When it comes to knowing the self, one must leave no stone unturned. How can we become like children, if the essence, our unique creative spark, is buried so deep in our own unconscious that we cannot access repressed memories or remember what it was like to be 4 years old?

Our parents were carefully selected by our higher self with the assistance of angels to give us the DNA and the wounds that would provide the opportunity for growth where it was most needed. If a soul needs to learn trust, it will be betrayed. If it needs to learn to assert for its own freedom, it will be smothered, humiliated and controlled. If it needs to learn to stay the course with courage, it will be terrified, neglected, or abandoned.

I wish to discuss the 5 basic wounds that shape our personality, body, and auric field. Understanding how we defend against these 5 wounds and being willing to feel our pain and then forgive, is what ends our “refusal of love” and our distorted emotional reactions. That is how we heal the emotional body, and become undefended.

Humans defend against having to feel the pain of five primary types of wounds:
1. Terror around the right to exist
2. Abandonment or deprivation
3. Humiliation or invasion
4. Betrayal
5. Rejection

Wilhelm Reich is the 3rd following Freud and Jung as the individual having the greatest impact on contemporary psychotherapy. Reich lived from 1897-1957. He was the only student of Freud’s to carry his libido theory into experimental science.

Reich went to medical school at the University of Vienna from 1919-1922 after having served as a battalion commander for the Austro-Hungarian army during WWI. He wrote 18 books. In 1929 he published Character Structure, in which he first described the formation of personality types now known as characterology.

Dr. Wilhelm Reich gave terrible old Freudian names to the 5 personality types that develop as a result of the ego defending against each wound. They are Schizoid, Oral, Masochistic, Psychopathic and Rigid. Dr. Reich first elucidated these types in a book called Character Structure. Characterology is unique among personality typing systems in that you can perceive the types in the physical body. Understanding these 5 types allows one to know themselves, their emotional reactions, others’ responses, and the interaction between self and others. Our goal is to be undefended, so it is necessary to study our defenses.

Making our defenses conscious, brings them out of the subconscious into the light of consciousness for healing.

Who and what we are is love, yet we all carry to a varying degree at times a “refusal of love.”

This “refusal to love” comes from the wounded parts of our self. The ego or personality that has fear, moves away from our pain, denies our darkness, and won’t forgive others and self. The wounded child that has vowed, consciously or unconsciously, to never feel that pain again.