Profile Shapes: How 77 Formations Capture Personality Dynamics
When you step back from individual scores, personality profiles reveal recognizable geometric shapes — recurring patterns called formations. This research catalogs 77 distinct formations across four structural dimensions, demonstrating that these shapes emerge naturally from grid geometry rather than arbitrary labeling. Safety screening integrated into formation detection links structural pattern directly to clinical significance.
The Geometry of Getting Stuck
Two people sit in the same therapist’s waiting room. Both scored 35 out of 100 on a measure of personality integration. On a chart, they’re identical dots.
One is barely there: voice flat, gaze unfocused, the whole system locked into a stillness that isn’t peace. The other can’t stop moving, thoughts racing, emotions surging, attention scattering like sparks off a grinding wheel. Same score. Completely different experience. And if you tried to help them the same way, you’d fail with at least one of them.
This is the observation that anchors five computational studies from the Icosa research program, each examining a different facet of the same question: when you map personality across 20 centers and watch what shapes emerge, what do those shapes actually tell you? The answer, drawn from over 10,000 simulated profiles, is that personality shapes aren’t decorative labels. They’re structural. They emerge from the geometry of the system itself. They carry information that a single severity score can’t. And they organize into a classification space that’s richer, and more honest, than a simple ladder from sick to well.
The Icosa model calls these shapes Formations. There are 77 of them. And they change how you think about what it means to be stuck.
Where Shapes Come From
The Icosa model maps personality across a grid of 20 centers, each one the intersection of a Capacity (how you process experience) and a Domain (where you experience it). The four Capacities follow the sequence Open, Focus, Bond, Move. The five Domains follow the sequence Physical, Emotional, Mental, Relational, Spiritual. So Empathy lives at Open x Emotional, your Capacity to receive emotional experience. Agency sits at Move x Mental, your Capacity to express through thought and decision. Belonging is Bond x Relational, your Capacity to connect within relationships. Each center can be under-active, centered, or over-active on two independent axes, and the particular configuration across all 20 creates the profile’s geometry.
Formations are what that geometry produces: a shape the system generates from the inside, not a label applied from outside. The question the research addressed head-on: are those shapes caused by the grid’s structure, or are they just categories someone invented?
The answer came from a study of 10,169 profiles examining a property called pair density: how many of the 20 centers are actively coupled with their neighbors, influencing each other rather than operating in isolation. Pair density correlated with Coherence (the model’s 0-100 measure of overall personality integration) at r = 0.51, a large effect. That means roughly a quarter of what determines your overall personality integration isn’t about any single center being off; it’s about how your centers talk to each other. Several centers can be at their targets, but if they’re isolated pockets of health surrounded by disconnected territory, the integration benefit is limited.
This is the foundational finding: Formations emerge from grid geometry. The density and organization of active center pairs within the 4x5 grid accounts for over 25% of the variance in personality integration. Connection, structurally speaking, matters as much as individual center health.
Same Score, Different Universe
Return to the two people from the waiting room.
The first, the one who’s barely there, has an Emotional Domain that’s largely shut down. Empathy, Discernment (Focus x Emotional), Embrace (Bond x Emotional), Passion (Move x Emotional), the entire column sitting in under-states. The Body Gate at Open x Physical is closed, cutting off somatic experience from the rest of the system. The Feeling Gate at Bond x Emotional is closed too. Pair density is very low because these centers aren’t engaging with anything around them. The system doesn’t cycle. It doesn’t erupt. It just stops. That’s a Frozen Formation. The lived experience is a kind of emotional fog: you can see your life happening but can’t seem to participate in it. Not numbness exactly, more like watching yourself through glass.
The second person, the one who can’t stop, has the same Emotional column over-active. Empathy flooding, Passion surging. But the Focus Capacity (Presence, Discernment, Acuity, Attunement, Vision) is under-active. There’s no containment. Centers are densely coupled but chaotically, triggering each other without the discernment to regulate the flow. That’s closer to an Erupting Formation: the experience of being overwhelmed by your own intensity, everything happening at once, unable to find the off switch.
Both profiles are in the Overwhelmed band. Both need help. But the help they need is structurally opposite. The Frozen profile needs activation, specifically opening the Body Gate and Feeling Gate to get centers coupling again, increasing pair density so the grid can start conducting experience through the system. The Erupting profile needs containment: strengthening Focus, particularly the Discernment Gate at Focus x Emotional, to introduce regulation into an already densely coupled but unmanaged grid.
A Coherence score of 35 can’t tell you which one you’re looking at. A Formation can.
