

Oh, I'm not my mom. I'm not my dad And if mom and dad were really strict and it had to be their way or if they Here's a big one. If they shamed you in any way, if there's any shame, then we learn it's not safe for me to speak up or to do what I want to do. So instead, I'm just going to hunker down and just take it because I don't want to lose mom and dad's love.

And so they learn to just stuff down their feelings, stuff down their emotions, and just simply endure it. It forms the body type too. A lot of times they'll be more heavy set. If it's just either their whole, they'll be stockier. There'll just be some denseness to that especially if it's their primary pattern.

And so, how do you help them heal and move through that? [00:12:00] They need to learn that A, they have choice. So when I work with a client like this, I never tell them anything. I put it in front of them, I give them choice, I ask them a lot of questions, I let them start to feel that they can choose and that there's no judgment because if they sense any bit of shame, they're going to crawl back into that, into that clam, right?

That cocoon. And for them a lot of movement because they're used to sitting and holding it all. It's not like, Oh, what are you feeling? Where are you feeling it? It's like, let's move with that feeling. Let's dance with that feeling. Let's create a lot of movement. Let's start to move it up.

Very common for them in my method of moving energy of feeling feelings for them to get the place where they feel nauseous. I feel nauseous because of course, cause you've been stuffing it down and now it's [00:13:00] knocking to come up and I have them be nauseous, have them actually act out throwing up, like, like marry that energy, be nauseous. They end up moving through it and unlocking whatever was underneath that. So a lot of permission to feel what is there and to move through what's there. That's kind of beautiful. Actually, just kind of getting it, I mean, not beautiful to throw it up, but, but getting it out almost like never. And I'll say this, they don't throw up.

It's just energy, but it's so amazing how common it is. It's every time, every client that I have that runs the enduring pattern at some point, as we're moving through feeling feelings, we'll say, Oh, I feel nauseous. And I'm like, perfect. We got the big one here that you stuffing down. And you [00:14:00] know, my work is very much about learning how to actually.

Feel your feelings because most of us are not feeling our feelings. We are Intellectualizing our feelings we're judging it. We're wanting to fix it change it stuffing it down numbing it avoiding it Most people don't know How to actually feel their feelings and that is a huge part of what it is that I teach the next one is the the aggressive pattern. And this one got formed, you know, around the age four or five years old when the child felt in some way, some level of abandonment. Whether it was, you know, just, you know mom and dad not being there or yelling at them, fighting with them somewhere where it's like, wow, you're not on my side.

You're not with me. You're abandoning me. It's me against the world. I'm all alone. So their biggest fear is to be alone. Just like the biggest fear of the [00:15:00] enduring pattern is to ever experience shame again. So they don't want it. They'll just stuff anything down. Right. The merging pattern is, is to you know, fall into like hopelessness.

Anytime they feel hopeless, helpless, it's like, ah, I need saving. So for the, for the aggressive pattern, it's it's the fear of being let down. Experiencing being alone, experiencing that abandonment. And so. It can look like I'll show you like I'll fight back and it's, you know, that level of aggression or it's, I need to be in control because I need to make sure that like things go my way.

And you know so we know a lot of what the aggressive looks like otherwise. And you know, what the aggressive pattern needs to heal is to learn to. It's to learn to heal that level of inability to trust others. It requires a [00:16:00] practitioner that is very skilled. You need, you need to have authority because they're testing you.

Can I even trust you? And so yeah, learning to feel safe to trust, learning to feel safe to trust the universe, to let go of that, of the need to control everything so that's a little snippet. My, my work is about understanding that everything is learned, and you learned it by the age of seven, and it was modeled to you, and you learned by what you saw, heard, or felt energetically from mainly your role models, mom and dad, but if you learned it, you can unlearn it. And you're like how do I heal my own inner child it's Acknowledgement and validation.

Like we need to learn to acknowledge and validate what is showing up, what is arising as what is arising. There's nothing to fix. There's nothing wrong. There's [00:17:00] just, can you acknowledge and validate? Like, just imagine if they didn't try and fix it or make it wrong.

And you said, you know, I'm feeling I'm, I'm feeling annoyed or I'm feeling sad. And instead of like, what's wrong, how do I fix this? It's just acknowledging and validating that. Yes, I do feel that. And where do I feel it in my body? And let me name the sensations that are there around that and then learning how to feel it is like imagining that you are in the ocean of your emotion.

