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 Explains Defense Mechanisms

The concept of defense mechanisms originated with Freud to describe how people cope with anxiety. Compass Therapy explains defense mechanisms with the use of the Self Compass. Here are some examples:

Projection is a defense mechanism whereby one is so uncomfortable with personal deficiencies that they are disowned by projecting them onto other people, who are then seen as possessing these negative traits. Here is how Compass Therapy predicts projection works in terms of personality patterns found around the Self Compass: 

• Pleasers and Storytellers project onto others their hope for approval instead of learning to approve of themselves, projecting self-assurance onto others, creating a compelling inner need for external reassurance. 
• Arguers and Rule-breakers project their cynicism and spite onto others, assume the worst in people, and feel justified in their contempt for others. They even project their hostility onto groups or society as a whole, feeling as a consequence that others have malevolent intentions and are out to get them. 
• Worriers and Loners project their withdrawal onto others and therefore see people as withdrawing from them; they even project their rejection of others onto humanity as a whole, feeling like outcasts from the human race. 
• Boasters and Controllers project their hidden inferiority feelings and fear of being judged onto others, so that other people are viewed as flawed and deserving of their judgment.

Displacement means taking an emotion that occurs in one situation where it seems too threatening to express and displacing it onto a subsequent situation that seems less threatening. Here is how Compass Therapy interprets displacement:

• Pleasers and Storytellers displace onto others the depression that lurks under their social facades, and then reframe themselves as the caregivers who cheer up those who seem unhappy. This spares them from facing the lack of identity that secretly depresses them. 
• Arguers and Rule-breakers frequently become irritated and angry, displacing this agitation from one situation or relationship to the next, and then ventilating with acerbic explosiveness on an unsuspecting person.  

• Loners and Worriers displace energy for living into a fantasy life that requires no risks or social contact. 
• Boasters and Controllers displace and convert the anxiety hidden beneath the mask of cool composure into steely resolve to impress others with their command of a situation. 

Isolation is a defense mechanism where some aspect of the self is dissociated from consciousness and exiled to the unconscious. 

• Pleasers and Storytellers isolate anger and resentment from conscious awareness, and create a compensatory niceness. 
• Arguers and Rule-breakers isolate love and forgiveness from consciousness, and bristle with contrariness. 
• Loners and Worriers isolate risk-taking and involvement from consciousness, and stagnate in apathy.

While psychoanalytic theory offers the hypothesis of repression and acting out of unconscious impulses to account for why people behave destructively, Compass Therapy offers a biblical view that misguided self-will holds human beings captive to rigid personality trends and patterns, thereby estranging them from God’s healing love, and that all people stand in need of the reconciling grace of Christ that makes loving self, others, and God possible, transforming destructive tendencies into actualizing growth.

And while the psychoanalytic methods of free association, the interpretation of ego defense mechanisms, and the effective resolution of transference offer valuable means for making the unconscious conscious, Compass Therapy adds that people can move directly into growth and health by applying the Self Compass, taking appropriate growth stretches into unused compass points, and developing more flexible, balanced behavior.

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 

Welcome to Compass Therapy!

   

The Compass Therapy approach integrates a model of counseling and therapy with Christian orthodoxy. I pray that it enhances your counseling practice or quest for self-knowledge.

   I recall the years in which I studied or received supervision in different approaches to counseling and therapy. Psychoanalytic. Psychodrama. Existential. Gestalt. Transactional analysis. Family systems. Cognitive-behavioral. I read theory and learned techniques, while searching Scripture and praying for a viable integration with my Christian beliefs. Some theories and techniques enriched my way of understanding and helping others. Others didn’t. I kept what worked, and what proved compatible with Christian orthodoxy. 

 For instance, while I found aspects of Freud’s theory of value, I had to leave other parts behind. The belief in the unconscious as a dark and pervasive instinctual force contradicted my experience of people’s resiliency and resourcefulness in the counseling process—not to mention the ingenious ways I sensed the Holy Spirit helping people rebound from terrible pain or loss.

 Gradually, I evolved the bedrock assumption of Compass Therapy: the positive gains of good counseling are an amalgamation of therapeutic principles empowered by Christ’s healing love. Ultimately, therapeutic psychology and the Lord work together in the counseling process, whether or not there are overt references to Christianity. The Holy Spirit blesses people who humble themselves in seeking a greater wholeness.

 Whether you are a veteran therapist, student of counseling, or person undergoing therapy, I invite you to explore and enjoy the benefits of Compass Therapy provided in future posts.   

To view the Compass Therapy book, click:

COMPASS THERAPY: CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION