Understanding Dan Montgomery's Compass Therapy

My fifteen years of collaboration with Everett Shostrom, a Stanford research psychologist and psychotherapist who carried out pioneering work in the field of counseling, planted the roots for Compass Therapy in what we at that time called Actualizing Therapy. Our approach combined a health model of personality with an explanatory system of psychopathology. We suggested that actualizing growth fosters maturity, flexibility, and purpose in life, and constitutes a reasonable goal of therapy. Further, that therapeutic gain always involves the integration of polar opposites within the personality and an acceptance of individual differences in relationships.

Historically, Dr. Shostrom had produced the “Gloria” films during which Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, and Albert Ellis each worked in hour-long sessions with a counselee named Gloria. These films demonstrated the usefulness of showing exactly what happens in counseling sessions so that others can replicate beneficial techniques. Some years later Shostrom and I produced a second film series that featured Arnold Lazarus (Multimodal Therapy), Carl Rogers (Client-Centered Therapy), and Everett Shostrom (Actualizing Therapy) each working with a counselee named Cathy.

In the decades followed I continued this eclectic theory building by developing Compass Therapy, an approach that links together the Self Compass model of personality with operational definitions of psychopathology found in the universal standard for mental health professionals: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The use of compass-like diagrams made a user-friendly graphical interface that not only highlighted the principles of Compass Therapy, but also allowed counselees to readily understand how to participate more fully in their own transformation.

DSM

Though Compass Therapy has distinctions of its own, I was careful to construct an open-ended conversation with other major counseling theories. This partnering philosophy makes Compass Therapy a co-proponent of some of the most reliable therapeutic principles found in Psychoanalysis, Jungian Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, Transactional Analysis, Family Therapy, Existential Psychotherapy, Behavioral Therapy, Cognitive Therapy, and Positive Psychology. Perhaps this accounts for why Raymond Corsini, considered by many as the dean of American counseling and psychotherapy, has described my Compass Therapy approach as a “supersystem” that represents “the therapeutic system of the future.”

What has differentiated Compass Therapy from other theories is the idea that human nature and personality are comprised of dynamic opposites that need integration around the core self, and that action techniques are often required to move people forward in therapeutic progress. Like the alternating AC/DC current that powers an electric appliance, polar opposites in human beings create aliveness and health. For instance, healthy individuals find rhythms between solitude and sociability, activity and passivity, involvement and detachment, and work and play.

It’s when the dynamic movement between polarities breaks down and you get an extended flat line of stasis that people become sick, depressed, or devitalized. Dynamic movement fueled by the rhythmic swings of polar opposites expresses itself in mental health as well. Healthy individuals are spontaneous and flexible precisely because they are alive with new possibilities and passionate about the pursuit of creativity. If something doesn’t work, they try something else. If they are frustrated in fulfilling a goal, they explore novel options. They resist becoming stuck in a one-dimensional life.

Psychopathology, however, works differently. Rigidity replaces rhythm. Resourcefulness succumbs to sameness. Relationships perpetuate superficial actions and reactions. Life grows dull. Symptoms set in. The personality and human nature become frozen in intractable patterns that resist change and growth. Actually, the whole range of psychopathological alternatives to healthy living have a strangely attractive appeal, for they seem to make life safe, to make life predictable, and make life familiar.

The Compass Model

 

Healthy individuals can be loving or assertive, and weak or strong, as a situation requires. Rigid individuals are stuck in chronic behavior patterns that are too loving, too aggressive, too weak, or too strong. If healthy living lets you play the eighty-eight keys of the piano with both hands, then psychopathology makes you play only “Chopsticks” with two fingers.

Compass Therapy's Self Compass as well as the Human Nature Compass offer crucial dimensions for growth of personality and human nature that give a person all eight-eight keys, and unlimited capacity for composing the creative melodies and harmonies required for successful coping.

For more, read:  

Compass Therapy: Christian Psychology In Action 

Compass Therapy Liberates Rigid Personalities

Compass Therapy interprets personality rigidity as the way in which people unconsciously try to minimize anxiety by becoming inflexible, opting for stereotypic mind-sets that offer false security and impair actualizing development. These mind-sets congeal into rigid trends and patterns, defying the Self Compass LAWS (Love and Assertion, Weakness and Strength) of wholeness, even though this is not the person’s intention. 

Usually people are unaware of behavioral rigidity, simply thinking, “This is how I’ve always been.” Nevertheless, these trends and patterns are formidable barriers that arrest growth toward loving self, others, and God, constituting a hidden dimension of sin within the human condition.

