Compass Therapy and The Schizoid Loner Personality Disorder

Actualizing persons interact with the world through rhythms of contact and withdrawal, involvement and detachment, activity and passivity. Contact, involvement, and activity require action to engage in work, relationships, or self-development. Withdrawal, detachment, and passivity allow for resting and sleeping, solitude, and recharging one’s batteries. 

But the schizoid Loner cuts this rhythm in half, fixating on withdrawal, detachment, and passivity. The word schizoid derives from the Greek word schizoid and means “split off.” All the compass points are collapsed, except for Weakness, which intensifies into nothingness.

The Pattern’s Interior

The schizoid Loner is trapped on the Weakness compass point. Loners withdraw because of an indifference to everything—to friends and relations, to vocational enjoyment, to duties or rights, to good fortune or bad. The rewards and pleasures of human companionship mean nothing to them.

Karen Horney noted that schizoids actively “move away from people” by forming an impenetrable shell that makes other people fade out of consciousness. The phrase, “Out of sight, out of mind,” is not just a credo. It is a daily goal.

Hermit Crab

Not only do others disappear off their radar screen, but their emotions evaporate as well. This life plan has its merits in that schizoid Loners maintain simple lives, untroubled by feelings, impervious to relationships, and undisturbed by inner conflicts. In fact, if a person wants to live an ascetic life that is celibate and single, the schizoid pattern offers the structure and function for doing so. 

Perhaps this accounts for the secret superiority often noted in schizoid counselees. Compass theory posits that this tendency reflects the psychodynamics of a tightly repressed Strength compass point that acts out in the form of unconscious narcissism. Millon notes: “Fantasy in a schizoid-like person sometimes betrays the presence of a secret grandiose self that longs for respect and recognition while offsetting fears that the person is really an outcast.”

While everyone needs a rhythm that includes occasional withdrawal and detachment, the schizoid Loner’s selection of isolation as a long-term coping pattern leads into dangerous territory: a solitary confinement that begins as a retiring lifestyle, but can spiral into schizotypal eccentricity, possibly leading to several types of schizophrenia. For this reason Rollo May has described the schizoid life as existentially hollow.

This hollowness reflects the interpersonal truth that human beings need social stimulation, and when they isolate from the rewards and consensual validation society normally provides, their psyche begins to create its own media show: excessive daydreaming, voices that speak from illusory entities, and the formation of an alternate reality that is light years away from normalcy. 

In other words, the psychospiritual energy for actualizing growth, when not pursued, doesn’t just disappear; unconscious forces convert it into the landscape of the Loner’s version of the universe. In Self Compass terms, the Loner-patterned person lacks esteem for self or others (Strength compass point), love for self or others (Love compass point), and courage to take risks for self-development or the bettering of circumstances (Assertion compass point). The energy from these compass points is shunted into exaggerated weakness, creating a barren existence rather akin to the hermit crab.

By applying techniques that balance a healthy Weakness compass point with an awakening of the Strength, Love, and Assertion compass points, therapeutic intervention generates enough aliveness to jump-start the Loner’s motivational engine and develop the LAWS of personality.

For more on the schizoid Loner personality disorder see:

COMPASS THERAPY: 

CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION

Compass Therapy Explains Defense Mechanisms

The concept of defense mechanisms originated with Freud to describe how people cope with anxiety. Compass Therapy explains defense mechanisms with the use of the Self Compass. Here are some examples:

Projection is a defense mechanism whereby one is so uncomfortable with personal deficiencies that they are disowned by projecting them onto other people, who are then seen as possessing these negative traits. Here is how Compass Therapy predicts projection works in terms of personality patterns found around the Self Compass: 

• Pleasers and Storytellers project onto others their hope for approval instead of learning to approve of themselves, projecting self-assurance onto others, creating a compelling inner need for external reassurance. 
• Arguers and Rule-breakers project their cynicism and spite onto others, assume the worst in people, and feel justified in their contempt for others. They even project their hostility onto groups or society as a whole, feeling as a consequence that others have malevolent intentions and are out to get them. 
• Worriers and Loners project their withdrawal onto others and therefore see people as withdrawing from them; they even project their rejection of others onto humanity as a whole, feeling like outcasts from the human race. 
• Boasters and Controllers project their hidden inferiority feelings and fear of being judged onto others, so that other people are viewed as flawed and deserving of their judgment.

