I listened to this entire book while out on my evening walks to get some exercise.  The focus of the book is understanding and working with personalities and defences through the embodied movements of internal energies that have developed and shaped us through our growing years and onwards.  So to be listening to this audiobook while also exercising my body lent the experience a very immersive and immediate aspect for me.  Another additional extra of listening to this audiobook was being able to hear with aural musicality the voice of the author, Stephen Kessler – something that can be lost in reading a conventional book.
 
Overall, I very much enjoyed listening to this book and learning more about working therapeutically with the body and embodied energies.  This is an area that I have had an interest in and practiced in as a psychotherapist for many years.  Here, in Stephen Kessler’s book, I found another very helpful supplement to my lifetime experiences of the choreography of the mind, body and soul.  It was early in my life that I learned the value of including the language of the body not only in interpersonal communications but also in the practice of spiritual contemplation.  Exploring along the way different embodied mindful practices, experiential movement, and therapeutic bodywork, as well as connecting to evolutionary lineage and transpersonal awareness, I gained a rich sense of the whole of life, the expanse of consciousness, finding extension through the energetic formation of our bodies.  Therefore, as my journey of development continues, it was a delight for me to hear Kessler refer to the embodied spirit/soul:
Embodiment takes place when the incoming spirit/soul is able to orient itself to the physical world, settle into the physical body, and claim it. We might say that the child’s incoming spirit attaches to the physical world. In order to do that, it needs to experience the physical world as being sufficiently loving and safe.
 
Kessler then proceeds to a description of what he refers to as “survival patterns”.  He connects his ideas to the groundbreaking work of Wilhelm Reich, a star student of Sigmund Freud, who noticed his patients displaying shared patterns of character resistances which he referred to as Character Structures.  Kessler then references the work of Alexander Lowen who developed Reich’s thinking into five different patterns: Schizoid, Oral, Masochist, Psychopath, Rigid.  While these names are taken from Freud and evoke Freudian analyses of psychopathologies, Kessler leans more into what each pattern does, its safety strategy.  He refers to the five patterns as Leaving, Merging, Enduring, Aggressive, and Rigid.  He says:
By using names that highlight each pattern’s safety strategy, I am also emphasizing the fact that a pattern is something a person does to protect themselves when in distress, not something they are.
 
Kessler goes on to richly describe how each survival pattern appears in the developing child.  Devoting whole chapters to each pattern, he notes the gifts of each pattern, as well as the struggles that each pattern presents for the person.  He offers useful exercises to help the listener gain an immersive experience of each pattern and what it is like “to be in pattern” on each occasion.  Kessler gives attention to what each pattern looks like within a relationship and offers guidance and tips for how to work with one’s own survival patterns as well as when we are relating with others who are “in pattern”.
 
One of the beautiful experiences of listening to Kessler read through his own  book is being able to notice that I myself, as with every human, has passed through the developmental stages of childhood within which each of the personality patterns is developed.  I could recognise aspects of each of the patterns active in my own personality and relationships.  While I am able to recognise one pattern which is particularly strong in my own energetic structure and personality, it is by no means the most dominant.  There is a strong secondary pattern at work in my own character defences, something that Kessler also pays attention to in the later chapters of his book.  Kessler offers us a series of self statements that help identify a core element of each pattern and distinguish them from the others.  While this can appear as crudely reductive, I find the statements act as helpful gateways towards recognising what patterns are active in any particular relational context:
You may recall that each of the survival patterns has a characteristic sequence of thoughts that arise on seeing that someone else has something that they want.
For the leaving pattern, the sequence goes something like, “You have it. I want it. I’ll just imagine I have it.”
For the merging pattern, it goes more like, “You have it. I want it. I’ll get you to give it to me.”
For the enduring pattern, it usually goes, “You have it. I want it. I’ve failed.”
For the aggressive pattern, it goes, “You have it. I want it. I’ll take it.”
Here, for the rigid pattern, the sequence is more like, “You have it. I want it. You should give it to me.”
 
In my psychotherapy practice I pay a lot of attention to the dynamics of energy and emotion held and expressed in the bodies of my clients.  Everything about how a client inhabits their body is potentially available for exploration during a therapy session.  Their muscle tone, their body shape, their posture and movement all offer a kind of archaeology (my word) of what they’ve been through in their life experiences.  Indeed, something that Kessler doesn’t give much attention to, the same archaeology can be heard in the sound of a client’s voice.  As a colleague once remarked, working in this way, we can know the story before hearing the script.  What Kessler offers in his lengthy outline of each defence pattern are guidelines for empathic interventions that are understanding of these presenting archaeologies.  Kessler also gives very clear guidance on how to support our clients to recognise their own character structures, how they can consciously draw upon the gifts of these patterns, and how they may ultimately develop a whole new way of living by consciously avoiding the pitfalls of these defence patterns.  The direction for growth is to be able to go into and come out of pattern consciously and at will.  Kessler declares: The goal is presence.
 
While listening to Kessler I was continually struck by my sense of his deep level of respect for each human person.  His attention is consistently focussed on giving the listener as clear an understanding as possible of the details of each pattern, so that each of us can use the knowledge and learning for the benefit of our personal development and improved relationships, indeed improved life experiences.  The very human impulse is to analyse other people and “label” them as having a particular pattern and hence predicting a list of traits we expect them to display.  In contrast, I find myself reminded that the information in this audiobook is to support each of us on our own journeys of personal discovery, and that we can support others in theirs.  Kessler’s presentation effectively allows us to recognise our shared identities with each other by acknowledging that we all pass through the developmental challenges that are associated with each of the patterns, and thereby can identify with each other’s struggles, acknowledge each other’s gifts, and support each other towards more mature relationships and more fulfilling life experiences:
To diminish your suffering, and that of those around you, you must learn to recognize when you’ve gone into pattern. And then you must take steps to get yourself out of pattern. That’s the path that will bring you more into presence, day by day. That’s the path that will free you from the prison of your survival patterns. And that’s the path that will allow your essence to shine out into the world.