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Understanding and reforming your own personality
Applying the insights of the Personality Adaptations Theory of Dr Vann Joines to transform your life
By Dr Jim Byrne
Updated in March and July 2025
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Page summary
The Joines Personality Adaptations Questionnaire (JPAQ) by Dr. Vann Joines is a valuable tool for understanding personality and improving relationships. Dr Jim Byrne uses the JPAQ to assess clients’ communication styles, pitfalls, and areas for growth. The assessment identifies ego states and personality adaptations that influence behaviours and emotions. Clients learn to manage their inner critiques; to eliminate their negative personality traits; while focusing on their strengths. Dr Byrne’s “booklets” (or “handouts”) about each of the personality adaptations – which he provides as follow-ups to his assessment process – provide insights into six personality types, each with strengths and weaknesses, guiding therapeutic work. For £260 GBP, clients can receive the questionnaire – plus a 60 minute counselling session – and personalized support through the assessment process; followed by a detailed guidance plan for improving each of their personality adaptations; fostering personal transformation and relationship enhancement.
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It’s never too late to change your self!
If you think your personality is fixed for all time – like your finger prints or your eye colour – then you are quite mistaken. You were not born with your personality. Your personal strengths, weaknesses and habitual tendencies were formed in your family of origin, through repeated interactions between baby-You and your mother (and father)! And what was once shaped in early relationships can be changed – (to some significant degree, with effort) – today, using the process described on this page.
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Introduction
One of the most useful personality assessments that I have found, which helps enormously with my work with counselling clients, is the Joines Personality Adaptations Questionnaire (JPAQ).
This personality assessment instrument helps in several ways:
- It allows me to understand the client’s dominant communication style: Whether a particular client leads with their thinking, their feelings, or their behaviour; and I can then match that communication pattern.
- It allows me and my client to understand the Pitfalls in their personality, which will most likely cause them problems in their lives, and especially their relationship lives. And it clarifies the Areas for Growth which they can work on in order to avoid those Pitfalls in the future.
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If you want to engage with this process, please let me know, and I will send you a Joines Personality Adaptations Questionnaire (JPAQ).
The cost of this process is currently £260.00 GBP, payable in advance of sending the questionnaire.
Please email me: Dr Jim’s Email Address.***
Or phone me on 01422 843 629 (from inside the UK)
Or on 44 1422 843 629 (from outside).
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- It also helps the client to know what kinds of “injunctions” (or parental prohibitions) they have stored in their non-conscious minds, which are fuelling some of their most difficult feelings and behaviours. (Examples would be: “Don’t grow up!” “Don’t think!” “Don’t feel!”, “Don’t enjoy!”, and so on).
- It helps the client to know their dominant “drivers” – which are like “cattle prods” to their habitual behaviours; such as: “Be Perfect”; “Be Super-Strong (and ignore your own feelings and needs)”; “Try Hard, but Don’t Make it!” “Please Others…*; Etcetera.
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If you want to engage with this process, please let me know, and I will send you a Joines Personality Adaptations Questionnaire (JPAQ).
The cost of this process is currently £260.00 GBP, payable in advance of sending the questionnaire.
Please email me: Dr-Jim-2024@proton.me
Or phone me on 01422 843 629 (from inside the UK)
Or on 44 1422 843 629 (from outside).
~~~
- It helps the client to know which “ego state” – (meaning Parent-like behaviour; or Adult-like behaviour; and/or Child-like behaviour) – is most dominant in their social relational functioning, and what they need to work at changing in order to have a better life, including a better relationship life.
- And finally, it tells them, quite clearly and explicitly, what their undoubted Strengths are!
And, for each of those personality adaptations, I have developed a detailed guidance document, to help my client to work at eliminating the negative aspects of each of their personality adaptations, mainly through journal writing about those negative aspects, and developing affirmations to reverse or neutralize them.
~~~
If you want to engage with this process, please let me know, and I will send you a Joines Personality Adaptations Questionnaire (JPAQ).
The cost of this process is currently £260.00 GBP, payable in advance of sending the questionnaire.
Please email me: Dr-Jim-2024@proton.me
Or phone me on 01422 843 629 (from inside the UK)
Or on 44 1422 843 629 (from outside).
~~~
About the JPAQ test
If you want to understand yourself better, then taking the Joines Personality Adaptations Questionnaire (JPAQ) will definitely help.
This personality assessment will provide you with an insight into which of six personality types you tend to operate from in your daily life.
Each of those personality adaptations (formed in response to your parents, in the first few years of your life) has a positive aspect and a negative aspect.