Displacement means taking an emotion that occurs in one situation where it seems too threatening to express and displacing it onto a subsequent situation that seems less threatening. Here is how Compass Therapy interprets displacement:

• Pleasers and Storytellers displace onto others the depression that lurks under their social facades, and then reframe themselves as the caregivers who cheer up those who seem unhappy. This spares them from facing the lack of identity that secretly depresses them. 
• Arguers and Rule-breakers frequently become irritated and angry, displacing this agitation from one situation or relationship to the next, and then ventilating with acerbic explosiveness on an unsuspecting person.  

• Loners and Worriers displace energy for living into a fantasy life that requires no risks or social contact. 
• Boasters and Controllers displace and convert the anxiety hidden beneath the mask of cool composure into steely resolve to impress others with their command of a situation. 

Isolation is a defense mechanism where some aspect of the self is dissociated from consciousness and exiled to the unconscious. 

• Pleasers and Storytellers isolate anger and resentment from conscious awareness, and create a compensatory niceness. 
• Arguers and Rule-breakers isolate love and forgiveness from consciousness, and bristle with contrariness. 
• Loners and Worriers isolate risk-taking and involvement from consciousness, and stagnate in apathy.

While psychoanalytic theory offers the hypothesis of repression and acting out of unconscious impulses to account for why people behave destructively, Compass Therapy offers a biblical view that misguided self-will holds human beings captive to rigid personality trends and patterns, thereby estranging them from God’s healing love, and that all people stand in need of the reconciling grace of Christ that makes loving self, others, and God possible, transforming destructive tendencies into actualizing growth.

And while the psychoanalytic methods of free association, the interpretation of ego defense mechanisms, and the effective resolution of transference offer valuable means for making the unconscious conscious, Compass Therapy adds that people can move directly into growth and health by applying the Self Compass, taking appropriate growth stretches into unused compass points, and developing more flexible, balanced behavior.

Compass Therapy Interprets the "Christmas Blues"

Why is it that so many people experience depression, anxiety, and even anger during the Christmas season? And if they are in therapy, what can be done about this?

The main reason? Christmas focuses our attention on relationships, the very relationships that are often problematic the rest of the year. Grown children think about their parents, and parents about their grown children, bringing up mutual memories not just of good cheer, but of family roles and conflicts that brought pain to all.

Ex-spouses experience the additional difficulty of trying to coordinate two Christmases, one that their ex-wife or husband puts on for their children, and the other that they put together. This shuffling of the kids back and forth can be awkward or abrasive. It reminds divorced couples of all the things they never liked about each other. And when you add the possibility that one or both of them is now remarried, the complications multiply for feeling unappreciated, jealous, or otherwise discontent.

Christmas also impacts work environments, because a person's mood can be affected by whether they received a bonus and if it met their expectations. There can be struggles about how much vacation time is allotted and who within the business gets it.

Another difficulty that most people experience, especially during economic hard times, revolves around gift giving. How can you guess what someone else really wants? And how can you afford to buy the gifts you'd like to give without being in debt the rest of the year? 

All this is pretty much standard fare for human misery during a season which celebrates happiness and good will. So we therapists need to relax and expect our clients to share with increased intensity their personal woes. They will find new peace in our caring for them. Beyond this, we therapists do well to handle our own Christmas blues in psychologically and spiritually constructive ways, even as we seek to help those who confide their issues to us.

Are there general guidelines to what will help most people, including our clients, to have a relatively fulfilling Christmas? Here are a few principles that deserve mention to counselees:

1. Lower your expectations about other people's behavior during the Christmas holidays. If you set high expectations that other people, especially your relatives, should be kind, generous, and unselfish, then you are setting yourself up for disappointment and anger. It is wiser to expect people you know to keep behaving like they always do. Those who are by nature generous will keep being generous, whereas those who are critical and egotistical will keep being critical and egotistical.
2. Set lower rather than higher goals for gift purchases. A limited amount of money can buy unique things at lower cost, and fewer things at higher cost. Trust in the maxim, "It's the thought that counts," to buy things you can afford that nevertheless speak to the identity of the person you care about.
3. Adopt an attitude of relaxed cordiality, showing up for a gathering of the relatives or a drop-off of the kids to an ex-spouse's home with a degree of social warmth. 
4. Accept up front that not all of your expectations for companionship or material acquisitions can be met, so make these desires modest so that they can be fulfilled. (I worked with a single female client of forty who dreaded spending Christmas alone, encouraging her to throw the Christmas party she had been hoping someone else might throw. She developed a list of twenty people who agreed to attend, and decided to think of these folks as her "resident family," since her own family could not get together).
5. If someone starts to get snippy, or brings the kids two hours late, don't upset yourself about it. Consider it inconvenient but not catastrophic. Make the adjustment, then focus on becoming absorbed in the positive Christmas spirit that you yourself are creating.

