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

Compass Therapy and The Schizoid Loner Personality Disorder

Actualizing persons interact with the world through rhythms of contact and withdrawal, involvement and detachment, activity and passivity. Contact, involvement, and activity require action to engage in work, relationships, or self-development. Withdrawal, detachment, and passivity allow for resting and sleeping, solitude, and recharging one’s batteries. 

But the schizoid Loner cuts this rhythm in half, fixating on withdrawal, detachment, and passivity. The word schizoid derives from the Greek word schizoid and means “split off.” All the compass points are collapsed, except for Weakness, which intensifies into nothingness.

The Pattern’s Interior

The schizoid Loner is trapped on the Weakness compass point. Loners withdraw because of an indifference to everything—to friends and relations, to vocational enjoyment, to duties or rights, to good fortune or bad. The rewards and pleasures of human companionship mean nothing to them.

Karen Horney noted that schizoids actively “move away from people” by forming an impenetrable shell that makes other people fade out of consciousness. The phrase, “Out of sight, out of mind,” is not just a credo. It is a daily goal.

Hermit Crab

Not only do others disappear off their radar screen, but their emotions evaporate as well. This life plan has its merits in that schizoid Loners maintain simple lives, untroubled by feelings, impervious to relationships, and undisturbed by inner conflicts. In fact, if a person wants to live an ascetic life that is celibate and single, the schizoid pattern offers the structure and function for doing so. 

Perhaps this accounts for the secret superiority often noted in schizoid counselees. Compass theory posits that this tendency reflects the psychodynamics of a tightly repressed Strength compass point that acts out in the form of unconscious narcissism. Millon notes: “Fantasy in a schizoid-like person sometimes betrays the presence of a secret grandiose self that longs for respect and recognition while offsetting fears that the person is really an outcast.”

While everyone needs a rhythm that includes occasional withdrawal and detachment, the schizoid Loner’s selection of isolation as a long-term coping pattern leads into dangerous territory: a solitary confinement that begins as a retiring lifestyle, but can spiral into schizotypal eccentricity, possibly leading to several types of schizophrenia. For this reason Rollo May has described the schizoid life as existentially hollow.

This hollowness reflects the interpersonal truth that human beings need social stimulation, and when they isolate from the rewards and consensual validation society normally provides, their psyche begins to create its own media show: excessive daydreaming, voices that speak from illusory entities, and the formation of an alternate reality that is light years away from normalcy. 

In other words, the psychospiritual energy for actualizing growth, when not pursued, doesn’t just disappear; unconscious forces convert it into the landscape of the Loner’s version of the universe. In Self Compass terms, the Loner-patterned person lacks esteem for self or others (Strength compass point), love for self or others (Love compass point), and courage to take risks for self-development or the bettering of circumstances (Assertion compass point). The energy from these compass points is shunted into exaggerated weakness, creating a barren existence rather akin to the hermit crab.

By applying techniques that balance a healthy Weakness compass point with an awakening of the Strength, Love, and Assertion compass points, therapeutic intervention generates enough aliveness to jump-start the Loner’s motivational engine and develop the LAWS of personality.

For more on the schizoid Loner personality disorder see:

COMPASS THERAPY: 

CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION