How Core Beliefs Become Your Character Strategies
In this writing, I’ll share with you…
What are Hakomi character strategies and how do they differ from other systems of categorizing personality.
Core beliefs as the seed of Character Strategies
The possibilities of growth beyond the limits of your strategies
How Character Strategies Get Started
What are they?
“Character Strategies” are similar to archetypes, enneagram personality types, and other ways of categorizing personality.
However, Hakomi's Character Strategies differ in some very important ways. The primary difference is that rather than telling you who you are, they describe why you behave and experience life in certain ways. They describe the likely missing challenging experiences of your childhood. Character strategies are the result of strategies you tried as a child to get needs met in overwhelming or hostile environments.
The strategies carry strengths and limitations. The limits of your character strategies are what has gotten in the way of your natural life-long development. Hakomi provides maps and explorations to move beyond the limitations of your character while retaining useful skills and strengths.
Hakomi identifies 9 different strategies. Between the time you were in your mother's womb and until you were about six years old, you likely developed many of the nine Hakomi strategies to varying degrees.
As a child, when something happened to you that was either emotionally or physically painful, your child self could only respond in ways that were possible within your capacity.
Within your childhood, you had very little power to affect your environment and very basic ideas about yourself and the world.
For example:
As an infant in times of overwhelm - the best response may have been to withdraw and dissociate.
As a 2-year-old in times of overwhelm - the best response may have been to express neediness or self-reliance.
As a 5-year-old in times of overwhelm - the best response may have been to achieve or entertain for attention.
All of the above best responses were motivated by one or multiple painful experiences in your childhood.
Through these experiences, you formed “Core Beliefs” about who you are, the world, and how you could safely relate to others.
These Core Beliefs are created out of intense emotion and physical contraction.
How Core Beliefs Become Character Strategies
As you transitioned from childhood into adolescence and eventually adulthood, these core beliefs formed into your character strategies. The character strategies are reflections of the child’s limited and naive understanding of self and world.
Your character strategies have now become your egoic identity defense system, creating boundary limits for your life expression and unconscious filtering of your present moment experience.
Your core beliefs are the seeds that grow into character strategies.
Your character strategies act out your core beliefs.
The overwhelming emotional pains of your child self remain encapsulated in your body. The avoidance of these deep emotional pains is usually a primary source of motivation, and often conflict, for every adult.
This means that the unconscious beliefs formed by wounded or traumatized children are a major source of the collective actions of our societies. It is imperative for us to take personal responsibility for unwinding these core beliefs, developing beyond the limitations of our character strategies, and seeking support to do so if needed.
Character Strategies indicate barriers to your natural development
Hakomi understands that Character is growth delayed. Meaning, that character strategies do not describe who you are. They explain why you experience and behave in certain ways. Most importantly they help indicate where you are limited and where possibility for change and growth is present.
How can this help me heal and change if this is all happening under the surface?
To access and reveal your core wounds and change how you experience yourself and the world in a lasting way, you need to befriend your unconscious.
The wounded child parts of you are not readily accessible in your normal consciousness. That is how they have remained so long a part of your operating ecosystem.
You see, your everyday conscious experience is filtered, managed, and navigated by your unconscious to avoid core wounds. The keys to befriending your unconscious are mindfulness and compassion.
Understanding the basic concept of Character Strategies as “the best a child could do in a certain circumstance” can be immensely supportive in developing compassion for yourself and all other people in your life.
Truly, the innocence of a wounded child lives within every expression of everyone’s Egoic Identity Defense System.
The specific map of character strategies that resonate with your self-understanding can provide great insights into how your sense of self and world are organized unconsciously. It can point you towards blindspots in your development and new possibilities.
The 9 strategies are complex and detailed, built on solid foundations of developmental theory and the rich study of psychotherapy. They are powerful maps. However, like all maps, they ultimately fail to capture the unique expression of each individual landscape. If you are curious about the character strategies I will write more on each one in the future, or you can look to the primary Hakomi training book for great examples and descriptions.
In a session, it is my role to know the maps, and support your self-discovery. I track for indicators of core material, and will support you in accessing beyond the limits your character strategies. The pains that may be encapsulated in your body require a tender approach and befriending of your unconscious.
The conditions for the re-emergence of courage and vulnerability can be learned and practiced for each other and ourselves. The possibilities of your unique human development remain waiting.
In future offerings, I will be diving deeper into each of the nine character strategies, with experimental mindfulness prompts, meditations, and practices. Please subscribe to my weekly newsletter below if you want to receive more blogs like this and more.