Of course in your practice you'll hear many other variations of the Christmas blues, but I'm sure that your provision of healthy psychological overviews and coping strategies will greatly assist your clients to have a more fulfilling Christmas.

My personal relationship with Christ strengthens me through Christmas to help distraught clients. I've know Jesus intimately for sixty Christmas seasons now. I've found that I don't have to hide my anxieties or depression from Him. Jesus has consistently shown me that He understands the difficulties of the human journey, and that He will help me in mysterious ways to find a measure of peace, joy, and love — amidst trials and adversity — at Christmas.

Freud and Christian Personality Theory

Freud’s penetrating insights into clinically rigid personalities bear witness that unconscious conflicts, some of them arising from childhood experiences, affect human behavior in lasting ways.

To drive the point home, Freud develops the notion of the id, ego, and superego. The id represents the most primitive dimension of the self, derived from primal instincts of sex, aggression, and pleasure. The superego symbolizes cultural, parental, and societal norms that seek to tame and civilize the unruly id. The ego, the reality principle of selfhood, seeks to forge an uneasy but workable peace between impulses from the id and repression of these impulses by the superego. 

To the degree that persons can sublimate the id into more constructive and socially acceptable behaviors, the ego is strengthened and the superego becomes less repressive and more proactive in terms of a healthy conscience. “We might say that the ego stands for reason and good sense while the id stands for the untamed passions” (Freud, 1933).

Christian personality theory agrees with this overall picture in all but two points. First, it suggests that the id, or instinctual basis of the self, is not merely biological and genetic but also spiritual and interpersonal. Thus, while the unconscious is potentially selfish and self-absorbed, it is also innately concerned with creativity, social integration, and a human goodness that emerges from the divine impulses of the soul that also reside within the unconscious. 

Second, the purpose of human life is not limited to the resolution of unconscious conflicts, but also reflects the calling of Christ within each person to become a more whole personality, their human nature sharing in Christ’s redemption, their fulfillment combining self-determination with openness to God’s grace in life and relationships.

In regard to Freud’s discovery and elucidation of the ego defense mechanisms—ways that people defend themselves against actualizing growth by perpetuating rigidly defended patterns—compass theory offers a rationale for organizing and deriving insight into these defense mechanisms by interpreting them within the Self Compass framework. 

Personality Patterns Self Compass

Denial can be employed from every compass point. Pleasers and Storytellers (Love compass point) deny that they live too much through other people. Arguers and Rule-breakers (Assertion compass point) deny that they are mean-spirited. Loners and Worriers (Weakness compass point) deny that they actively avoid developing strengths or learning how to love. Boasters and Controllers deny that they have superiority complexes that judge others as inferior to them. 

Reaction formation involves a rigid determination to become the opposite of someone or something the person is rebelling against. Persons stuck on the Love compass point often experienced someone in their family of origin engaged in angry tirades or dominating others through intimidation; therefore Pleasers and Storytellers go out of their way to accommodate others and maintain good will at all cost. 

 

Assertion-stuck individuals often modeled a parent’s aggressive trend, learning to disdain anyone who modeled servile submissiveness. Arguers or Rule-breakers develop a reaction formation against submission by blaming and attacking others to ensure a dominant role. 

Weakness-stuck individuals have given up on improving their lot, frequently because someone stuck in Strength pushed them too hard or criticized them too frequently. So Worriers and Loners develop a reaction formation against strong and assertive behaviors by determining not to take risks as a strategy for maintaining social invisibility. 

Boasters and Controllers, stuck on Strength, have often developed a reaction formation against someone they knew who was pitifully weak, or a time in life when they felt trapped by overwhelming anxiety; they vow never again to show weakness by fortifying a self-image of being perfectly in control.