And if you've ever been on, you know, in the ocean, like the Pacific ocean, especially there's waves. So you want to think of your emotions as waves. And if you're in the ocean of your emotion and a wave of emotion comes and you just damn there. You're going to get smacked down. You need to learn how to be with the emotion.

You need to learn [00:18:00] how to ride the wave. And, you know, Harvard did a study that you can move through any emotion in 90 seconds. The reason you don't is because we're not actually, we're Feeling the emotion. You don't know how, like I said, we're fixing it. We're judging it. We're intellectualizing it. We're stuffing it down.

But when you do, it does move through you in 90 seconds. So how do you do that? Well, you work with your nervous system because your nervous system's always working for you, but you're not always with you. It's always listening for safety. And when it senses safety, it metabolizes it. It processes whatever's there and it discharges it, right?

Like a dog comes towards you and you're like, Oh no, am I scared of this dog? Oh no, this dog safe. Oh, okay. And suddenly you feel like you get hot and then you sweat it out and you're good. But you know, A big scary dog comes, and I say dogs because that's my like, I guess, little dogs. [00:19:00] I'm like, well, you don't jump on me.

I'm cool, but I still get really sweaty. Big dogs. I'm like, ah, and I just want to like run the other way. But yeah, when it senses threat, protects you, it puts you into fight, flight, freeze, or please like, you'll definitely see me running from the dog. It puts us in this protective bubble, and So there's this feeling that we're saying isn't safe, and so we're not feeling it.

We're actually protected by it, and we're stuck sometimes in these heightened states, whether it's pleasing, or appeasing, or running. Like people that say to me, I'm anxious. I feel anxious. I'm like, what are you running from? Anxiety is not the feeling, it's a running from a feeling. What are you running from?

If you're very controlling, having to control everything, that is the fight. I'm like, what are you trying to control instead of allowing yourself to be there? [00:20:00] So this is what happens when we don't work with our nervous system. We get smacked by the waves over and over again. And here we are stuck in a heightened state. If you can. So, learn to cultivate safety in your system. And I have a free guided meditation on this on how to work with the nervous system and really learn how to self regulate and feel good in our body. Then already just working with your breath in that way, you're going to start to feel safer with whatever emotion is there.

Then from there, when an emotion comes up for you, you ask yourself, where am I feeling this? And if you can name it in sensations, like it's in my chest and it's a size of an orange and it's heavy and it's hot and it's tight, what you're doing is you're speaking the language of the nervous system.

Sensations are the language of the nervous system. It's neutral. You're not saying it's good or bad. It's just, it's sensation. And right [00:21:00] there. You're speaking to the nervous system. So you're starting to work with the nervous system and saying, Hey, let's walk through this door. Let's get on this surfboard.

Let's ride this wave. Then what it looks like to feel the feeling from there is to get accurate with naming what it is that you're feeling. Is it sad? Is it disheartened? Is it hopeless? Like how accurate can you get with that? And then Imagine that you are an actor on stage, and it's a one woman, one man show, and you can't speak, but you have to act out, I am. Disheartened or I am hopeless whatever that feeling is in order to do that for the audience to get Oh, she's disheartened You would have to use your whole body. You would actually have to be fully self expressed You would have to allow yourself [00:22:00] to fully feel that feeling And so by doing that You're giving data to your nervous system.

You'd have to use your body language, your facial expression, some sounds like, what does it sound like when you feel disheartened? What is the facial expression? What's the body language? And so suddenly we are feeling the feeling with more of our whole beingness and we're giving so much data. To our nervous system for it to learn this emotion, to learn this energy so it can digest it, metabolize it, and discharge it.

And this is what it is to feel a feeling and so what I do with my clients is I have them identify the sensation and the emotion, and I say, okay, I'm setting a timer, 90 seconds. Go, act it out, and every time, within 90 seconds, that wave has [00:23:00] passed, most of the time. And then they either land at shore, or I like to call it the land of possibility, like suddenly they feel possible again, hopeful again, or Another wave comes up.

There's another layer because sometimes that is what happens, right? There's layers to it. We pop the lid off and we feel nauseous But now we feel sad and underneath that there's anger and underneath that there's grief. And so Learning to feel our feelings in that way, giving ourselves permission to take up space, to be center stage, to be the star, let it be the star, so that your nervous system can learn this energy. It's not that you're never going to feel that type of feeling again. It's that now you go from, Whoa, it's so uncomfortable every time that I feel sadness or believe it or not for some people, joy and love feels uncomfortable [00:24:00] to now it's programmed in there. And next time you have a thought or something triggers that emotion for you, your nervous system knows what to do with it and knows how to work with it. And so what you're doing is you're building your capacity to handle more instead of what we See, all the time is we're in, we're stuck in survival in our little box. I don't want to ever feel this again. How do I not experience that again? And we become weak as a society. And it sounds like by, can I say almost like training your nervous system?

It's yes. You're, when you get hit by these waves or you should be riding them, but when you get hit by the waves, it's like your body, like almost naturally knows how to surf on them. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you could see that. I mean, think about whatever emotions you have no problem with. And for [00:25:00] some people, if you grew up in a household of chaos.

And you walk into a home where everybody's yelling. You're like, cool, no big deal. But if you didn't grow up in a household of chaos and you go over to your part and to your in laws and everyone's yelling, you're just like, Oh my god, this is too much for my nervous system. It's because for one person it was trained, it's already programmed what to do with it and how to discharge it.

And the other person that isn't so we get to expand our nervous system's capacity to handle the full range to handle more big waves, small waves. It'll know what to do. Nice. Yeah, I love that. And I don't think I want to train my nervous system to want to be in a household that's chaotic and yelling though, let's do it or do I, maybe I do just to know how to handle it.

So this is a great question. And especially for those that run the leaving pattern that, Oh my God, it's too much. [00:26:00] I can't be with big energy. And that was me. That's my secondary pattern. And you know, your secondary pops in when your primary doesn't work. Think of it like you're too busy. You're two bodyguards, and if the first bodyguard, like, gets taken down, the second one comes up.

So if you're in a situation where it doesn't work to come, to merge and come back to love, for example, then the second one kicks in for me. And so, like, with my partner, he would, his patterns are different. So he'd get loud, and I'd leave the room, and he'd say, where are you going? I'm like, it's too much.

I can't. And so to answer your question, for those of us that run the leaving pattern and something like being with anger, whether it's other people's big energy or our own, it is very important to learn to cultivate and be with big energy, not so that you can get in the ring and fight, but so that you don't have to feel that you can't be in the fight. I have capacity now [00:27:00] to access my, you know, my fire energy without burning myself down or burning the village down. So there's a healthy way to cultivate something like that. And it could also look like boundaries. Right? It's, it's knowing you walk into the home where there's a lot of chaos.

It's like, okay, what is my boundary around and what I'm hearing is, I know there's one more that we left out, so we'll get back to that because I know people are hanging on going, well, what was the fifth one, right?

However my question, because you were talking about, you know, your partner there, like, if you have different patterns in the household that maybe are different waves for each other, how do we handle that? Oh, wow. I don't know if I could cover that in two minutes. No, I'm just kidding. 90 seconds, right?

Just 90 seconds. Like my, my partner and I have opposite ones, right? His is, oh, oh, [00:28:00] here comes the fifth one. Rigid pattern. Okay. This is rigid and a little bit of aggressive. I say more enduring and mine is merging and leaving. So we're opposites in that. And I think the gift and beauty in that is we get to teach each other.

Like he's learned patience and more compassion for me. Like we get to teach each other the gifts of it. I've learned more like structure and organization and finding my, my voice and my power from him. And you know, he brings groundedness to me. I bring lightness and flexibility to him. So I think it's really beautiful to have the opposites.

And also in moments where I remember we just landed in Greece for our wedding when you were getting married in Greece and it was a stressful flight to say the least. And so we get in the car rental and he's like, He was really obviously overwhelmed, so all his patterns were [00:29:00] kicking in and he's like, you could go sleep with your parents tonight because my parents flew in that night too.

And if I didn't know his pattern, I would have been very upset in that moment. And instead I was like, Okay, we just had a hell of a 15 hour flight. We are tired. We are hungry. He's overwhelmed. That's all it is. He doesn't mean this. He needs space to cool off. Good thing he's dropping you off at the hair salon for your hair trial. And that's it. And I didn't take it personal. So understanding the stuff. Oh, it's going to save you so much from taking things personal. You're going to understand the person you're going to understand how to support them also in feeling safe and what they need.

