Compass Therapy Promotes Direct Action

Not long ago I was in a therapy session with a twenty year old woman (I'll call her Rachel) who was struggling to recover her battered self-esteem from an eight-month relationship with a domineering and misogynistic man. Of course her boyfriend (I'll call him Bill) had his charm. He bought her a few gifts. He made her laugh sometimes. But that hardly compared to how badly he ran her down in his presence.

We began our work with her describing Bill's many ways of verbally abusing her, at the same time trying to convince her that she deserved this treatment. 

Now in the present session I show her the Self Compass diagram, explaining how people need access to the four compass points of Love and Assertion, Weakness and Strength—the LAWS of personality health.

Rachael immediately got it. She said, "I was definitely stuck on the Love compass point, pleasing and placating Bill in every way, always trying to keep the peace, and always wondering why he was so mean and critical. I didn't dare show Assertion or Strength." Likewise, she identified Bill as stuck on the Assertion compass point with relentless aggression. "He always became angry and impatient, especially if I hesitated to do whatever he wanted."

Once we both grasped the relationship dynamics, I offered insights for developing healthy Assertion and Strength in Rachel's personality. But we needed more than insight alone. We needed to exorcise the emotional anxiety from his reign of terror in her life. In the next session, I moved into a Compass Therapy action technique.

"Rachel, our talking so frankly and fully about the emotional wounding you received from Bill is the first step in recovery. But the next step requires action on your part."

"What do I need to do?"

"Just relax where you are sitting and follow my instructions for the next couple of minutes. We're going to go deep in your psyche, where your unconscious has stored hundreds of painful memories—humiliation, false guilt, and fear of displeasing Bill or any other man. We're going to cast these feelings out of you by replacing them with their polar opposite: peace, dignity, and self-love."

Rachel agreed to follow my lead. I guided her into a deep breathing and muscle relaxation sequence, where she tensed and then relaxed muscle groups from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes.

Once she was physically and mentally relaxed, I said, "Now while you continue to melt your muscles and breathe deeply, I'm going to speak to you the way Bill often did, and use the same tone of voice. Your task is to keep relaxing, and come up with new responses that tell him now—based on your newly developing Assertion and Strength—what you wish you had said back then, but were too afraid."

Once she fully understood what we were doing, and did indeed relax, I repeated many of the criticisms that Bill once used, and was pleased to see her standing up to them. She drew from the Strength of our relationship, and trusted the process of Self Compass expressiveness that Bill inhibited. I cheered her on until she actually felt this healthy assertion in her body/mind/spirit.

A session like this isn't an instant fix. But it does have psychological power to generalize into a person's current and future life. And for Rachel it was lifesaving to develop a new sense of peace and self-confidence. She was taking the first steps to learning how to build a self-boundary strong enough to ward off any future encounter with a misogynistic man.

There are twenty-five counseling techniques in one of my books on Compass Therapy. To read the first chapter, 
visit Amazon.com here:

Christian Counseling That Really Works: 

Compass Therapy in Action

Carl Rogers and Dan Montgomery: A Dialogue About Therapy

Carl Rogers stands out as the psychotherapist and theory-builder who emphasized the significance of feelings and emotion in therapy.

To place Rogers in historical perspective, we need only realize that he felt disturbed by the psychoanalytic and behavioral approaches to therapy in his day. These, he believed, minimized the importance of human feelings and overstated the role of the therapist as an authority figure who knew more about a person's problems than the person.

The many films that feature Carl Rogers in counseling reveal his transparency and sensitivity. Clients who worked with him often reported feeling deeply accepted and understood.

Rogers was raised on a farm with rural folk who prized sincerity above all else. He acknowledged that this upbringing influenced his formulation of therapist warmth, congruence, and unconditional positive regard as crucial to successful therapy. Indeed, he argued that these very qualities in the therapist would facilitate client healing, self-trust, and self-direction.

During Roger's prime, I collaborated with my psychological mentor and film-maker Everett Shostrom to produce the famous "Kathy" films, in which Carl Rogers, Arnold Lazarus, and Shostrom each spent an hour counseling the same woman. She later described Carl Rogers as the most friendly and supportive of the three, but stated she hadn't learned much from him.

In the years that followed, however, a number of studies indicated that Client-Centered or Rogerian Therapy was too non-directive for many clients. It seemed to work best for educated and self-motivated clients who could benefit by the therapist reflecting their feelings, apart from any other techniques or directives.

By contrast, in formulating the principles of Compass Therapy, I came to emphasize that therapists need to come across as experts in the field of therapeutic psychology. This does not mean acting in an authoritarian style, but rather taking charge of the course of therapy by  stimulating a client's healing and personality development through action techniques. This might include relevant teaching about lifespan psychology, human sexuality, healthy versus dysfunctional ways to handle emotions, the challenging of irrational ideas, or role-playing problematic situations or behavioral solutions.

I had the opportunity to discuss these ideas with Dr. Rogers. Here is the heart of that conversation.

Dan: "I have long admired the warmth and support you offer clients, how you are with-and-for them no matter what they share."

Carl: "Thank you for saying so. I believe clinical science has shown that this is an essential ingredient to successful therapy. What is your perspective?"

Dan: "I agree on the whole, but wonder whether in light of your lifetime work you still believe that reflection of emotions is the key element of therapy. And specifically, I wonder if there might be a place for a therapist to use diplomatic confrontation, such as teaching a person about personality patterns that are hurting them, or role-playing methods of coping that can carry over into daily life."

Carl: "This is a sensitive subject, because I've always been cautious about a therapist interfering with a client's inner-direction. But I have to say that if I had it all to do again, this time I would grant a place for more active engagement and methods on the therapist's part, while continuing to express empathy and emotional rapport."

Dan: "I like how you put that, and in the model I'm developing this would amount to the therapist using caring and empathy to maintain client rapport, and action techniques to teach new behaviors and stimulate creative coping."

Carl: "I'm a little suspicious of techniques, unless they are well integrated with the therapist's spontaneity and authenticity. I do like the concept, and wish you well in putting together reflection and action in your methodology."

Compass Therapy continues to integrate action methods with rapport-building principles, so that clients remain emotionally secure, as well as occasionally challenged by the therapist to take needed growth-stretches that actualize their goals.

Compass Therapy and Cognitive Therapy As Complimentary Methods

The world is richer for the Cognitive Therapy approach to life and behavior developed by Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck. These two pioneers in counseling and psychotherapy came to believe that it is the thoughts we think determine the emotions we feel.

Albert Ellis

Aaron Beck

Therefore, they reasoned, by making a client's thoughts fully conscious and examining them in the therapeutic process, the client could be free of irrational thoughts and emotional health would follow.

I am connected to these men because my colleague and mentor, Dr. Everett Shostrom, made historic videos of Ellis and Beck applying the cognitive approach in live sessions. We carefully studied these and other examples of their work.

                                                   

Everett Shostrom

Dan Montgomery

 












Shostrom and I agreed at the time that the cognitive approach has strong merits, especially because it helps clients to identify when they are magnifying negative thoughts, influenced by unexamined thoughts from childhood, or otherwise frustrating themselves and their relationships with unhealthy assumptions about life.

But even while seeing these positives of cognitive therapy, we noticed some limitations. Primarily, there is more to human nature than thinking. Thoughts are important, but so are emotions, bodily states, and spiritual values. In writing Chapter One of Raymond Corsini's book, Handbook of Innovative Therapy, we addressed this point.

Corsini introduced our chapter by saying, "One of my long term goals is to write the definitive book on psychotherapy. Everett Shostrom and Dan Montgomery beat me to it, creating a supersystem of the best of all known theories and procedures...I believe an eclectic system of this type will eventually be the therapeutic system of the future" (Wiley, 1981, 2001).

After Shostrom passed away, I carried forward our fundamental assumption that human nature is holistic and multifaceted, and therefore needs a multifaceted method of healing and integration.

Compass Therapy, then, brings to therapists the multifaceted lens of the Human Nature Compass, which offers Mind and Heart, Body and Spirit, much as a physical compass provides North and South, East and West.

 A latitude and longitude of the self allows you to assess whether it is a client's thoughts, feelings, biological processes, or spirituality that is contributing to problems. And you can meet those particular needs by using action techniques that intervene at cognitive, emotional, physical, or spiritual levels.

Today I see Cognitive Therapy and Compass Therapy as complementary approaches to understanding and healing clients, each making unique contributions to a therapist's versatility in meeting client needs.

For more about applying the Human Nature Compass to 

 diagnose client needs and develop treatment plans, read: 

Compass Therapy: Christian Psychology in Action

Compass Therapy Tips for Counseling a Dependent Client

Dependent clients transfer their indiscriminate hunger for people’s approval straight into the counseling setting. In terms of the Self Compass, they are stuck on the Love compass point in the Dependent trend, and their chief difficulty is a fear of using the Assertion compass point.

1. Resist being trapped by the niceness, politeness, and attempts at being ideal counselees. It is important to help dependent clients stay in touch with the need for healthy assertion, because they fear anger and confrontation. Watch out for the temptation of feeling flattered when they tell you how wise and wonderful you are. If you get hooked by this unconscious ploy, they will remain as dependent as ever.

