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

Curing Personality Disorders in Compass Therapy

Why are personality disorders so alluring to individuals who cling to them? I agree with Gordon Allport that a pattern 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.

Any one of the personality disorders 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!” Harry Stack 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. 

Yet from the view of 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 the personality disorder pattern and their correlated styles of resistance reside within the Self Compass, the therapist can impart new information throughout the therapy, gradually strengthening a counselee's resolve to escape from the pattern by challenging their own resistance.This motivates clients to participate in their growth toward freedom and health, a decisive gain for successful therapy.

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 exaggerating or avoiding of one or more compass points: 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. To learn more about these LAWS of personality read Christian Counseling That Really Works: Compass Therapy in Action.

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 personality disorder 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. 

In this manner, the patterns that underlie personality disorders 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 clients replace them with signs of an integrated Self Compass, with all its benefits of personality health and fulfilling relationships. 

To master how to successfully treat the nine most common personality disorders (Narcissistic, Compulsive, Histrionic, Dependent, Antisocial, Paranoid, Borderline, Avoidant, and Schizoid), read several times through:

COMPASS THERAPY: 

CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION