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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
