Your Personality Code

The triangle symbolizes security and power. Its broad base gives it stability, while the ascending peak anchors its energy to a central axis that keeps it from tipping or being easily moved. This might be a favored shape in your own personality code – referring to the preferred way you orient yourself in reality and engage the world around you. If it does represent your modus operandi in life, this doesn’t have to imply that you are a power monger or tend to push others around, but you probably do enjoy having influence in what’s going on.

The circle symbolizes attachment and love. Its round enclosure suggests wholeness and inclusion, while the endlessness of its curve speaks of rhythm and eternal recurrence. If this is the favored shape in your personality code, then you probably place high value on connection, inclusiveness, and intimacy. It doesn’t have to mean that you are sappy or an emotional pushover – although you could be. You might guess correctly that Triangle people and Circle people sometimes don’t get along well, or else they get stuck together in co-dependent relationships.

The square symbolizes meaning and truth. Its boxy shape suggests containment and conclusion, where things are packaged up and put away. The four sides also connote wholeness – not by inclusion (as the circle) but through bringing together different aspects, dimensions, or viewpoints (as in the four cardinal directions and the “four corners of the world”). If your personality code favors the square, then you are a person who engages the world rationally, who wants things to fit together and make logical sense.

I started our review of personality-code shapes with the triangle and ended with the square because that particular order reflects the actual sequence of stages in human development. Our need for security dominates early infancy, when we are forming our deepest impression concerning the provident nature of reality. This impression is registered in our nervous system as a set-point to which our mood, mindset, outlook on life, and emerging worldview will be tethered as we develop.

Depending on whether we feel secure in the care of our higher powers, attachment proceeds either in a healthy direction (infant-mother bonding) or else we attempt to pacify our anxiety by desperately clinging to mother and insisting on being comforted. If our mother (and the family system overall) is anxious and insecure, our insistence on keeping her close will regulate somewhat her anxiety, thereby pulling us both (or all of us) into a co-dependent web of mutual support.

If our family system was characterized by a general insecurity and these co-dependent attachment strategies, our personal construction of meaning was probably closely monitored and prescribed by the higher powers in charge. It was necessary that our mental picture of reality (or worldview) conform to their “orthodoxy.” The stories we told about others and ourselves, our beliefs concerning good and evil, right and wrong – along with the metaphysical backdrop of supernatural forces and principalities – all of them had to match up and justify our shared outlook on things. To belong was to be a confessing member of this orthodoxy, “one of us.”

What I’m calling your personality code, then, might be thought of as the way your individual history (especially your early history) programmed your engagement with reality along an axis of three coordinates situated at points corresponding to your gut (security/power), your heart (attachment/love), and your head (meaning/truth). If the triangle, circle, or square represents your preferred way of engaging reality, then the values associated with that shape (as briefly described above) are what typically orient and motivate your choices in life. Thus we might speak of “triangle types” (or T-types), “circle types” (or C-types), and “square types” (or S-types) in naming how individual personalities operate in the world.

The physical location of these centers in the body is easily verified in ordinary experience. When we feel that our support is being threatened or taken away, when we don’t feel prepared or confident in our ability to meet a challenge, when we are required to stand in front of a group and give a speech – in such times, don’t we typically experience upset in our gut? And when a loved one betrays our trust, abandons us in our need, or is taken from us by death, don’t we commonly speak of this as heartbreak? Finally, when we are unable to make sense of something, when life throws us a curve and our working theory of how it all holds together no longer works, don’t we often experience the disorientation as tension around our eyes and a dull throbbing headache?

Instead of reading the “/” (forward slash) in the word-pair as “and,” as in security and power, the terms actually comprise an opposition of sorts. In fact, a real appreciation of the difference between security and power, attachment and love, meaning and truth might dawn for most of us only later in life, at that critical time when our spiritual awakening is pushing against the boundaries of who we think we are. Our identity up to that point is a summation of numerous identity contracts we hold with ourselves and negotiate with others around us, going way back into our infancy when we formed that deep impression regarding the provident nature of reality.

If we can allow the realization to rise within us, we will come to understand the extent in which our authentic power has been relinquished for the sake of a false sense of security. We will understand how our attachment to possessions, other people, and tribal identities has closed down our capacity for empathy and genuine love. It will become clear to us how our commitment to meaning actually removes us from direct contact with reality, with the truth of things. When we are locked up as convicts inside our convictions, the true nature of existence and its ineffable mystery is inaccessible to us.

The point here is that, while security, attachment, and meaning are necessary to our healthy development, these very developmental achievements can interfere with the full activation of our spiritual intelligence (SQ). This interference can be particularly strong if our personality code is complicated by early trauma, chronic adversity, and tribal mind control.

But the good news is that our innate drive toward self-actualization – what propels every organism into maturity (Aristotle’s entelechy) – continues to seek fulfillment. The day hopefully comes when we discover our power, embrace all things in love, and allow our veils of meaning to fall away before the present mystery of reality.