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