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Unsolicited client testimonial
“Hi Jim, Thank you for the long document about my Creative Daydreamer personality adaptation. I have been doing the homework for more than two weeks, and I already feel different; I can see that my behaviour is very much more “for me”. I no longer default to “ignoring my own feelings and needs”. I feel stronger, happier, and and more my own person! It’s incredible!”
E.C. (Macclesfield). A client who completed the process described on this page!
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Personal illustration
For example, one of my (Jim Byrne’s) personality adaptations is called the Responsible Workaholic.
Like all of the six adaptations, the Responsible Workaholic has its strengths and weaknesses (or Pitfalls); and the test reveals the Areas for Growth that this personality type can pursue in order to become more functional in their relationships.
In brief , the challenge (for me) was/is to move back from the Workaholic or right-hand end of the spectrum, back towards the left-hand end, of simply being Responsible, but not perfectionistically work-obsessed.
If I had a particularly strong Bad Inner Critic, I could give myself a hard time about being such a Workaholic, and thus upset myself about my imperfections.
This is the (theoretical) problem with each of the personality adaptations. Anybody taking this test could use the weaknesses or pitfalls of their personality adaptations to put themselves down.
For this reason, I begin each handout on individual personality adaptations with a list of the six strengths of that personality adaptation; and I end each handout with those six strengths again!
And the content of the handout is about how to eliminate the negative features of that particular personality adaptation.
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If you want to engage with this process, please let me know, and I will send you a Joines Personality Adaptations Questionnaire (JPAQ).
The cost of this process is currently £260.00 GBP, payable in advance of sending the questionnaire.
Please email me: Dr-Jim-2024@proton.me
Or phone me on 01422 843 629 (from inside the UK)
Or on 44 1422 843 629 (from outside).
~~~
Understanding personality development
In E-CENT theory, we maintain that our development as children (and in later life) includes, among many other things:
(1) Internalizing representations of good and bad aspects of significant others (including mother and father, etc.); and:
(2) Then “…adding in all of our good and bad adaptations towards them, and all of our good and bad reactions and rebellions against them”. (Source: Byrne, 2009)[1].
In theory, we could say that our reactions and rebellions are actually ‘negative adaptations’.
In Byrne (2009) – which is E-CENT Paper No.9 – I go on to write:
“Initially, I internalize aspects of my mother; then my father; then my siblings; other relatives; school and neighbourhood peers; and out further into ever widening circles of social interaction, for the whole of my life. But the earliest internalizations are the most fundamental, the most tenacious, and the most predictive of my thinking/feeling/behaving states. As it turns out, all of the elements that I have internalized can be classified into (good and bad) Controlling Parent and/or Nurturing Parent incoming elements; (good and bad) Adult incoming elements; (good and bad) Adapted Child responses; (good and bad) Rebellious Child responses; (good and bad) Free Child responses to the stimuli of my environment; and, as time goes by, (good and bad) Little Professor computations (in my mind) and resulting actions (in my immediate environment): as the foundations of my Adult perceiving-feeling-thinking functioning begins to take shape.”
So, in the E-CENT model as developed up to 2009, ‘personality adaptations’ are restricted to the ways in which the good and bad sides of the organism I was, interacted with the good and bad sides of my significant others. (This then becomes habitual, and I carry it on into the present time).
All of those adaptations are conceptualized in terms of the Transactional Analysis (TA) ego states – of Parent, Adult and Child – each with a good and a bad side.
This Parent-Adult-Child model of human personality was developed in the 1940s to 1970s by Dr Eric Berne; who created the system of therapy known as Transactional Analysis (TA). This model made it possible to communicate complex ideas about personality and interpersonal communication using simple terms like Parent, Adult, Child, Games, Scripts, and so on.
But when I looked at Joines and Stewart’s book (from 2002)[2], I realized that it is possible to go further, and to be very precise about the kinds of thinking/feeling/acting tendencies which are predictable in a cluster of ‘personality’ or ‘character’ types. And that this would be very helpful for guiding therapeutic relationships and therapeutic interventions.
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The cost of this process is currently £260.00 GBP, payable in advance of sending the questionnaire.
Please email me: Dr-Jim-2024@proton.me
Or phone me on 01422 843 629 (from inside the UK)
Or on 44 1422 843 629 (from outside).
~~~
The origin and nature of our individual self-concept
Each of us has what the Freudians used to call “an ego”. An ego simply means a “personality/character”.
But some people were defined as being “egotistical”. That was meant to imply that, while some of us are fairly realistic in our self-conceptions, others of us have a clearly false sense of self; which is not only exaggerated; and distorted; but also fragile; and so it will be defended like Fort Knox, otherwise the individual may feel that they will implode.
