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

 

Freud and Christian Personality Theory

Freud’s penetrating insights into clinically rigid personalities bear witness that unconscious conflicts, some of them arising from childhood experiences, affect human behavior in lasting ways.

To drive the point home, Freud develops the notion of the id, ego, and superego. The id represents the most primitive dimension of the self, derived from primal instincts of sex, aggression, and pleasure. The superego symbolizes cultural, parental, and societal norms that seek to tame and civilize the unruly id. The ego, the reality principle of selfhood, seeks to forge an uneasy but workable peace between impulses from the id and repression of these impulses by the superego. 

To the degree that persons can sublimate the id into more constructive and socially acceptable behaviors, the ego is strengthened and the superego becomes less repressive and more proactive in terms of a healthy conscience. “We might say that the ego stands for reason and good sense while the id stands for the untamed passions” (Freud, 1933).

Christian personality theory agrees with this overall picture in all but two points. First, it suggests that the id, or instinctual basis of the self, is not merely biological and genetic but also spiritual and interpersonal. Thus, while the unconscious is potentially selfish and self-absorbed, it is also innately concerned with creativity, social integration, and a human goodness that emerges from the divine impulses of the soul that also reside within the unconscious. 

Second, the purpose of human life is not limited to the resolution of unconscious conflicts, but also reflects the calling of Christ within each person to become a more whole personality, their human nature sharing in Christ’s redemption, their fulfillment combining self-determination with openness to God’s grace in life and relationships.

In regard to Freud’s discovery and elucidation of the ego defense mechanisms—ways that people defend themselves against actualizing growth by perpetuating rigidly defended patterns—compass theory offers a rationale for organizing and deriving insight into these defense mechanisms by interpreting them within the Self Compass framework. 

Personality Patterns Self Compass

Denial can be employed from every compass point. Pleasers and Storytellers (Love compass point) deny that they live too much through other people. Arguers and Rule-breakers (Assertion compass point) deny that they are mean-spirited. Loners and Worriers (Weakness compass point) deny that they actively avoid developing strengths or learning how to love. Boasters and Controllers deny that they have superiority complexes that judge others as inferior to them. 

Reaction formation involves a rigid determination to become the opposite of someone or something the person is rebelling against. Persons stuck on the Love compass point often experienced someone in their family of origin engaged in angry tirades or dominating others through intimidation; therefore Pleasers and Storytellers go out of their way to accommodate others and maintain good will at all cost. 

 

Assertion-stuck individuals often modeled a parent’s aggressive trend, learning to disdain anyone who modeled servile submissiveness. Arguers or Rule-breakers develop a reaction formation against submission by blaming and attacking others to ensure a dominant role. 

Weakness-stuck individuals have given up on improving their lot, frequently because someone stuck in Strength pushed them too hard or criticized them too frequently. So Worriers and Loners develop a reaction formation against strong and assertive behaviors by determining not to take risks as a strategy for maintaining social invisibility. 

Boasters and Controllers, stuck on Strength, have often developed a reaction formation against someone they knew who was pitifully weak, or a time in life when they felt trapped by overwhelming anxiety; they vow never again to show weakness by fortifying a self-image of being perfectly in control.

For more, see:

CHRISTIAN PERSONALITY THEORY: 

COMPASS PSYCHOTHEOLOGY APPLIED