For more, see:

CHRISTIAN PERSONALITY THEORY: 

COMPASS PSYCHOTHEOLOGY APPLIED 

Personality Disorders Explained: Compass Therapy

On the eve of the publication of DSM-V, the world's major tool for understanding mental illness and personality disorders, psychiatrists are pulling their hair out, trying to find a central working model that makes sense of people's inner worlds.

The main problem psychiatrists and personality theorists find with the concept of personality disorders -- longstanding patterns of cognition, emotion, and perception -- is that so many of the present personality disorder categories overlap one other when observed in real life.

Called co-morbidity (a terrible word since it sounds like death warmed over!), it simply means that very few people are pure prototypes of the narcissistic, compulsive, antisocial, paranoid, dependent, histrionic, schizoid, or avoidant personality disorders. This rests on the assumption that human behavior and its attendant psychopathology should be neat and tidy, like the data found in most other hard sciences: chemistry, physics, and mathematics.

But humans are not purely objective creatures with totally predictable instincts. We are deeply subjective individuals with personal life histories and points of view. I say that it is time psychiatry wakes up to this fact of life, and accepts the simple truth that individuals seen in therapy can demonstrate elements of narcissistic entitlement, antisocial rule-breaking, and histrionic melodrama coexisting within their personality and relationships.

Compass Therapy makes a contribution here by asserting that all human beings possess personality rigidities that are behaviorally significant in varying circumstances. These rigidities increase under stress and decrease with personality integration, which needs to be a primary goal of all therapy.

What has blocked this perception from developing in psychiatry is the ongoing war between psychoanalytically oriented professionals who believe there exists an unconscious motivation for every inner conflict, the behavioral professionals who believe that medication and behavioral conditioning can remove symptoms without a client's subjective involvement in the process, and humanistic professionals who believe that giving a client an empathetic ear for airing their inner distress will eventually lead them into making more adaptive and self directing life choices.

Compass Therapy draws upon all of these perspectives in order to develop an overview that pertains to every single client: we need to see with X-ray vision into the objective structure of personality to grasp why people subjectively choose the way they do, especially when their choice patterns bring them anxiety, depression, hostility, withdrawal, alienation, and other symptoms that make life intolerable.

With a cursory glance at the diagram above you can recognize when your client is stuck favoring one of the universal compass points of personality to the exclusion of others, or if your client rigidly uses different compass points in different situations. This solves the co-morbidity problem because it is common for people to swing around the Self Compass in non-adaptive ways, precisely because they've never learned through cognitive and emotional maturity how to use a whole Self Compass to flexibly adapt to life situations.

The Compass Model introduces new learning on how mental health functions, exactly how it breaks down, and how to expand a client's personality into healthy compass points that foster health in personality and relationships. Understanding this system give a counselor invaluable information immediately, since it illuminates the client's personality structure in every moment of counseling.

Without this model you are left floundering, trying to figure out the complex causes of historical or developmental traumas, and then how how to promote healing and change. The Self Compass Model organizes an immense foundation of clinical and empirical data, yielding a simple and effective perception of the client's health or dysfunction. A second substantial advantage is that a therapist can share compass concepts directly with clients, since these concepts are understood even by school age children.

I encourage you to get an early start on grasping the new DSM-V by first mastering the principles of Compass Therapy. To help you along, here are five Compass Therapy books for you to consider adding to your core clinical and/or pastoral counseling library.

COMPASS THERAPY

THE SELF COMPASS

CHRISTIAN PERSONALITY THEORY

PASTORAL COUNSELING AND COACHING 

CHRISTIAN COUNSELING THAT REALLY WORKS

Psychology and Theology In Action!

Before he passed on, Professor Ray S. Anderson at Fuller Theological Seminary had this to say about Compass Therapy:

“At the core of Compass Therapy is the divine endowment of human spirituality in each person that comes to expression through the mental, emotional and physical spheres of the self. Through diagrams and dialogue this book takes the reader directly into the counseling experience where a therapeutic alliance between the therapist and the counselee is created, releasing the innate spiritual capacity of the self to overcome negative and counter-productive personality patterns of behavior. 

Ray S. Anderson

"Dan Montgomery rightly views emotional and mental health as more than merely removing pathology; rather it is the movement of the self in relation to others where identity, intimacy and community are actualized as an achievement of the holistic self.