A Landscape, Not a Ladder
| Family | Typical Coherence | What It Feels Like |
|---|---|---|
| Resonant | 70–90 | Well-integrated, balanced across dimensions |
| Complementary | 55–75 | Strengths compensate for weaker areas productively |
| Asymmetric | 40–60 | Some areas strong, others noticeably underdeveloped |
| Stagnant | 50–65 | Stable and consistent, but rigid and hard to shift |
| Distressed | 20–40 | Multiple areas of active difficulty |
| Mirrored | 35–55 | Polarized: some centers over-active, others under |
| Transitional | 45–60 | Things are actively changing, not yet settled |
| Crisis | 5–25 | System-wide breakdown across most dimensions |
The research produces a surprising result at this point. A reasonable expectation would be that the 77 Formations arrange themselves on a simple continuum from worst to best, a severity ladder with Collapsed at the bottom and Balanced at the top. They don’t.
When the dynamics metrics that describe how personality systems move through time were analyzed across 10,169 profiles, they organized into four distinct dimensions, not one. Principal component analysis captured 95.4% of the total variance in four components: volatility (how much disturbances amplify and oscillate), regulatory Capacity (how well the system organizes under pressure), directional change (whether things are heading toward or away from integration), and structural resistance (how much force is required to shift the system at all).
Four dimensions. Not a single axis of severity. This means two profiles at the same Coherence score can differ along at least four independent structural properties, and those differences aren’t noise. They’re clinically meaningful distinctions about how the system behaves.
The Formation family hierarchy study confirmed this from another angle. The 77 Formations group into eight families (Resonant, Complementary, Asymmetric, Stagnant, Distressed, Mirrored, Transitional, Crisis), and while these families do track with Coherence (profiles with stronger family resonance tend toward lower integration, r = -0.19), the effect is small. Family membership accounts for only about 3.5% of the variance in Coherence. That’s a genuine relationship, statistically significant across 10,169 profiles, but it’s far from deterministic. Formation families are qualitative categories, not a ranked ladder. A Stagnant profile and a Distressed profile aren’t at different rungs; they’re in different rooms.
This is one of those findings where what the model doesn’t claim matters as much as what it does. Formations capture shape, not just severity. The four-dimensional dynamics structure and the small family-hierarchy effect both confirm the same thing: reducing a personality configuration to a single number cannot capture what’s happening inside it.
| Dimension | What It Measures | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Centered proportion | How many of 20 centers are balanced | The broadest indicator of integration |
| Row evenness | Balance across your 4 processing modes | Detects capacity-specific imbalances |
| Column evenness | Balance across your 5 experiential areas | Detects domain-specific blind spots |
| Hot core health | Health of the 6 most central positions | These centers have outsized influence |
| Polarity balance | Over-active vs. under-active symmetry | Reveals directional tilt of the system |
The Balance Point
If Formations emerge from grid geometry, then the geometric properties of a Formation should carry clinical information. They do, and one property in particular stands out.
Every Formation has what the model calls a fulcrum, a structural center of gravity around which the 20-center configuration organizes. Think of a mobile hanging from the ceiling: the pieces can be different sizes and weights, but if the fulcrum is well-placed, the whole thing hangs in equilibrium. Shift the fulcrum, and the mobile reorganizes entirely. Pieces that were floating freely start pulling on each other in ways they weren’t designed to.
Fulcrum health (how well a Formation organizes around its structural center) predicted Coherence with a medium effect (r = 0.32), accounting for about 10.6% of the variance in personality integration. That’s a single geometric property of the Formation’s shape capturing roughly a tenth of what determines how well the whole system holds together.
This explains a particular kind of therapeutic frustration. You’re doing the work, opening a Gateway, breaking a Trap cycle, and the gains don’t hold. Like rearranging furniture in a room that’s tilted. Everything slides back. Fulcrum health data tells you whether individual center work is enough, or whether the Formation itself needs rebalancing. That’s a different kind of intervention, one that targets the organizing principle of the shape, not just the symptoms it produces.
The same study tested whether structural asymmetry (how evenly balanced a Formation is between its Physical-Emotional half and its Relational-Spiritual half) predicts Trap emergence. The correlation was real but small (r = 0.14, about 2% of the variance). Traps fire based on specific local center configurations, not global shape imbalance. A Formation can be wildly asymmetric and have its asymmetry concentrated in centers that don’t trigger Trap mechanics. Global asymmetry is a flag, not a verdict. It tells you the Formation is uneven. It doesn’t tell you where the unevenness sits, and where matters enormously.
