The science
This is not a horoscope.
Pattern Type reads how your childhood taught you to stay safe, and what that costs you now. Here is the model, the research each part of it sits near, and the things we do not claim.
The framework
The Root Framework, by Yousuf Aslam, says the same thing in three parts. First there is a wound: what your early world was short on, or what it did to you. Then there is a charge: the feeling that sits under it, usually fear, shame, grief or anger. Then there is a posture: the move you learned to make so the feeling stayed manageable. Please, prove, hide, harden, perform, disappear.
Six of those postures make the six masks: the Achiever, the Caretaker, the Good One, the Self-Reliant, the Performer and the Withdrawer. Four roots underneath them give twenty-four types, plus the Settled, for people whose early ground was steady enough that no single wound took hold.
None of that is abstract by the time you feel it. It arrives as a Tuesday: the yes you did not mean, the email you rewrote four times, the row that came out over the dishwasher. Those everyday shapes are what we read.
The sixteen areas
What we read, and what it sits near
Sixteen everyday areas. Each one has decades of research behind it under a less friendly name. We use the plain name and keep the research honest.
| Area | The science behind it | The measure | What we look at |
|---|---|---|---|
| People-pleasing | The fawn response and sociotropy | Sociotropy-Autonomy Scale | Keeping other people happy was once the safest thing to be. |
| Perfectionism | Multidimensional perfectionism (Hewitt and Flett) | Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale | When love came with conditions, the standard is how you pay them. |
| Procrastination | The emotion-regulation model of procrastination (Sirois and Pychyl) | Irrational Procrastination Scale | Putting it off is not laziness. It buys an hour away from a bad feeling. |
| Imposter feelings | The impostor phenomenon (Clance) | Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale | You do the work, then hand the credit to luck and timing. |
| Overthinking | Rumination and worry (Nolen-Hoeksema) | Ruminative Responses Scale and the Penn State Worry Questionnaire | A mind that had to see things coming keeps running the film. |
| Anxiety | Trait worry | Penn State Worry Questionnaire | The body stays ready, because once it had to be. |
| Low mood | Dysphoria, the low end of everyday mood | Positive and Negative Affect Schedule | When the pattern stops paying, the lights go down rather than off. |
| Not feeling enough | The defectiveness schema (Young) and global self-worth (Rosenberg) | Young Schema Questionnaire and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale | The big question got answered early, and the answer was you. |
| Social worry | Fear of negative evaluation | Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale | You watch the room for the moment it turns, because it used to. |
| Loneliness | Perceived isolation | UCLA Loneliness Scale | Not how many people are near you. How much of you they get. |
| Confidence | Self-efficacy (Bandura) | General Self-Efficacy Scale | The ability is there. The permission never got handed over. |
| How I see my body | Body image and weight-based rejection sensitivity | Body Shape Questionnaire and weight-based rejection sensitivity measures | The body took on a job that was never really about the body. |
| The inner critic | Self-criticism (Gilbert) | Forms of Self-Criticising and Self-Reassuring Scale | Someone else's voice, still doing the job it was given. |
| Snapping and resentment | Anger suppression, anger held in | State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory, anger-in scale | Anger with nowhere to go does not leave. It waits. |
| Can't switch off | Burnout and the inability to recover | Maslach Burnout Inventory | If love had to be earned, stopping feels like losing ground. |
| Letting people in | Attachment avoidance | Experiences in Close Relationships-Revised | Getting close is fine until it starts to cost something. |
We are not running these questionnaires on you. We read the same areas they read, and we say where each one comes from so you can go and look.
The wounds
Five wounds, and the ground under each
A wound is not a story about your parents. It is the thing your early world was short on, or the thing it did, that your body still runs on. Each one lines up with a body of research that has been measured for years.
How it reads you
You rate a set of statements from nought to ten by how true each one is of you. The statements map onto the roots and the masks, and the shape of your answers puts you on the grid. A short block asks how loved and liked you felt by each parent, and how much you loved and liked them back. That is not a scoring of your parents. It is the shape of your first bonds, and where the gaps sat.
The reading phrases present-day claims as tendencies that show up under pressure, not fixed traits. Where something is inferred rather than measured, it says so and gives you the mechanism instead of a verdict.
What it is, and is not
This is a tool for self-understanding, not a clinical instrument. It does not diagnose anything, it is not therapy, and it is not a replacement for professional help. Low mood here means low mood, not depression. Worry means worry, not an anxiety disorder. If something sits heavy for weeks, or the days stop feeling liveable, please speak to your GP or a therapist.
We hold this to a real standard. The model is refined against thousands of responses, and we keep testing how consistent the instrument is as the data grows. We would rather tell you that than overclaim.