There's a whole lot that you can learn from the book. And then I think specifically if you are looking to know how to work with clients as a practitioner, I have a free guide that I created from all my years. This isn't in Steven Kessler's book. This is more specific to [00:30:00] how to support, you know, your clients and work with your clients.

Through stuff. So I have that free guide available on my website. Awesome. Awesome. So it sounds like that fifth one was the rigid. So thank you for putting that in there. I feel like I might be part of that, that one too. Pattern it gets formed. That one is like age five to seven, which I think as parents, we think by then, like, well, the kid could tie his own shoes and shower and eat and brush his own teeth.

So like you should get everything right. And we tend to become parents that reward our kids for everything they do. Right. And so they, they form this belief of like, I am my accomplishments. And, or if you have parents that were rigid themselves and there's a right way in a wrong way. So you feel that you have to perform, you have to get things right. Otherwise, you're You would lose their love. So you become this person again, the distortion, the belief is I am my accomplishment and there's a right way and a wrong [00:31:00] way. So you, it could look like being very hard on yourself, very hard on others. And yeah, stuck in this. And then of course, there's also a lot of beautiful, beautiful gifts to to the rigid pattern, to all the patterns.

So there's no bad pattern. There's just the one you got and it's never going to change. You just like, you can't get rid of it. You just get to move more into the gifts of it. And for those of you that are like, I could see myself in all five. So I'm really confused. Pay attention to what shows up when you're overwhelmed, when you're stressed, when you're in a fight.

Because those are your survival strategies. The others could just be that they were your parents survival strategies, and that you learned it as a behavior. So for you, you can access it and behave like it, but it's not [00:32:00] necessarily something that you do when your system feels overwhelmed, when you don't feel safe.

So that's the distinction there. Yeah, that's a big one. Because I was thinking that as you're going through I'm like, Oh, I can see myself there. And then But no, in the overwhelmed, I am rigid. I go back to like, okay, we need to plan this out. This is what we're doing. Do, do, do, do, do. And there we go. Well, I couldn't be more rigid just to get me out of it.

My sister in law, because I've, you know, seen her and my brother get into a fight and she'll start cleaning. Yeah, they're literally fighting. She's like cleaning because she's looking to create. order. Yes. Because your system's looking for something like order feels safe. I understand your sister. I get it.

Now here's something because, okay, we have lots of parents listening, right? And we're all like, shit, what did I do to my kid, right?

, what would you say to parents out there that are listening going, Oh, gosh, these, these patterns in it, yes, I'm for myself, and I'm going to heal [00:33:00] myself and things like that.

But like feeling maybe a little guilty about what maybe they put into their child. Well, feel the guilt, but release the guilt, because ride the wave, ride the wave. Even if your kids are adults, they're still looking at you as a role model of what's possible for them.

So the biggest, best thing that you can do is to heal yourself, to learn, to come out of your trauma. the distortions of your patterns and be more in the gifts to have a more regulated nervous system and then therefore if you're the one that is Evolved in that higher state of consciousness, so to speak, your job is to have more space and compassion to meet them where they're at, not to fix them or judge them, but to see it just like I see it in my husband.

And I'm like, okay, cool. I see that. And I know like learning [00:34:00] what I know that he needs right now to come out of it. And if we regulate our nervous system, that in itself already supports them in co regulating with us and coming out of it. But yes, they learn how to feel safe in their body. They're, they're gonna, they're gonna free themselves from the distortions. They'll be more in the gifts. And you did a beautiful job. . I love that. So tell the listeners where they can find you and some of those amazing things you've offered.

Yeah. So all the freebies are on my website, trainingcampforthesoul. com.

And I hang out on Instagram. If you follow me on there I message every new follower because I always like to get to know the human behind the follower. Cause I have a lot of resources, free resources, my own other people, and, you know, just want to support people with whatever it is that they need.

So feel free to [00:35:00] follow me there or check out any of my offerings and free offerings on my website. Well, thank you so much for sharing all these personality patterns and just. Your own experience with them, as well as all your free offers to us. We really appreciate that. And it's been so nice to have you on the show. Thank you, Lisa, for having me. Thank you so much for joining us today for this episode. I hope you were able to identify your personality pattern.

And if you want to learn about Anant and all her amazing resources, Including those free guides that she was talking about On her show, just click on the link in the show notes, And until next week, keep riding those waves and taking care of yourself because you matter.