"I am not aware of any other book that succeeds as well as this one in providing both professional therapists as well as Christian counselors with a theoretical and practical model that combines psychology and theology in an integrated way. It has a profound simplicity that covers a wide range of personality disorders. Readers will say, ‘Now I see why typical patterns of dysfunctional and disruptive behavior have a common root but also a specific cause.’ 

"Put it on top of your reading list!"

Ray S. Anderson, Senior Professor of Theology and Ministry, Fuller Theological Seminary

How The Self Compass Explains Psychosis

With psychosis, the therapist can often deduce a compass interpretation from the structure and function by reasoning backwards from the symptoms of the psychosis itself to the Self Compass. Noting whether the distinctive features include anxiety, depression, paranoia, violence, withdrawal, grandiosity, or obsessive-compulsive symptoms helps you find which compass points are over-functioning and which ones are under-functioning. These observations help you form a treatment strategy of growth stretches into unused compass points and better modulation of exaggerated compass points.

The thickest ring in the Compass Model diagram indicates the severe constriction and dissociation from reality that psychosis brings. This “ring of fear” represents an episodic or chronic crisis of personality sufficiently acute that the spiritual core succumbs almost entirely to anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar mood swings, or other Axis I syndromes. Not only the core, or nucleus of the self, but one’s whole human nature—Mind and Heart, Body and Spirit—are uniformly disturbed. 

How The Self Compass Explains Psychosis

 I once worked with a young woman who had spent three years in a psychiatric ward. Her primary diagnosis during that time was paranoid schizophrenia. The doctors had given her little hope of recovery because of the recalcitrance of the symptoms and her determination to outsmart everyone who treated her. Mary’s presenting façade when she came to the university counseling center where I worked was that of a demure, well-dressed, and compliant person. I immediately recognized the dependent Pleaser pattern at work. But when she described the auditory and visual hallucinations of a demonic figure named Mary Lou, who would appear in mirrors and scream vulgar names and vicious threats at her, I recognized the presence of the paranoid Arguer and antisocial Rule-breaker patterns.

By the second month of therapy I had conveyed to Mary that her fragmented Self Compass had split into warring factions. Mary Lou represented her anger, assertion, and strength of identity, while Mary (her presenting self) constituted her love, vulnerability, and many fears.

For the next several months I took special interest in Mary Lou, the wild and aggressive dimension of her personality. I encouraged Mary to pay attention to the hallucinations so we could invite Mary Lou into a creative dialogue. This terrified her at first, but because I wasn’t afraid of Mary Lou, she gradually developed curiosity instead of fear toward this alien part of herself. A turning point came in the tenth month when she spontaneously told me, “I think I get it now. Mary is the part of me that wants to please everybody because my dad is a senator and that’s how he brought me up. But Mary Lou wants to give everyone the finger and say, ‘Screw you! I want to be a real person!’”

I commended her for this brilliant deduction, and was even more fascinated by what she said next: “You know what? I don’t think I need Mary Lou to fight the world for me anymore. I can tell people if I disagree with them, or I can agree with them if I choose. I don’t need to split myself in half any longer.”

Over the next two months the auditory and visual hallucinations faded away as Mary’s sense of integrated identity and genuine connection to people increased. Her Strength and Weakness compass points gave her a relaxed confidence, and the integration of Love and Assertion balanced caring for others with standing up to them when needed. When Mary stopped by to visit me several years later, I felt amazed at the maturity and stability of this young woman, and was pleased that she gave me permission to tell her story in the hope that it might help others.

People catastrophically stuck on the Love compass point become especially vulnerable to major depression and suicidal ideation. They also are prone to develop generalized anxiety and even the kind of disorganized schizophrenia that Mary exhibited. These symptoms often arise as a consequence of an irreparable loss of a significant other upon whom they have profoundly depended. In Mary’s case, the event that precipitated her psychotic break at the age of eighteen was the loss of boyfriend who, though he had severely abused her, was the only source of love she had ever known. Without external security, dependent-fixated individuals can regress into infantile dependency, coiling into a fetal position, or histrionically pouting, giggling, and seducing in attempts to capture people’s attention and approval, all of which Mary had done in the psychiatric hospital. 