 

2. How do you teach dependents about their self-defeating personality pattern without devastating them? You break the news gently by exploring how they first acquired the Dependent trend in childhood and adolescence. You ask them to recall who taught them to care so much about people’s approval. You predict that unless they outgrow the Dependent trend, they will keep feeling guilty about trivial matters, fearful of displeasing others, and depressed when others inevitably take them for granted.

3. Skillfully frustrate their tendency to lean on you. Ask them how they feel about different issues, and wait for them to spell it out. This helps them take responsibility for thoughts and feelings. Ask what they want and how they might accomplish it. This helps them think for themselves. Compliment every movement toward self-direction and emotional self-sufficiency.

4. Become the accepting parent your dependent client never had. Compliment them when they finally admit their anger towards others, disclose secret depression, or show disgust with their overdone niceness. Your acceptance of their negative feelings helps them accept more realistically their Strengths and Weaknesses—without fear. This is how they become more authentic human persons.

Dr. Jim Beck at Denver Seminary says about  

Christian Counseling That Really Works: 

"The 25 techniques alone are worth the price of the book."

 

Compass Therapy and Christian Psychology

All theories of counseling include underlying assumptions and core beliefs about God, human nature, personality, and healthy versus unhealthy behavior. Compass Therapy holds that people are related to the personal, holy, and loving Creator known through the Christian faith.

This does not exclude other perceptions of God or other ways of construing human values within the therapeutic setting. It simply underscores the fact that since cardinal values of Christianity include compassion, empathy for those who suffer, and motivation to heal and transform persons who have lost their ways, Christian psychology offers a viable worldview from which to practice counseling and psychotherapy.

Compass Therapy weds faith and science. The facets of psychology pertinent to the healing of persons include motivation, sensation and perception, learning and memory, personality and social integration, and lifespan development. All are grounded in a God who understands and utilizes counseling and therapy as yet another means of calling people to exercise freedom rightly and benefit from the identity, intimacy, and community he has invited them to know.

From a Christian perspective, Christ embraces people in need, seeking to transform their personal crises through the power of the Holy Spirit present within the alliance of therapist and counselee (Montgomery, 2006, pp. 71-74).

It's as though the Holy Spirit says to any therapist who is open, “Come. Let us work together with your counselee. Let me inspire you with insight and direction to help tame your counselee’s anxiety and heal their pain. Have courage in guiding them to give up the patterns that are defeating them: the manipulations of pleasing, placating, seducing, calculating, controlling, arguing, intimidating, avoiding, or withdrawing. Through a therapeutic bond that draws upon My wisdom, help them find a pathway that leads to flexibility, discerning love, and personal power without guile.”

If your therapeutic experience is anything like mine over the past thirty years, you may have noticed that the Trinity comforts and heals beyond religious category or human constraint, and that the Holy Spirit does indeed enhance your effectiveness as a healer of the soul.

To learn more, see:  

Compass Therapy: Christian Psychology in Action

Philosophical Underpinnings of Compass Therapy

As the founder of Compass Therapy, I'm occasionally asked why I choose a Christian worldview as the philosophical foundation of this approach to counseling. The obvious answer is that I am a Christian by faith and choice, though in coming to this experience I did try out atheistic and agnostic perceptions of reality. 

Beyond my personal faith, I want to take a stand as a professional psychologist who believes that spirituality is essential to human nature and vital to mental health. I agree with many world religions that are rooted in a community of faith, where people find purpose in suffering, hope in times of loss, and meaning in their sacred scriptures and traditions.

So why am I selective about making Christianity the foundation upon which Compass Therapy arises? Because the Trinity, the core teaching of Christian faith and doctrine, reveals a spiritual reality that underlies all human experience: the reality of One God in Three Persons. In other words, human life and history, deriving from being created in the image of God, is fundamentally interpersonal, just like the divine Trinity is fundamentally interpersonal: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

But aren't these religious assertions a far cry from modern psychology and psychotherapy, and shouldn't there be a permanent barrier that separates what happens in a house of worship from what happens in a therapist's office?

I think not.

Whether we like it or not, we are born into a social context of Life Together. Therefore our mental health is linked to the progress we make in getting along with God and other people. No person is an island, and alienation from community (ie. the inability to give and receive love) is a sure mark of psychopathology.

Compass Therapy suggests that developing a healthy personality and fulfilling interpersonal relationships are primary aims of good therapy. Toward that end a therapist uses techniques of psychotherapy to relieve symptoms of anxiety, depression, relationship dysfunction, addiction, or a host of other disorders and psychological disabilities. Yet let's never forget that the primary aim remains the development of personality health and social integration, a pursuit that lasts a lifetime.

For more about this, see

COMPASS PSYCHOTHEOLOGY:
 Where Psychology & Theology Really Meet