Each of us can also be said to have a Good Conscience and a Bad Inner Critic, which can hag-ride us into a state of emotional misery, by criticizing and damning us at every turn. Some of us may not be able to do anything to the satisfaction of our Inner Critic.
Clearly, anybody who is going to explore their personality adaptations, and who may have to come to terms with the fact that they are not who they thought they were, will need to be able to manage and defeat their own Bad Inner Critic if it starts to use the results of their Joines Personality Adaptations Questionnaire (JPAQ) assessment against them.
For this reason, I make my handout on how to manage your Bad Inner Critic to any client who feels bad about the negative features of their personality adaptations.
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If you want to engage with this process, please let me know, and I will send you a Joines Personality Adaptations Questionnaire (JPAQ).
The cost of this process is currently £260.00 GBP, payable in advance of sending the questionnaire.
Please email me: Dr-Jim-2024@proton.me
Or phone me on 01422 843 629 (from inside the UK)
Or on 44 1422 843 629 (from outside).
~~~
Joines and Stewart’s theory of Personality Adaptations
Joines and Stewart (2002) are keen on the character-assessment approaches designed by Ware (1983)[3], Kahler (1972, 1982, 2000)[4], and Joines (1986, 1988) – which fit with the idea of personality adaptations to environmental pressures; but which we should note are strongly linked to TA theory.
However, the sources quoted in their Appendix ‘A’ are drawn from a much wider field than suggested here.
Their main source is Theodore Millon’s (1981) study of personality disorders[5]. And this is how they summarize Millon’s perspective:
“Theodore Millon (1981) using the three dimension of active-passive, pleasure-pain, and self-other, derived eight basic personality ‘coping patterns’ and three severe variants … As Millon points out, these (eight) patterns indicate what types of reinforcements these persons have learned to seek out or avoid (pleasure-pain), where they look to obtain them (self-others), and how they have learned to behave in order to elicit or escape them (active-passive)…” (Page 372 of Joines and Stewart, 2002).
To arrive at their own six-way classification of human personality, Joines and Stewart begin with two dimensions:
# Active-Passive; and:
# Involving-Withdrawing.
In E-CENT, we can work with this approach, because they fit with two approaches that are already built into our system, namely:
# Passive-Aggressive-Assertive behaviour;
# Attachment styles (including clingy and healthy attachment [or moving towards the attachment object]), and withdrawing [healthily towards autonomy] and unhealthily [as in the insecure-avoidant type of withdrawal]).
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If you want to engage with this process, please let me know, and I will send you a Joines Personality Adaptations Questionnaire (JPAQ).
The cost of this process is currently £260.00 GBP, payable in advance of sending the questionnaire.
Please email me: Dr-Jim-2024@proton.me
Or phone me on 01422 843 629 (from inside the UK)
Or on 44 1422 843 629 (from outside).
~~~
I have used the Joines and Stewart (2002) JPAQ assessment with more than twenty-five of my recent clients, and got some very good results, in terms of my clients and I coming to understand the client’s problem much more clearly, and being able to produce a much more precise set of strategies for those clients to move forward in a positive direction in their lives, including in their relationship lives.
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The cost of this process is currently £260.00 GBP, payable in advance of sending the questionnaire.
Please email me: Dr-Jim-2024@proton.me
Or phone me on 01422 843 629 (from inside the UK)
Or on 44 1422 843 629 (from outside).
~~~
Endnotes and references
[1] Byrne, J. (2009) The ‘Individual’ and his/her Social Relationships – The E-CENT Perspective. E-CENT Paper No.9. Hebden Bridge: The Institute for E-CENT. Available from drjwbyrne@gmail.com
[2] Joines, V. and Stewart, I. (2002). Personality Adaptations: A New Guide to Human Understanding in Psychotherapy and Counselling. Nottingham and Chapel Hill: Lifespace Publishing
[3] Ware, P. (1983) Personality adaptations. Transactional Analysis Journal, 13(1), 11-19.
[4] Kahler, T. (1972) Predicting academic underachievement in ninth and twelfth grade males with the Kahler transactional analysis script checklist. Dissertation, Purdue University.
Kahler, T. (1982) Personality pattern inventory validation studies. Little Rock: Kahler Communications, Inc.
Kahler, T. (2000) The mastery of management (4th ed). Little Rock: Kahler Communications, Inc.
[5] Millon, T. (1981) Disorders of the personality. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
ABC Counselling and Psychotherapy, Hebden Bridge 