Understanding Dan Montgomery's Compass Therapy

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.

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.

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.

For more, read:  

Compass Therapy: Christian Psychology In Action 

Stanford Professor Commends Compass Therapy

“In Compass Therapy: Christian Psychology In Action, Dan Montgomery adds to the impressive and growing list of Compass Therapy books that well integrate Christian perspectives with psychological theory and practice in an easy to read, thoughtful, and compelling manner. 

“The Compass Therapy book will assist counselors, therapists, clergy, and pastoral care givers broadly defined use of Compass Theory tools to both understand and help those who struggle with a wide range of personality, behavioral, emotional, and relational challenges.”

Dr. Thomas G. Plante

Thomas G. Plante, Ph.D., ABPP, Professor of Psychology at Santa Clara University and Adjunct Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, has written or edited twelve books and has published over 150 journal articles and book chapters. He maintains a private clinical practice as a licensed psychologist in Menlo Park, CA.

RELATED BOOKS BY THOMAS PLANTE:

 

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

Compass Therapy and Christian Psychology

All theories of counseling include underlying assumptions and core beliefs about God, human nature, personality, and healthy versus unhealthy behavior. Compass Therapy holds that people are related to the personal, holy, and loving Creator known through the Christian faith.

This does not exclude other perceptions of God or other ways of construing human values within the therapeutic setting. It simply underscores the fact that since cardinal values of Christianity include compassion, empathy for those who suffer, and motivation to heal and transform persons who have lost their ways, Christian psychology offers a viable worldview from which to practice counseling and psychotherapy.

Compass Therapy weds faith and science. The facets of psychology pertinent to the healing of persons include motivation, sensation and perception, learning and memory, personality and social integration, and lifespan development. All are grounded in a God who understands and utilizes counseling and therapy as yet another means of calling people to exercise freedom rightly and benefit from the identity, intimacy, and community he has invited them to know.

From a Christian perspective, Christ embraces people in need, seeking to transform their personal crises through the power of the Holy Spirit present within the alliance of therapist and counselee (Montgomery, 2006, pp. 71-74).

It's as though the Holy Spirit says to any therapist who is open, “Come. Let us work together with your counselee. Let me inspire you with insight and direction to help tame your counselee’s anxiety and heal their pain. Have courage in guiding them to give up the patterns that are defeating them: the manipulations of pleasing, placating, seducing, calculating, controlling, arguing, intimidating, avoiding, or withdrawing. Through a therapeutic bond that draws upon My wisdom, help them find a pathway that leads to flexibility, discerning love, and personal power without guile.”

If your therapeutic experience is anything like mine over the past thirty years, you may have noticed that the Trinity comforts and heals beyond religious category or human constraint, and that the Holy Spirit does indeed enhance your effectiveness as a healer of the soul.

To learn more, see:  

Compass Therapy: Christian Psychology in Action

Philosophical Underpinnings of Compass Therapy

As the founder of Compass Therapy, I'm occasionally asked why I choose a Christian worldview as the philosophical foundation of this approach to counseling. The obvious answer is that I am a Christian by faith and choice, though in coming to this experience I did try out atheistic and agnostic perceptions of reality. 

Beyond my personal faith, I want to take a stand as a professional psychologist who believes that spirituality is essential to human nature and vital to mental health. I agree with many world religions that are rooted in a community of faith, where people find purpose in suffering, hope in times of loss, and meaning in their sacred scriptures and traditions.

So why am I selective about making Christianity the foundation upon which Compass Therapy arises? Because the Trinity, the core teaching of Christian faith and doctrine, reveals a spiritual reality that underlies all human experience: the reality of One God in Three Persons. In other words, human life and history, deriving from being created in the image of God, is fundamentally interpersonal, just like the divine Trinity is fundamentally interpersonal: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

But aren't these religious assertions a far cry from modern psychology and psychotherapy, and shouldn't there be a permanent barrier that separates what happens in a house of worship from what happens in a therapist's office?

I think not.

Whether we like it or not, we are born into a social context of Life Together. Therefore our mental health is linked to the progress we make in getting along with God and other people. No person is an island, and alienation from community (ie. the inability to give and receive love) is a sure mark of psychopathology.

Compass Therapy suggests that developing a healthy personality and fulfilling interpersonal relationships are primary aims of good therapy. Toward that end a therapist uses techniques of psychotherapy to relieve symptoms of anxiety, depression, relationship dysfunction, addiction, or a host of other disorders and psychological disabilities. Yet let's never forget that the primary aim remains the development of personality health and social integration, a pursuit that lasts a lifetime.

For more about this, see

COMPASS PSYCHOTHEOLOGY:
 Where Psychology & Theology Really Meet

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