Personality Rigidity

The Self Compass can help. It provides not only a model for comprehending personality dysfunction, but also places behavioral rigidity on a continuum with actualizing growth, thereby revealing a bridge of continuity that shows how to move from rigidity to the actualizing rhythms of personality health. 

A rigid personality trend strands individuals in a lifestyle characterized by too much dependency, too much aggression, too much withdrawal, too much control, or a combination of these trends.

This growth deficiency is held in place by an unconscious manipulative attitude, a way of treating both self and others as objects for manipulation rather than persons worthy of respect and love. As Buber suggested, manipulation reduces the “I - Thou” quality of life to “I - It.”

Anna Freud described how specific defense mechanisms, which we call manipulative trends, need challenging, so that individuals can come to grips with their underlying concerns. Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, Eric Berne, Abraham Maslow, Virginia Satir, and Aaron Beck, among other theorists, describe from their own perspective the four manipulative trends of dependency, aggression, withdrawal, and compulsive control.

Compass personality theory locates these trends around the Self Compass, yielding an intelligible map for understanding and transforming them. 

The Trends Self Compass: Dr. Dan & Kate Montgomery

Notice how the Trends Self Compass shows the familiar healthy compass points on the outer circle and summarizes their actualizing expression. Expressing these polarities rhythmically helps generate personality health and relational fulfillment.

• Actualizing Love fosters nurturing and forgiving. 
• Healthy Weakness expresses vulnerability and uncertainty. 
• Diplomatic Assertion offers expressiveness and assertiveness. 
• Humble Strength yields confidence and adequacy. 

The shaded interior circle reveals the unconscious hidden agenda that governs each trend. This circle is smaller than the actualizing circle, and bordered by a thicker ring, indicating that manipulative trends contract the personality, constricting freedom by diminishing creativity. Trust in the spiritual core is infiltrated by core fear, the distorting force that underlies manipulative living.

While everyone is occasionally dependent or aggressive, withdrawn or controlling, a manipulative trend fixates into a predictable way of life that has dehumanizing repercussions.

• Wilhelm Reich observed that manipulation tenses body musculature, terming it character armor. 
• Karen Horney described manipulation as a tragic waste of human potential. 
• Carl Rogers viewed manipulation as a struggle for authenticity between an idealized self and a real self. 
• Joseph Wolpe described rigid trends as maladaptive behavior that can be unlearned. 
• Eric Berne construed the self-fulfilling nature of manipulative trends as negative life scripts. 
• Albert Ellis noted that a manipulative mindset is held in place by a set of irrational assumptions. 
• Aaron Beck referred to manipulations as exaggerated cognitive processes.

Compass Therapy adds that understanding the particular ways that core fear infuses and drives the manipulative trends (Dependent, Aggressive, Withdrawn, and Controlling) provides vital clues that facilitate healing and promote wholeness, regardless of whether this transformation is called personality integration, spiritual formation, sanctification, or self-actualizing in Christ.

For more, read:

CHRISTIAN PERSONALITY THEORY: 

A Self Compass for Humanity

Christian Personality Theory

Compass Therapy Interprets Personality Rigidity

Compass Therapy interprets personality rigidity as the way in which people unconsciously try to minimize anxiety by becoming inflexible, opting for stereotypic mind-sets that offer false security and impair actualizing development. These mind-sets congeal into rigid trends and patterns, defying the Self Compass LAWS (Love and Assertion, Weakness and Strength) of wholeness, even though this is not the person’s intention. 

Usually people are unaware of behavioral rigidity, simply thinking, “This is how I’ve always been.” Nevertheless, these trends and patterns are formidable barriers that arrest growth toward loving self, others, and God, constituting a hidden dimension of sin within the human condition.

Personality Rigidity

The Self Compass can help. It provides not only a model for comprehending personality dysfunction, but also places behavioral rigidity on a continuum with actualizing growth, thereby revealing a bridge of continuity that shows how to move from rigidity to the actualizing rhythms of personality health. 

A rigid personality trend strands individuals in a lifestyle characterized by too much dependency, too much aggression, too much withdrawal, too much control, or a combination of these trends.

This growth deficiency is held in place by an unconscious manipulative attitude, a way of treating both self and others as objects for manipulation rather than persons worthy of respect and love. As Buber suggested, manipulation reduces the “I - Thou” quality of life to “I - It.”

Anna Freud described how specific defense mechanisms, which we call manipulative trends, need challenging, so that individuals can come to grips with their underlying concerns. Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, Eric Berne, Abraham Maslow, Virginia Satir, and Aaron Beck, among other theorists, describe from their own perspective the four manipulative trends of dependency, aggression, withdrawal, and compulsive control.

Compass personality theory locates these trends around the Self Compass, yielding an intelligible map for understanding and transforming them. 

The Trends Self Compass: Dr. Dan & Kate Montgomery

Notice how the Trends Self Compass shows the familiar healthy compass points on the outer circle and summarizes their actualizing expression. Expressing these polarities rhythmically helps generate personality health and relational fulfillment.

• Actualizing Love fosters nurturing and forgiving. 
• Healthy Weakness expresses vulnerability and uncertainty. 
• Diplomatic Assertion offers expressiveness and assertiveness. 
• Humble Strength yields confidence and adequacy. 

The shaded interior circle reveals the unconscious hidden agenda that governs each trend. This circle is smaller than the actualizing circle, and bordered by a thicker ring, indicating that manipulative trends contract the personality, constricting freedom by diminishing creativity. Trust in the spiritual core is infiltrated by core fear, the distorting force that underlies manipulative living.

While everyone is occasionally dependent or aggressive, withdrawn or controlling, a manipulative trend fixates into a predictable way of life that has dehumanizing repercussions.

• Wilhelm Reich observed that manipulation tenses body musculature, terming it character armor. 
• Karen Horney described manipulation as a tragic waste of human potential. 
• Carl Rogers viewed manipulation as a struggle for authenticity between an idealized self and a real self. 
• Joseph Wolpe described rigid trends as maladaptive behavior that can be unlearned. 
• Eric Berne construed the self-fulfilling nature of manipulative trends as negative life scripts. 
• Albert Ellis noted that a manipulative mindset is held in place by a set of irrational assumptions. 
• Aaron Beck referred to manipulations as exaggerated cognitive processes.

Compass Therapy adds that understanding the particular ways that core fear infuses and drives the manipulative trends (Dependent, Aggressive, Withdrawn, and Controlling) provides vital clues that facilitate healing and promote wholeness, regardless of whether this transformation is called personality integration, spiritual formation, sanctification, or self-actualizing in Christ.

For more, read:

CHRISTIAN PERSONALITY THEORY: 

A Self Compass for Humanity

Christian Personality Theory

Communication: The Heart Pulse of Compass Therapy

Communication is the heart pulse of therapy. The dialogue that develops between a therapist and counselee incorporates body language, emotional nuances, cognitive insight, and spiritual discernment—an interpersonal dynamic that evokes the whole human nature of each person. This is what makes counseling so different from other health professions like medicine, dentistry, or optometry. 

In counseling and psychotherapy you utilize your own personality and human nature as an interactive force in calling forth your counselee’s human potential.

While some therapies set down rules of engagement that keep the therapeutic communication at a strictly clinical level, Compass Therapy suggests that it is wise to build a rhythm between clinical professionalism and personal naturalness that helps a counselee feel at home. Sullivan called this interpersonal posture that of a “participant observer.”

Participant Observer

If the counselee grew up in the town where you spent your last vacation, it’s a natural point of discussion to spend a couple of minutes talking over your mutual impressions of the place. This builds rapport, develops a fellow feeling, and prepares for the next round of therapeutic exploration.

BUILDING EMOTIONAL RAPPORT

Emotional rapport takes top priority throughout therapy. In fact, there is no effective therapy without emotional rapport; there is only talking or questioning or preaching.

Rapport involves curiosity, humor, listening, asking interested questions, exchanging ideas, and speaking in short enough sound bites that counselees can maintain their attention while feeling that you understand them. Whenever this rapport is broken for any reason, you can interrupt what you’re doing and immediately begin reflecting what the counselee is feeling. Before long, trust is restored and the conversation can resume.

Carl Rogers’ original research revealed the considerable role that building and maintaining rapport plays in promoting behavioral change. Rogers especially highlighted the therapist qualities of warmth, genuineness, and empathy that invite a reciprocal authenticity from the counselee. Today these qualities serve just as effectively for deepening the therapeutic conversation and alliance.

In fact, a review of forty years of research shows that a therapist’s main contribution in helping counselees achieve a favorable outcome is through empathetic, affirmative, collaborative, and genuine engagement.

Building Rapport

So rather than exuding an artificially aloof bearing meant to convey clinical objectivity, Compass Therapy suggests that you go ahead and be human, professional role and all. It’s good clinical practice to know how deeply people need attention, support, and caring, and to provide these qualities in no uncertain terms.

When you can say it authentically, you might try something like: 

• “That is a powerful insight.” 
• “I am amazed by the courage you are showing.” 
• “That is the funniest story I’ve heard in a long time.” 
• “You have a fascinating life narrative.”

For more, read:

COMPASS THERAPY:

Christian Psychology 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.