How Compass Therapy Reduces the Power of Personality Disorders

Why are personality disorders/patterns so alluring to individuals who cling to them? I agree with Gordon Allport that a disorder exists as an autonomous complex within the personality. It functions much like a tapeworm within its host, taking energy and usurping what would rightfully belong to the host, and giving nothing back but its own waste. This is the mystery of iniquity, identified even in the Bible, which troubles people from one generation to the next and defies rational explanation.

The Power of Personality Disorders

From the view of Compass Therapy, every personality pattern has the power to speak, think, feel, and act as though it is a living person. The truth is that these patterns are neither living nor responsive to life, yet they act with a purposeful autonomy. Often when counselees try out a creative new thought, feeling, or action, the personality pattern will assert itself as if to say, “Don’t you dare change or something bad will happen!” Sullivan called this the defensive alarm mechanism of patterned behavior. It is just as predictable as the patellar reflex which occurs when a doctor taps a patient’s knee.

Though Freud documented the resistance levied by defense mechanisms, a personality pattern’s ego-syntonic autonomy goes way beyond the theory of transference. More often than not, the pattern makes repeated bids to take over the counseling dialogue, and without vigilance a therapist and counselee can sit there powerless to intervene. 

Personality Disorders Self Compass

Yet for Compass Therapy, the form this resistance takes provides vital information about how a counselee thinks, feels, and acts in everyday life. For instance, the histrionic pattern leads to non-stop talking that drives a counselee to perform rather than communicate. The therapist can gesture for a “time-out” (as officials do in an athletic game) to help move through this resistance and make relevant points.

Or, in the case of the avoidant-patterned counselee, the therapist can point out the psychology of the obvious by saying gently, “It’s like your unconscious came up with a solution to anxiety long ago: ‘If I just sit here and say nothing, then nothing bad can ever happen.’”

By knowing in advance where patterns and their concomitant styles of resistance reside within the Self Compass, the therapist can impart new information throughout the therapy, gradually strengthening counselees’ resolve to escape from the pattern by challenging their own resistance. 

Resistance to Personality Change

This process of pattern identification, and the forming of a compass conception of what life could be without the pattern, works even when there are pattern combinations involved. Just as all colors on an artist’s palette originate in the primary colors of red, blue, and yellow, so all personality patterns and their combinations originate in exaggeration or avoidance of Love and Assertion, or Weakness and Strength. The LAWS of personality and relationships link together the potential for actualizing growth with manipulative trends, personality patterns, and psychoses.

For instance, someone who combines both compulsive and dependent patterns will not only compulsively set about seeking other’s perfect approval, but will experience an inner conflict between controlling everyone’s reactions while needing others to control them in an authoritarian way. This neurotic conflict is like prizing your new car so much that you are afraid to drive it, while at the same time offering the keys to anyone who needs a ride. In this particular case, you can see the neurotic dilemma in which the counselee’s unconscious resentment of people (compulsive control) co-exists with an unceasing quest for people’s approval (dependent pleasing).

When counselees learn to discriminate between the false voice of their pattern and the true voice of their spiritual core, the pattern loses its allure. The therapist’s clear vision into the nature of these patterns is passed on to the counselee as though through a vaccination that gives them immunity toward the pattern. 

Personality Growth

In this manner, patterns are gradually flushed out, brought into consciousness for constructive reflection, and increasingly discarded in favor of new behavioral experiments that yield more satisfying results. Otherwise, therapy will bog down or last forever with only marginal results. No wonder therapists can burn out and not know why.

As a therapist, you know you’re making progress as you illuminate these ineffective coping strategies and watch counselees replace them with signs of an integrated Self Compass. Many pseudo-problems and wild-goose chases fade away 
as substantial personality growth occurs. 

For more, read:

COMPASS THERAPY: 
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION

 

Compass Therapy and the Paranoid Personality Disorder

You can recognize when someone with the paranoid personality disorder has entered your practice because you feel uneasy, as though someone is sizing up your weaknesses to use against you. 

Paranoid Arguers exaggerate the Assertion compass point to the exclusion of the Love compass point. They exude an attitude of suspicion and testiness that reflects their penchant for blaming and attacking others. Just as a shark snaps up a mackerel, the paranoid pattern will take a bite out of the naïve therapist.

You can grow apprehensive if there are several paranoid Arguers in your practice, because they try to make you walk on eggshells, revealing their hidden agenda that the one who is going to change is you. Their edgy tension, abrasive irritability, and sarcastic humor contribute to a formidable defensive armor. 

THE PATTERN'S INTERIOR

Fearing the vulnerability that accompanies love, Arguers harden their hearts to the needs or suffering of others, ruling out the possibility of intimate bonding. Instead, the Love compass point is used to manufacture displays of fake charm. Likewise, the humility and soul-searching of the Weakness compass point are twisted into self-pity, where Arguers berate people, institutions, or life itself as unfair to them. The Strength compass point inflates the Arguer with airs of self-importance and invincibility, even illusions of omnipotence, and a burning need to get their way.

Paranoid Arguer Personality Disorder

The paranoid pattern exists as a pure prototype of fixation on the Assertion compass point with aggressive trends. It is also found in combination with the adjacent compass points of either Strength or Weakness. In the case of Strength, paranoid aggression combines with narcissistic pomposity or compulsive obsession. With Weakness, the paranoid develops avoidant depression or schizoid detachment. In all instances, the opposite polarity of Love is shut off and prohibited expression.

These compass distortions mean that paranoid Arguers believe people are out to get them, and that they are justified in the hostility and bullying they direct towards others. They levy castigating remarks with impunity because there is no remorse. Antagonism and suspecting the worst in others color everything they do. 

This pattern is expressed on a continuum from mild to moderate to severe levels, as are all personality patterns. This means that actualizing individuals need a mild dose of paranoid suspicion for healthy skepticism about advertising claims, product guarantees, smooth-talking sales tactics, and conning or cajoling behavior from other people. But the paranoid Arguer congeals these self-protective strategies into a mistrustful worldview that pervades the mind and heart, body and spirit.

 
CLINICAL LITERATURE

Paranoia is a term characteristic of the Arguer pattern meaning “to think beside oneself.” The term “paranoia” is of Greek origin, found in medical literature over 2000 years go, and precedes the writings of Hippocrates, capturing the sense of a delusional belief system that emphasizes suspicion and hostility. Unwilling to follow the lead of others, and accustomed to trusting only themselves, the paranoid Arguer pattern requires the reconstruction of reality in accordance with its dictates.

Freud termed paranoia a “neuropsychosis of defense,” highlighting how this pattern wards off reality through the defense mechanisms of denial and projection. Shapiro added that the projection of unacceptable feelings and impulses onto others both eliminates guilt and accounts for the lack of intrapsychic conflict.

Unwilling to acknowledge their faults or weaknesses, Arguers shore up their self-esteem by projecting personal shortcomings onto others, believing that it is others who are malicious and vindictive. This pattern is expressed in a variety of forms. They include: the “combative type” who wants to fight the world, the “eccentric type” who withdraws yet harbors persecutory delusions, or the “fanatic type” who recruits others into secret sects. 

Horney observed that paranoid-patterned persons exhibit “sadistic trends” that distract them from their hidden inferiority. By blaming and attacking they build a counterfeit self-esteem. This obnoxious behavior acts to isolate them from meaningful or intimate relationships, further confirming their suspicion that the world is against them and that the blame for their failure lies solely on external hindrances.

Compass Therapy has selected the term “Arguer” to stand for the perpetual contrariness and automatic argumentation that dominates the paranoid’s perceptual field. There are endless ruminations or “subliminal arguments” about past injustices or wounds to their pride; current quarrelsomeness with family members, work associates, or strangers; and plans-in-preparation for arguing their case in the immediate future. Like a disputatious defense attorney, they are always on the job, considering no detail too trivial for possible use in winning a battle in the courtroom of daily life.

For techniques to work with counselees diagnosed with the paranoid personality disorder, read:

COMPASS THERAPY: 

CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION

Compass Therapy for Controlling Persons

Those who are stuck on the Strength compass point of the Self Compass in the Controlling trend are usually too self-sufficient to ask for help when they need it, too proud to say they are sorry, too competitive to be intimate, and too self-centered to listen to other’s needs.  

Controlling Behavior

Exaggerated strength without the balance of the Weakness and Love compass points turns people into control freaks who use power to judge others. They believe that the only way to do things is their way. They judge and reject anyone or anything that doesn't comply with their standards. Their need for perfection interferes with the ability to grasp the bigger picture. They are closed-minded but convinced they know it all. They feel entitled to play “junior gods” in the lives of others.

Controller Self Compass

Controllers' consuming need is to give a good impression and to be in control at all times. Their Rock of Gibraltar self-image is paramount. This keeps them from laughing, playing, feeling, risking, and sharing.

Lacking in imagination and creativity, controllers rely on tradition or the rulebook to prescribe what “should” be done in the present. They live mechanically by rite, ritual, and propriety. They pooh-pooh feelings and consider introspection to be self-indulgent. They are often oblivious to their own and others' emotions.

Controllers secretly strive for recognition and admiration. Their fundamental attitude is: “Strive at all times to demonstrate your strength and superiority.” They view most other people as irresponsible, lazy, and incompetent.

Ordinarily, Western culture and Christian culture are in agreement that personal confidence is an admirable asset. Strength of character, it is supposed, leads to perseverance, discipline, and purpose. What is seldom understood, though, is how often the strength-stuck person is preoccupied with controlling the self, others, and God.

A First Session

In a first interview, it is fairly easy to spot when the Controlling trend is dominating someone’s personality. The counselee has poise, and usually good verbal and cognitive skills. But there is a lack of emotional spontaneity, since a controller lives out of the mind, not out of the heart.

This makes sense when you grasp that the Controlling trend perceives feelings as disruptive to the logic and predictability that thoughts and beliefs provide. Feelings flow from the limbic center of the brain and have much more of a visceral component than do thoughts or acts of will. Controllers numb feelings in an effort to control them. They often override their actual feelings with mental mandates about what they “should” be thinking or doing: a kind of “hardening of the oughteries.”

Tyranny of the Shoulds

Whereas thoughts reflect a person’s assumptions and expectations, feelings reflect their more private and emotionally colored perceptions at any given moment. If you want to exercise self-control the way controllers do, you repress your feelings, even denying them when they run counter to how you think you should behave. This leaves you out of touch with your own depths—with your heart and body—because feelings and sensations are more akin to the spontaneity of the unconscious than to the structure of consciousness.

Hence, controllers are in the dark about parts of their own experience. They have blind spots when it comes to emotion, sensation, interpersonal intuition, and inner guidance from the Holy Spirit.

Awakening the Controller’s Whole Human Nature

Compass Therapy—based as it is on an actualizing psychology of the whole person—places as much value on feelings and sensations, or inner subjectivity, as it does on cognition and volition, the objective aspects of behavior.

The challenge in counseling a strength-stuck person is to avoid becoming enmeshed in a maze of logical but unfruitful speculations about the presenting problem. A certain amount of rational analysis is helpful for determining what is triggering the symptom and what is holding it in place. Beyond that, it is essential to shift to a more experiential mode of therapeutic encounter, a methodology that integrates cognition with emotion and sensation.

So the counseling aim is double-pronged: to assist in resolving the presenting problem or symptom, while at the same time teaching counselees to value their feelings and sense perceptions as highly as their thoughts. This often involves liberating counselees from the curse of perfection, which I define as the realization that you aren’t perfect, accompanied by an expectation that with more effort you COULD (and therefore SHOULD) be perfect.

For more, read:

CHRISTIAN COUNSELING THAT REALLY WORKS 

Christian Counseling That Really Works

Christian Personality Theory and Carl Jung's Personality Theory

Unlike his mentor, Freud, who was an atheist, Carl Jung saw spirituality as the defining trait of personality and human nature, manifested as a mysterious presence found in all cultures. Jung held the conviction that God existed and that in all important matters a human being was alone with God.

Jung developed the idea of the collective unconscious as a repository of universal archetypes like the divine child, the old sage, and the primordial mother. These archetypes and the symbols they elicit in dreams and through intuition, he surmised, are meant to guide people through an individuation process, offering fulfillment through reconciling opposing forces within the psyche. Jung saw a person's destiny as the result of a collaboration between the conscious and the unconscious.

While agreeing that spirituality is indigenous to human nature, compass personality theory more explicitly affirms the Trinity as the ontological foundation of personhood, Jesus Christ as the God-human mediator, and the Holy Spirit as the source of wisdom within the spiritual core. Rather than cultural symbols to guide people toward individual fulfillment, compass theory emphasizes the Word of God as the objective revelation of the Trinity without equal in revealing what people are called to become. 

Without this framework, the Bible says, “there is a way that appears to be right to a person, but its end is the way to death” (Prov 14:12). In other words, symbolic interpretation of psychic and cultural processes is insufficient in itself to establish communion and communication with the Creator, for this requires conversion of the heart, regeneration of the spirit, and living in existential responsiveness to the Trinity. 

Of all Jung’s concepts, introversion and extroversion have gained the widest general acceptance. Introverts focus on their own thoughts and feelings, recharging their psychic batteries through interior reflection and recollection. Extroverts focus on social stimulation, recharging their psychic batteries through interaction with others. Introverts see the world in regard to how it affects them, whereas extroverts are more concerned with their impact upon the world. 

In compass personality theory, introverted personality patterns include the  Avoidant Worrier, Schizoid Loner, Dependent Pleaser, and Compulsive Controller. Extroverted patterns include the Histrionic Storyteller, Paranoid Arguer, Antisocial Rule-breaker, and Narcissistic Boaster.

Perhaps what characterizes Jung’s theory more than anything else is his emphasis on polarities within personality as the key to understanding individual differences and helping people make progress in individuation. To Jung, the self can have  no reality without polarity.

Both Jungian and compass personality theory see the development of personality and relationships as a goal-directed enterprise, marked by the balanced development of all parts of personality, utilizing a free flow of energy between conscious and unconscious processes. Thus, the differentiation of opposites needs consistent integration within the self-system throughout the lifespan.

For Jung this means venerating what is God-like in the self, but also respecting what is most base, one’s shadow side, and learning how to give equal place even to the seemingly contradictory aspects of human experience. 

Compass personality theory is anchored in God’s invitation to trust in the Trinity as an edifying presence for developing healthy personality and relationships. Personality health is achieved through growth in developing a Christlike Self Compass as a person learns to recognize and dismantle the manipulative trends arising from dependency, aggression, withdrawal, or control. 

For more, read:

CHRISTIAN PERSONALITY THEORY:

A SELF COMPASS FOR HUMANITY