Saturday, January 12, 2013

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.


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