When Moving Forward Doesn’t Mean Getting Better
One of the most counterintuitive findings across these studies involves momentum, the sustained directional change of a personality system, adjusted for resistance, The typical assumption is that positive momentum should predict higher integration: if the system is actively changing in a positive direction, that ought to mean things are getting better.
The data says no. Momentum showed a negligible, non-significant correlation with Coherence (r = -0.02, p = .095). Functionally zero.
The reason lives in the model’s architecture. Coherence isn’t calculated from how fast or in what direction you’re changing. It’s calculated from where your 20 centers actually sit right now, how close each one is to its target. Strong positive momentum can exist in centers that barely move the Coherence needle. Rapid change can concentrate in your Spiritual Domain while your Emotional and Relational Domains, which carry heavy Coherence weight, stay locked in place.
Direction of change tells you which way the wind is blowing. It doesn’t tell you whether the wind is hitting the sails.
What does track with Coherence, even modestly? Volatility. Cascade and cycling both showed small but consistent negative associations with integration (around r = -0.19). Systems that amplify disturbances and swing between extremes tend to be less integrated. This makes intuitive sense: if every perturbation spreads across Domains and you’re oscillating between over- and under-states, the stable centering that high Coherence requires is structurally difficult to maintain.
This finding has a direct implication for anyone tracking their own progress. A period of intense internal movement, where everything feels like it’s shifting, isn’t automatically a sign of improvement. And a period of apparent stillness isn’t automatically stagnation. What matters is where the movement is happening, which Gateways it’s flowing through, and whether it’s landing in centers that actually drive integration.
The Safety Net Beneath the Shapes
Formations don’t just describe personality structure; they also expose risk. The Icosa model computes an automated safety screen across every profile, an urgency ordinal designed to catch configurations that warrant immediate attention. A validation study tested whether this screen actually tracks what it should track: accumulating Traps, degraded Coherence, and structural instability.
The screen converged with all three in the expected directions. Higher urgency tracked with more active Traps (rs = 0.19), lower Coherence (rs = -0.22), and greater Formation instability (rs = 0.09). All statistically significant. All small in magnitude. And that pattern, modest convergence across the board, is the most informative finding.
If the safety screen merely echoed the Coherence score, it would be a thermometer with an alarm, redundant. Instead, Coherence explained only 5% of what the urgency screen was doing. Trap count explained 3.8%. Formation instability contributed less than 1%. The screen synthesizes across these signals rather than collapsing into any one of them. It catches configurations of risk that no single metric captures alone.
Consider someone with a Coherence of 51 (Struggling band), not alarming on its own. But the urgency screen flags the profile. Looking at the structural detail, you’d see why: the Feeling Gate (Bond x Emotional) is Closed, and that Closed gate is simultaneously the escape route for an Emotional Suppression Trap and an Identity Dissolution Trap. Two feedback loops, both needing the same locked door to open. The profile has also settled into the Appeasing Silence Basin, where Passion and Vitality are suppressed while Embrace and Belonging over-connect. Expression shuts down and bonding over-compensates, a stable configuration that resists perturbation.
The Coherence score alone reads as moderate difficulty. The Trap count (two) reads as unremarkable. But the configuration (two Traps sharing a blocked escape Gateway, sitting inside a stabilized Basin) is what the urgency screen detects. It’s reading the geometry, not just the numbers.
This connects directly to the broader Icosa research program. Studies examining Coherence itself found that the model’s band-separation system (Crisis, Overwhelmed, Struggling, Steady, Thriving) produces strong rank-order differentiation (rs = -0.61 between band assignment and dysfunction indicators). The safety screen operates on top of that band system, catching the within-band configurations that a severity cutoff alone would miss. And clinical studies examining treatment trajectory found that termination markers correlate with structural features at similar magnitudes (rs = -0.61), suggesting that the same geometric properties that drive Formation classification also predict who stays in treatment and who drops out.
What Crystallized Dysfunction Feels Like
There’s a particular quality to dysfunction that has organized itself into a recognizable pattern. It’s not chaos, it’s a terrible kind of order. Everything fits together in a way that makes the stuckness self-consistent.
The Formation family hierarchy study captured this precisely. Across 10,169 profiles, the stronger a profile’s resonance with its assigned Formation family, the lower its Coherence tended to be. Profiles that fit their family label most cleanly, where the match was crisp and decisive, were the least integrated. The effect was small (r = -0.19), but it held across multiple statistical approaches.
Clinically: when your personality system has organized its dysfunction into a recognizable pattern (when it’s settled into specific Traps and constraints and found a kind of terrible stability there) the Formation family system can see that organization clearly. The label fits because the constraint has a shape.