 Persons severely stuck on the Assertion compass point have learned to cope with threat by acting out aggressively. They can decompensate into paranoid schizophrenia, both discharging anger and projecting it onto others. Now they vent their hostility through wild rages and explosive assaults (antisocial), or in smaller doses of being secretive, touchy, and irritable (paranoid). Because of Mary’s split personality, she had exhibited many of these traits as well.

Schizophrenia, particularly catatonic withdrawal, is the psychosis that arises from extreme rigidity on the Weakness compass point, creating a world inhabited solely by one’s self. Mounting evidence suggests the identification of avoidant, schizoid, and schizotypal personality patterns as schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. In compass terms, it is the isolating effect of social anhedonia (interpersonal aversion) in addition to genetic factors that renders individuals vulnerable to the onset of schizophrenia.

The Strength compass point manifests psychosis as the manic striving often linked to bipolar syndromes. In the manic phase, narcissists seek an exalted and pompous state of euphoric excitement, as though striving to recapture the glory of an earlier time in which they knew they were admired and invincible.

Bipolar patients exhibit narcissistic pattern characteristics while in the manic phase. On the other hand, compulsives are more prone to develop control-oriented symptoms like obsessive-compulsive syndromes that strive to manage anxiety through rituals, counting, tics, hoarding, obsessive doubting, compulsive thoughts, and insisting on cleanliness and order.

While medical compliance to pharmacological treatment contributes to a counselee’s recovery from psychosis, the psychiatric patient can benefit from a compass overview of the personality pattern(s) they adopted earlier in life, and what they can do now to expand their personality toward the health psychology embedded in the Self Compass. Redemptive hope, then, provides a vision for transforming chronic suffering into the wisdom and balance of a renewed life. The psychiatric patient has as much right to this prospect as any person, and needs this hope to make forward progress.

The Supernatural and Therapeutic Psychology

The year after receiving my doctorate in clinical and counseling psychology, I visited my folks in northern New Mexico. Saturday night found me finishing a cup of coffee in a nearby café. I paid the cashier and headed to my car, only to hear a voice speak within me: “Dan, drive over to the rectory of the Catholic church. Tell the priest there that I love him very much.” 

What? I thought. Go where and say what to whom?

“A priest is praying to me. He’s lonely and depressed. Go comfort him. Tell him to take heart, for I love him and I am guiding him.”

Uncomfortable with this instruction from out of nowhere, I fished for my keys and started the car. I had no connection to the Roman Catholic Church, no knowledge of any priests living in the rectory, no desire to give a complete stranger a weird message that seemed to float down from heaven. I pulled out of my parking space and inched around the town plaza in indecision, the only car on the road.

The personality tests I’d taken as a doctoral candidate at the University of New Mexico had demonstrated sound mental health, so this couldn’t be a psychotic delusion. This must be God, then, and though I didn’t understand why and how he was communicating with me, I felt curious enough to find out.

I turned right on the road to the rectory. As I drove up the driveway, a light blinked on somewhere in the building. Nuts, I thought. Now I have to go to the door! Placing a hesitant forefinger on the doorbell, I pushed and heard a chime. The porch light turned on and the wooden door creaked open. 

A little man with dark hair peeked out. “Yes?”

I felt tongue-tied. “Uh, well, actually I was leaving the Plaza Café, when I seemed to hear an inner voice telling me to come over here and talk to a priest.”

“Someone sent you here to speak with a priest?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“God.” My voice sounded as awkward as I felt.

“And your name is?”

“Dan Montgomery.”

“So you need to speak with a priest about God?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, come in.”

The man turned and I followed him down a hall to the kitchen. An overhead light revealed a white table with an empty glass and a half-empty bottle of wine. He pulled out a chair for me and I sat down.

“I am Father Francisco. May I offer you some wine?”

“Yes, thank you.”

He retrieved a second wine glass from the cabinet and filled both glasses with red liquid. “Forgive me for not being dressed properly,” he said, looking down at his sweater and Levis. “I was about to retire for the night.”

“I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”

He sat down, took a sip of his wine, and said, “Are you a Catholic?”

“No.”

“Yet you are seeking a priest to discuss your need for God?”

Once again my tongue seemed uncooperative. “Well, yes. I mean no, not exactly. I mean to say that actually I’m here to deliver a message from God to a priest who lives here.”

He raised his eyebrows. “A message from God? For someone who lives here? I’m the only one who lives here.”

“It must get lonely living here by yourself.”

“Yes. I miss my friends and family in Rio de Janiero terribly. Even though I also work as a clinical chaplain at the State Hospital.”

“What do you do at the mental hospital?”

“I work with some pretty severe cases. The boy I’m seeing this week killed both his parents. I’m trying to get him to talk about it. I want him to know God can forgive him. But it is very difficult.”

“That sounds depressing.”

“It is,” he said. “Very much so.” His voice trailed off. He sipped his drink. “Now tell me more about what brought you here tonight.”

“I think I’m beginning to understand. An inner voice spoke to me at the Plaza Café a while ago. I think God knows about your depression. He wants me to assure you that he hears your prayers and loves you very much.”

“This is very unusual, Dan. Normally, I am the one trying to reassure everyone else of God’s love.”

“But who takes care of you?”

Father Francisco smiled. “No one lately. That’s my problem. I’ve been feeling like everyone wants something from me, but no one knows how much I’m struggling. I have to put on a happy face, but deep down I feel like crying.”

“I’m like that, too, Father,” I said. “I was socialized to keep my feelings to myself. I know how to act strong, like everything is fine, but find it hard to ask for help from God or anybody else when things get tough.”

“That’s what’s happened with me. I don’t want to burden anyone with my troubles. But a priest has to set a good example.”

“So how are you going to make it through this?”

“That’s what strikes me about you coming here. I just told God a while ago that  maybe I needed to resign and go back to Rio de Janeiro. That maybe I don’t have what it takes to serve God anymore.”

“Wow,” I said. “That makes even more sense out of the message I came here to give you.”

“How do you mean?”

“God told me to offer you his comfort, that you are to take heart because he loves you and is guiding you through this.”

Father Francisco’s eyes pooled with tears as though he felt struck by grace. “God said he loves me and is still guiding me?” His voice was low and hushed.

“Exactly.” I recalled the authority with which the message had come to me. “Absolutely!”

His eyes turned upward toward the ceiling as he reverently made the sign of the cross. “Gloria a Dios,” he whispered. His eyes returned to me. “I’ve been reading St. John of the Cross. He calls what I’m going through the dark night of the soul. Tonight I cried out in my room for help and ten minutes later you rang the doorbell. Glory to God!”

Now his eyes were shining, his lips curled into a smile. He reached across the table and I shook his extended hand. “Thank you, Dan, for listening to God. He has heard my lament and I feel deeply comforted. Now I am very tired, so if you will excuse me, I’m must retire for the night.”

Exchanging a hug at the door, I drove home, pondering how the Great Companion—as psychologist William James called God—had expanded my conception of counseling and psychotherapy by healing Father Francisco’s wounded heart.

Now here’s the question. Was what transpired that night between Father Francisco and me spiritual direction or psychological counseling? Was it a holy encounter inspired by the vertical dimension of the grace of God? Or was it a healing conversation guided by the horizontal dimension of therapeutic psychology? And what carried the action forward to its climax? Was it the power of God or the power of psychology—divine intervention or human intuition?

 

Here is a reasonable hypothesis for analyzing the encounter between Dr. Dan Montgomery and Father Francisco: that spirituality joined with psychology to facilitate a therapeutic intervention that transformed disabling depression into recovered hope and purpose.

In fact, a unique dimension of Compass Therapy involves the integration of Christian faith with empirically validated principles of therapeutic psychology. Compass Therapy stands on a philosophical foundation that brings together openness to God with openness to behavioral science. 

Stanford Professor Commends Compass Therapy

“In Compass Therapy: Christian Psychology In Action, Dan Montgomery adds to the impressive and growing list of Compass Therapy books that well integrate Christian perspectives with psychological theory and practice in an easy to read, thoughtful, and compelling manner. 

“The Compass Therapy book will assist counselors, therapists, clergy, and pastoral care givers broadly defined use of Compass Theory tools to both understand and help those who struggle with a wide range of personality, behavioral, emotional, and relational challenges.”

Dr. Thomas G. Plante

Thomas G. Plante, Ph.D., ABPP, Professor of Psychology at Santa Clara University and Adjunct Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, has written or edited twelve books and has published over 150 journal articles and book chapters. He maintains a private clinical practice as a licensed psychologist in Menlo Park, CA.

RELATED BOOKS BY THOMAS PLANTE: