Warrior, Settler, Nomad

Good old Sigmund Freud and his mates: they had a name for everything, especially when it came to personality types. According to them, you were either Pre-genital stage: Anal-Paranoidal Personality (often referred to as ‘Anal’), Pre-genital stage: Oral-Schizoidal Personality (‘Oral’), or Genital-Hysteric Personality (‘Hysteric’). Trouble is, they all sound a bit rude. So let’s give it up for Mr. Terence Watts, a world authority on hypnotherapy, who some years ago re-invented these definitions in much more understandable, not to say polite terms: Resolute Organisational Personality; Intuitive Adaptable Personality and Evidential Charismatic Personality. Or even simpler: Warrior, Settler and Nomad.

Now, we all carry around parts of all these personality types, but almost all of us have a predominance of one or the other, which largely determines the kind of person we are. So what exactly are they and how do they differ, one from the other?

Resolute Organisational (RO)
There’s a clue in the name. Their over-riding inclination is to control and organise. They are also analytical, practical, ambitious and forceful. You know when you’re in the presence of a Warrior: they don’t give much away in their facial or body language and they think rather carefully before they answer. They’re not frivolous and fun loving, Warriors, and they’re often bullies.

Evidential Charismatic (EC)
Nomads on the other hand want fun all the time, and they just can’t concentrate on one thing for very long. They crave attention, make great dinner-party guests, and are often clever and creative. But you can’t rely on them, and oh, they boast a lot.

Intuitive Adaptable (IA)
The Settler loves everybody. If you’ve got a problem, take it to a Settler – she’ll sit there listening for hours, head on one side, making little ‘Ah’ sounds as you spill your heart out to her. Doesn’t she just lap it up? She’s the one who comes up to you at a party, and before long you know everything about her, her children, her invalid mother, the woman across the road. Worse still though – she knows everything there is to know about you. On the plus side, she really does care, and she is very good with people – kind and patient – and often to be found in the caring services. What would we do without her? But beware: many Warriors masquerade as Settlers in order to dominate and control the vulnerable.

 But let’s stop there for a moment and ask ourselves why these terms were coined in the first place. According to Terence, and as far as I can tell, no serious expert has contradicted him, it’s all to do with our ancestral memories. For tens of thousands of years Homo sapiens wandered the earth, happily hunting and gathering in small packs, surviving from day to day. (Ah yes, we were all Nomads back then).  But suddenly, about 150,000 years ago, another race evolved: Homo sapiens sapiens. Not only did they have a habit of repeating themselves when introduced, but they were brainier, taller, more upright, could run faster and were much less ape-like than any previous humanoid – though you still probably wouldn’t have wanted your daughter to marry one.

The Warriors would have been the original ‘savages’ of those days, raping and pillaging and generally on the receiving end of any Asbos going. But, they were resourceful and determined, and their most developed instinct would have been for survival – of themselves and of the group.

It took a long time for the Settlers among them to decide they’d had enough of all this happy slapping. They were the gentler, more thoughtful types among the tribe, contented just to while away the hours painting animals on their cave walls, picking nits out of each other’s hair and empathising earnestly with anyone they thought less fortunate than themselves, which was, well, everybody really. They were the ones who formed the first primitive settlements around 10,000 years ago. Of course, the Nomads had always been around because, in the beginning, everybody was a Nomad. But when the Settlers settled, and the Warriors came in and took over and started bossing everybody around, telling them what colour to paint their huts, handing out parking tickets and all that, the people with Nomad tendencies said, “We’re off mate” or words to that effect, because Nomads hate unpleasantness, or being told what to do, or anything boring. So they legged it out of there as fast as they could. And that is the beginning of THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT.

And that’s how it is today, with Warriors determined to control everything and everybody (they’re the bosses, policemen, people with teeny-weeny handwriting and pens in their breast pockets); Settlers who just want a quiet life with lots of friends, a job in the caring professions, and ponchos (but only ever when they’re out of fashion), and Nomads, who have the attention span of a gnat, and don’t mind making a fool of themselves on Karaoke night.

But let’s get serious here. Each of us really is a representative of one or other of the types: the trick is to recognise which group we belong to, because that can lead to a much better understanding of who we are and why we behave the way we do – for good or bad. Not only that, but it can give us insights into the behaviour of others. Even more significantly, it can help us recognise and understand conflicts within ourselves caused by clashes between the different aspects of our personality, conflicts that often lead to confusion, indecision and guilt.

 Imagine a Nomad child born to parents, the dominant one of whom is a Warrior personality. The Nomad child is likely to be outgoing, loud, disorganised and untidy, restless, eager for attention, impatient, short on concentration, long on charm. The Warrior parent, in contrast, is likely to be controlling, insensitive, analytical, resolute, organised, and short on imagination, long on determination. It’s not hard to see how the parent might impose a behavioural template on the child entirely unsuited to its real personality. In practice, the parent is likely to attempt to stifle the outgoing nature of the child, leading to the child growing up thinking that ‘showing off’ is wrong, but not being able to help it. This may well lead to feelings of guilt and confusion. That’s a very simple example, but given the infinitely complicated nature of the mind, it’s easy to see how parents can, in the poet Phillip Larkin’s immortal words, “Mess you up” - or something like that - however unintentionally.

So well defined and clearly differentiated are our personality traits, that during hypnotherapy, any conflicting sides of our personality can be contacted individually and persuaded to co-operate in the healing process. This therapy, called ‘Archetypal Parts Imagery’ was invented by Terence Watts and is used worldwide in the treatment of inner conflict.

It’s easy to find out which personality type you are with a simple test, again devised by Terence Watts, though it’s important to bear in mind that finding out which type you are is one thing; understanding how this might be causing you difficulties takes rather more study.

Click here to take the test.

Copyright: Adrian Walker 2008