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.

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Christian Counseling, Psychotherapy, and Truth

Many therapists have been overly trained to view a client's ego as fragile and unable to handle dynamic truths about their condition and behavior.

I agree and disagree with this training. I agree that we therapists must provide a safe interpersonal environment in which our clients can risk disclosing themselves. I disagree that we must walk on eggshells in order to do so.

Would you rather a physician or dentist hide the results of what they knew about your condition in order not to make you anxious, or describe what is causing your pain and what effective treatment will entail?

However, professionals who do optometry, dentistry, and surgery perform physical treatments to a patient's body, whereas we therapists rely upon a client's subjective and personal dialogue with us to achieve therapeutic goals.

I had this point driven home to me when I worked in a medical clinic and received physician in-house referrals to treat people's anxiety or depression. Every one of the fifty or so clients I worked with perceived me through the lens of the medical model. That means they would sit there passively looking at me while waiting for their anxiety or depression to magically go away. I found it extraordinarily difficult to engage them in dialogue to draw out the attitudes, thoughts, and feelings behind their clinical symptoms. They just didn't see the point.

This disappointing experience guided me all the more to affirm in Compass Therapy the need to be straightforward with people from the first session forward. Yes, a therapist listens with empathy and reflect feelings accurately so clients know they are being understood. But we must be fearless in bringing forth our clinical intuition and the findings of our psychological testing so that clients can perceive how important their free will choices are in relieving their symptoms.

This rhythmic movement between empathic listening and truthful engagement gives clients tools, concepts, and practice in thinking and feeling their way to personality health and wholeness.

Here is where Compass Therapy introduces a construct not present in secular psychotherapy; that is, the human soul. Human beings are God-created individuals who are called by God to purposeful lives. As therapists we are called upon when people feel bogged down by overwhelming stress, relationship dysfunction, or the grinding self-defeat of personality disorders.

We are graced with a degree of scientific knowledge about psychopathology and healthy personality growth, combined with our spiritual faith that God will help the therapeutic process along. I don't know about you, but I never begin a day of therapy without prayer for God to bless, heal, and guide the clients he sends to me.

 In the Compass model, where psychological truths are co-mingled with spiritual and biblical truths, clients are encouraged to face their disorders so that they can meaningfully outgrow them. I may tell a man with a paranoid arguer pattern that his perpetual anger and need to put people down is going to assure that he'll die as he has lived...grumpy and all alone. This is a wake up call to his soul that says, "Your therapeutic growth stretches need to include learning to make amends to the people you have abused, and learning to value love and forgiveness more than hatred and revenge."

Or, I might tell a woman who is trapped in the rigid pattern of dependent pleasing and placating, "Your efforts to make everyone happy is what leaves you depressed. Learning healthy assertion will help you develop a personal identity."

In my experience, clients respect truthfulness and take pride and pleasure when they act on psychological and spiritual growth stretches and get gratifying results.

The Compass Therapist does not hesitate being a cheerleader when people start thinking more effectively and regulating their emotions more appropriately. "Don, I really like how you stood up for yourself to your boss this week. Now he's lost his power to damage your self-esteem."

Scripture has a way of illuminating all human activities. In providing therapy, Jesus passed on a truth worth trusting: "And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32).