Imagine someone whose profile resonates strongly with the Stagnant family. In Icosa terms, Stagnant means the system has settled into a low-energy configuration. Basins (attractor states where multiple centers hold each other in under-activated patterns) are keeping things locked in place. Passion (Move x Emotional) is under-activated, so there’s no spark behind decisions. Agency (Move x Mental) is suppressed, so the list of things you could do sits in your head without any of them feeling possible. Vitality (Move x Physical) is low, so your body doesn’t want to start. These aren’t separate problems; they’re reinforcing each other. That’s the Action Inhibition Basin at work, and the Formation family system reads it clearly because it’s organized, coherent in its dysfunction, recognizable.
Now contrast someone at the same Coherence score but with low dominant resonance, where multiple families claim roughly equal pieces of the profile. Nothing has crystallized. In practice, this might feel more chaotic: one week the problem is relational, the next it’s physical, the emotional landscape keeps shifting. There’s no stable pattern to point to, which can make it harder to describe what’s wrong but might also mean the system hasn’t committed to a structural rut.
The most provocative implication: the path toward integration isn’t about moving from a “bad” family to a “good” one. It’s about the family signal dissolving altogether. A person in the Thriving Coherence band doesn’t strongly resemble any family’s prototype. Their 20 centers are distributed too evenly, too balanced across Capacities and Domains, for any single family signature to capture them. Integration, from the Formation system’s perspective, means escaping the structure of constraint entirely.
Three Profiles, Three Shapes, Three Paths
To ground all of this in what it looks like on an actual Icosaglyph:
Profile One: The Scattered Struggler. Coherence 51, Struggling band, Formation classified as Scattered. The Icosaglyph shows over-activation in Open across the Emotional and Relational Domains (Empathy flooding, Intimacy overwhelming) with under-activation in Focus across the same Domains. Discernment shut down, Attunement dropped. Fulcrum health is low: the Formation’s balance point has shifted toward the Open Capacity and the Emotional Domain, pulling the entire structure toward receptive overwhelm. Active Traps include Empathic Overwhelm (escaping through the Discernment Gate) and Emotional Flooding (also escaping through the Discernment Gate). Both route through the same Gateway, a structural bottleneck that’s not coincidence but the fulcrum at work. A Centering Path here targets the Discernment Gate first, because opening it breaks two Trap cycles and shifts the fulcrum back toward center simultaneously. Each step does local repair and structural rebalancing at once.
Profile Two: The Locked Overwhelmed. Coherence 36, Overwhelmed band, Frozen Formation. Pair density is very low. The Feeling Gate and Body Gate are both closed, isolating the experiential core of the grid from its relational and somatic foundations. Dynamics profile shows low volatility, high inertia, and near-zero trajectory; the system resists perturbation from every angle. A therapist working without this structural information might encourage the client to “feel their feelings,” attempting top-down affect regulation. The Icosaglyph shows why this often stalls: with the Body Gate closed, somatic experience isn’t feeding into the Open Capacity, which supplies raw experiential data to the entire system. The Centering Plan prioritizes opening the Body Gate first, because that single Gateway shift activates center pairs across the Physical column, increasing pair density and creating the structural foundation for emotional work to gain traction.
Profile Three: The Volatile Overwhelmed. Same Coherence band as Profile Two, but with elevated cascade and cycling, low inertia. This person’s system isn’t stuck, it’s actively destabilized. A difficult conversation bleeds into sleep, then focus, then body tension. The perturbation at one center cascades outward, and the oscillation prevents settling. The Centering Path starts with the Discernment Gate or Choice Gate (Focus x Mental), building the containment that interrupts the cascade chain before attempting deeper structural work.
Same Coherence band for Profiles Two and Three. Opposite dynamics. Opposite entry points. The Formation system is what makes the distinction visible.
What Changes When Shapes Change
Because Formations emerge from measurable grid properties (pair density, grid completion, fulcrum health), changing those properties should produce specific, anticipatable Formation transitions. This is what makes Formations prognostic tools rather than static descriptors.
When therapeutic work opens the Body Gate for someone with a Frozen Formation, the structural prediction is specific: pair density should rise as the Physical Domain begins coupling with the Emotional and Mental Domains. The Formation should shift from Frozen toward something more dynamic, like Shifting or Emerging. As grid completion improves with continued work, the resonance that drives transitional Formations should gradually decrease, settling into a Balanced or Anchored Formation in a higher Coherence band.
That trajectory isn’t a wish. It’s a geometric consequence of how the model works, and the effect sizes, large for pair density’s relationship to Coherence (r = 0.51), medium for fulcrum health (r = 0.32), indicate the structural relationships are strong enough to be clinically meaningful.
The Formation family hierarchy adds a second tracking dimension. As a client’s Coherence rises, their dominant family resonance should decline. The family pattern should loosen its grip. The path isn’t graduation to a better family, it’s dissolution of the family signature entirely. Tracking both Coherence and resonance across retakes reveals whether the structural pattern is reorganizing or whether the client has found a local optimization within the same constraint structure. A client whose Coherence rises from 18 to 31 while resonance barely moves (from 0.66 to 0.62) has gained some integration while remaining locked in the same family pattern. The Basins haven’t released; the system has gotten more efficient at functioning within the same structural constraints. That’s a plateau risk that a Coherence score alone wouldn’t flag.
The Wider Structural Picture
These Formation findings don’t exist in isolation. They connect to a broader research program that has examined the Icosa model’s constructs from multiple angles.
The Coherence studies established that the model’s five-band system (Crisis through Thriving) produces strong rank-order separation (rs = -0.61), confirming that the first axis of Formation classification (which band you’re in) carries genuine structural meaning. The Formation studies add the second axis: within any band, the shape of your profile tells you something the band alone can’t.
Clinical studies examining treatment-relevant indicators found that termination markers (the structural features that predict whether someone stays engaged with therapeutic work) correlate with the same geometric properties at comparable magnitudes (rs = -0.61). This suggests that Formations aren’t just descriptively interesting; they’re clinically consequential. The shape of your dysfunction may predict not just what kind of help you need, but whether you’ll stay long enough to receive it.
The safety screening validation bridges these Domains directly. The urgency screen’s convergence with Trap count (rs = 0.19) and inverse relationship with Coherence (rs = -0.22) confirm that automated screening catches structural risk indicators that static severity measures miss. For clinical practice, this means the Formation-level data feeding into safety screening isn’t decorative, it’s catching configurations of compounding risk that a Coherence cutoff alone would let through.
What the Model Responsibly Doesn’t Claim
Several findings across these studies are notable for what they rule out.
Momentum doesn’t predict integration (r = -0.02, not significant). The model doesn’t claim that the direction of change, by itself, tells you anything about where someone will end up. How a system changes matters less than where that change lands.
Formation families aren’t a ranked hierarchy in any strong sense (r = -0.19, small effect). The model doesn’t claim that being in one family is categorically worse than being in another. Families are qualitative categories, different kinds of constraint, not different levels of it.
Global asymmetry weakly predicts Trap emergence (r = 0.14, 2% of variance). The model doesn’t claim that lopsided profiles are necessarily more trapped. Traps fire locally, based on specific center configurations, not on the overall shape’s symmetry.
These null and near-null results aren’t failures. They’re boundaries, the places where the model draws a line and says: this is where the structural evidence stops. Formations capture shape, not just severity. Dynamics are multidimensional, not unitary. Safety screening is composite, not redundant. Each of these claims is supported. The claims the data doesn’t support are equally important to name.
What This Means for You
The shape your personality has taken isn’t random. It’s not a diagnosis someone assigned you. It’s structural: the consequence of how your 20 centers have organized themselves across the terrain of experience, strain, and adaptation. When 26% of what determines your overall integration traces to how densely your centers are coupled with each other, the implication is both humbling and hopeful: you’re not a collection of separate problems that each need fixing. You’re a system with geometry, and that geometry can change.
The geometric properties driving your Formation are measurable, trackable, and responsive to intervention. When therapeutic work opens a Gateway, when the Body Gate shifts from Closed to Vulnerable and somatic experience begins feeding into the rest of your system, pair density rises. The Frozen Formation that felt like living behind glass begins transitioning toward something more dynamic. The family resonance that made your constraint pattern fit so clearly into a recognizable shape starts to dissolve. Not because you’ve moved to a “better” category, but because integration itself means escaping the structure of constraint entirely. The clearest sign of progress isn’t that your profile looks more like the Thriving prototype, it’s that your profile stops resembling any prototype at all.
This is personality assessment that takes structure seriously. Not a snapshot of where you hurt, but a map of how you’re organized and where the leverage points are. The distinction between a Frozen system that needs activation and an Erupting system that needs containment isn’t academic. It’s the difference between interventions that work and interventions that stall. Seventy-seven Formations, four dimensions of dynamics, and a safety screen that catches composite risk no single score reveals, all anchored in the same geometric architecture that explains why two people at the same severity level can require fundamentally different clinical approaches.