Compass Therapy: Handling Resistance

Jesus used the analogy of planting seeds to describe the process whereby people are exposed to God’s Word and develop their unique way of responding to it.

I like this earthy analogy. It has similar implications for the counselor who wishes to plant seeds of personality wholeness or interpersonal communication in counselees. 

Collaborative Implantation

I am always watching for the opportunity to plant the seeds of caring, courage, humility, or esteem in counselees, for these can eventually germinate into personality balance and interpersonal fulfillment—two universal human needs.

Collaborative implantation lets you reflect the counselee’s perceptual field while at the same time sewing seeds for needed growth.

Shen is a sixteen-year-old sophomore who doesn’t like school. He spends a lot of time alone in his room listening to the latest teen music and playing video games. You are working with him to overcome his withdrawn trend and its concomitant social isolation and depression. 

After a number of sessions, you’ve helped him develop an interpersonal language for his feelings and receive adjunct medical therapy in the form of an antidepressant. He is doing much better now in holding his own with new friends and paying attention in class.

A new problem arises that Shen doesn’t recognize. “My sister is so stupid when it comes to music. I really let her have it this week.”

     

As you explore this new topic, you find that Chunnie, Shen’s thirteen-year-old sister, idolizes him. She hangs on his every word and takes what he says to heart. You realize he’s trying out his newfound strength and assertion by putting her down a lot. 

How do you help Shen develop a more compassionate attitude toward his sister, while continuing to develop his strengths? You try collaborative implantation.

         “Chunnie is so ridiculous,” he chides. “She thinks these totally plastic rock groups are so cool.”

         “Sounds like she doesn’t have your sophistication in listening to music. Yet she looks up to you so much. I bet she’d be so thrilled if you became the nurturing brother that she needs.”

         “What do you mean?”

         “You know; someone who believes in her—who helps her along without criticizing her. Of course, that takes quite a lot of skill. Most big brothers talk down to their little sisters. They don’t know how much damage that causes.”

         “It’s just that I can’t believe some of the groups she likes. They’re terrible!”

         “I know what you mean. The groups she chooses are ones you might have chosen at thirteen, before you developed more musical expertise. I can tell it would be hard for you—and maybe even impossible—to keep some of your critical comments to yourself.”

         “I can do that. But who will teach her what’s what if I don’t?”

         “So it seems to you like a special mission in life to correct your sister and make her adopt your beliefs and tastes. Like maybe she should be your clone.”

         “Hey, I’m not that bad. But I get what you’re saying—that I shouldn’t get on her case so much.”

          “That’s a very mature insight. I’m impressed. Keep that up and I bet you’ll be giving her a supportive hug before you know it.”

       

Do you see what is happening? How Shen’s rigid and sophomoric superiority is being challenged with new growth? And how his one-upmanship is expanded into a word picture of what it would look like to develop a more supportive big brother role?

         

In fact, because you’ve planted these seeds of healthier give and take with his sister, Shen gradually shifts his behavior in that direction. You feel gratified when a couple of months later Chunnie comes in for a session. She mentions in passing how well Shen has been treating her.

For more, read: Christian Counseling That Really Works

Christian Counseling

 

How Compass Therapy Reduces the Power of Personality Disorders

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

The Power of Personality Disorders

From the view of Compass Therapy, every personality pattern 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!” 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. 

Personality Disorders Self Compass

Yet for 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 patterns and their concomitant styles of resistance reside within the Self Compass, the therapist can impart new information throughout the therapy, gradually strengthening counselees’ resolve to escape from the pattern by challenging their own resistance. 

Resistance to Personality Change

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 exaggeration or avoidance of 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.

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 pattern 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. 

Personality Growth

In this manner, patterns 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 counselees replace them with signs of an integrated Self Compass. Many pseudo-problems and wild-goose chases fade away 
as substantial personality growth occurs. 

For more, read:

COMPASS THERAPY: 
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION