The 5 Systems of Character Adaptation

Your character adaptations are the ways you have learned to respond and adapt to the environment, given your genetic predispositions, your life history and events, and your cultural context. For example, taking your shoes off before you enter your house, going to the gym after work, or getting anxious in social settings are all examples of character adaptations.

UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge (Henriques, 2022),¹ identifies five different character adaptation systems. A system is an interlocking network of parts that function as a whole. It turns out that we can divide the ways people respond and adapt to their environment via five primary systems of adaptation. This is called Character Adaptation Systems Theory (CAST; Henriques, 2017),² and knowing about it can help you see more clearly the patterns by which you adjust, adapt, and act in the world.

Five Character Adaptation Systems

The first system is the habit system. The habit system works by chaining together stimuli with responses toward some result that is expected or rewarding. The habit system works pretty automatically; that is, you don’t need to think about it; you just do it. When you do things repeatedly, they get “downloaded” into your habit system. For example, if tying your shoes comes naturally to you, it is because now it is part of your habit system. For an excellent book on the habit system, see The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg. Habits play a crucial role in our lifestyles, and it is important to cultivate healthy habits regarding our sleep, eating, exercise, sexual patterns, and substance use.

The second system is your experiential system. This is your “on-line” system of subjective conscious experience that integrates your senses into perceptions and orients your attention. In addition, it includes your drives and feelings about what is happening and what you want to happen. Learning how to direct your attention in a responsive and mindful way is key to mental health, which is why meditation is so relevant to mindfulness and well-being. Also, effectively processing your emotional reactions by being aware and attuned, while also adaptively regulating them, is key to mental health. Holding your emotions this way, by being aware and attuned on the one hand and adaptively regulating them on the other, is called the “emotional sweet spot” in UTOK.

The third system of character adaptation is the relationship system. You may have heard of the attachment system or attachment style. That is where the relationship system starts. It also includes drives toward status and affiliation. In particular, your relationship system tracks the amount of social influence you have and your felt sense of relational value, which is the extent to which you feel seen, known, and valued by important others. In UTOK, the key dimensions of the relationship system are mapped by the Influence Matrix (Henriques, 2011).³

We share these three systems of adaptation with other social mammals, like dogs and apes. The next two are more unique to us as human persons.

The justification system refers to your language-based system of propositional beliefs and values. It is at work when you ask and answer questions, when you tell stories about what is happening, and when you are reasoning and giving reasons for your behavior. The world of justifications is what makes the world of persons different from the world of primates, and your justification system is the system that helps you navigate what UTOK calls the Culture-Person plane of existence.

Finally, there is the defensive system. This system is the hardest to see directly. The reason is that it emerges between the self-conscious systems of justification and the subconscious processes of inner images, feelings, and drives. As Sigmund Freud realized, those subconscious processes often involve content that is socially problematic and must be repressed or rationalized for the system to maintain equilibrium. The defensive system is the system that signals when there may be danger or inconsistency between the feeling portion of your mind and the justifying portion, and it tries to resolve the tension. Research into cognitive dissonance shows how this system works to protect the ego by making it as justifiable as possible.

One way to remember these five systems is with the acronym “HER-DJ,” as in, “Her DJ played great music at her wedding.” The “HER” portion (i.e., habit, experiential, relational systems) stands for the character adaptation systems we share with other social mammals. As such, we can say they make up our core, primate self. The “DJ” (i.e., defense and justification systems) stands for how we adjust to our environment as socialized persons. Here is a diagram that represents CAST. On the left, it shows the three broad contexts of development (i.e., biological, psychological, and social). On the right, it lists the five systems of adaptation.

Source: Gregg Henriques

These systems of adaptation do not always produce the most adaptive behavior patterns. Sometimes problematic habits, like excessive drinking or binging and purging, can develop. Sometimes we cope with our emotions by blocking them, only to have them come back and flood us and get us acting impulsively. Sometimes our relationship system causes us to project past injuries on present relationships. And sometimes we develop faulty beliefs about ourselves, the future, or the world that results in us making unwise decisions.

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Much of psychotherapy is about identifying maladaptive patterns. Indeed, the major schools of psychotherapy tend to focus on different systems of adaptation. The behavioral school focuses on habits, how they are formed, and how we can shape new ones. Humanistic and emotion-focused therapists focus on how we process our feelings and teach us the difference between adaptive and maladaptive emotional processes. Interpersonal therapists and therapists who emphasize attachment, focus on the relationship system. Psychodynamic therapists, in the tradition of Sigmund Freud, focus on helping us understand our defenses. And, cognitive therapists and narrative therapists focus on the justification system, and how to develop adaptive ways of reasoning about our lives and the world we are in.

Source: Gregg Henriques

Mental health is about adapting to the environments we are in over time. Learning about the five systems of character adaptation can help you see the different domains of adaptation and identify where you are healthy and where you might be able to enhance your adaptive living potential.