Ethics, Rapport, and Personality Disorders

The utmost delicacy is required in communicating to counselees the nature of their personality rigidities, since they may feel as vulnerable as a dental patient hearing the results of an examination. Yet therapists have an ethical mandate to impart this information when it contributes to understanding psychopathology or helps the counselee participate more effectively in resolving presenting problems.

Consider this as you approach a counselee: 

A good dentist knows to say, “Okay, this poke is going to sting a bit, but then you’ll feel better.” Patients still don’t want the needle and may resent the dentist for the invasiveness of the shot. But they do want the end result of healthy teeth.

So, when you are going to administer some truth serum to a counselee, and you anticipate temporary pain, you can say, “I’ve been pondering something that may represent new information for you…and may be a little shocking. But once we develop the overview, this insight will serve you well. Should I go ahead?”

Rare is the counselee who will stick fingers in both ears and shout, “No!” If you’ve developed decent rapport, something inside the counselee will say, “This is why I’m here.”

Rapport-building Psychotherapy

Here’s an example from my own practice:

“Ron,” I said, “we’ve reviewed pretty thoroughly how your parents left you to your own devices a lot, and didn’t much encourage conversation or activities in your life.”

“Right,” said Ron, waiting for the poke. “I grew up all alone.”

“Well, I’m afraid there are repercussions to that scenario that have lasted to this day.”

“You mean that I don’t like people?”

“Exactly. And more than that, you’ve built a castle around yourself and filled the moat with water and alligators so that nobody can get close to you.”

Ron smiled wryly. “My first wife would agree. She’d pester me for days to talk to her and then I’d bite her head off.”

“The bad news is that this will never go away on its own. The Compass Therapy name for it is the schizoid Loner pattern, or schizoid personality disorder.”

Ron sat up in his chair. “Does that mean I’m schizophrenic?”

“No. Schizophrenia is a genetic illness in which you have hallucinations and live in another reality. The schizoid personality pattern just means that you’ve split off your thoughts from your feelings, and this brings a hollow numbness inside. Then, to keep this loner pattern intact, you detach from people and withdraw into a shell. Does that make sense?”

Schizoid Loner Pattern

Ron nodded. “That’s me. I could stay on my computer for weeks if I didn’t have to go to work.”

“That’s a very honest assessment. Would you like me to tell you more about the consequences of this pattern so you can think over whether you want to keep it or not?”

“Go ahead.”

“The Loner pattern won’t let love in or out, won’t let you seek friendships that involve opening up, and will make you live and die a lonely man. How do you feel about that?”

“I guess I knew deep inside something like this was happening. I just got used to it and figured it was bad karma.”

“Actually, Ron, a fair number of counselees I’ve worked with started out even more schizoid than you. They somehow found the motivation to give life a second chance. You know, trying to see other people as more than just pests to get rid of.”

“Sounds hard to do. I get nervous when anybody’s around. I just like to be quiet with my own thoughts.”

“But isn’t that just what brought you into therapy—that you’re sick of thoughts rolling around like marbles inside your head?”

Marbles Rolling

Ron shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "I do get tired of hearing them."

“Perhaps one of our goals, along with diminishing those repetitive thoughts, can be to enrich your connection to people. There’s no good reason you can’t learn to have feelings and express them like anybody else.”

A look of relief came over Ron’s face. “Okay, but I’m going to need training wheels like a little kid on his first bike.”

“That’s what we’re here for. It’s safe to learn some new things now. And you’ve got plenty of intelligence to help you along.”

By being upfront and direct, I began shifting Ron’s concentration to actualizing growth and laid a foundation for the ongoing transmission of information about his schizoid Loner pattern even as he began to outgrow it. 

For more, read: 

COMPASS THERAPY:

Christian Psychology in Action

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

Compass Therapy Growth Strategy for Dependent Personality Disorder

Compass Therapy partners with other theories of counseling so that therapists are encouraged to draw upon their own approaches and clinical experience, even while applying compass tools. This means that therapist creativity, as well as sensitivity to the unique needs of each counselee, work together to determine the growth strategy that a therapist selects.

Psychotherapy

Here is a sample growth strategy that may prove helpful when working with Dependent counselees.

Therapy with the Dependent Pleaser usually starts well and proceeds rapidly for a few sessions, since the Pleaser wants to feel your approval. This is a good time to build rapport and lay the foundation for Strength and Assertion by commending any insights the person expresses or behavioral qualities they show that reveal the least bit of individuality.

The next step is to integrate psychodynamic insights with the kind of parenting they experienced, how they handled any brothers and sisters, and when they first noticed the onset of marked dependent behavior. Now is the time to let them talk about possible advantages of dependency, submissiveness, and non-competitiveness—what they gained from these behaviors and how the behaviors seemed to work for them at the time. This leads naturally into an exploration of the disadvantages of one-sided dependency: the opportunities they missed, the ways certain people took advantage, the lack of social visibility, the secret loneliness that came with a lack of identity, and the lack of assertion and confidence that they admired in others but lacked in themselves. 

Dependent Personailty Disorder

The novice therapist can get trapped in this phase of exploration and discussion by not shifting into the next phase of active coaching and skill building. In other words, while the Pleaser will comply with superficial talking therapy, sometimes giving the therapist what the therapist seems to want, they will begin to resist active strength-enhancement and assertiveness training steps.

Here lies the difference between therapy that meanders in undifferentiated directions and therapy that moves forward in providing counselees what is needed to outgrow defeating patterns.

To move into the action phase of therapy, you maintain rapport and conversational ease, but add the ingredient of behavioral experiments. Just as a coach training athletes, you teach and encourage counselees to handle current interpersonal relationships in new ways that bring gradual advances in personal presence. “What were you feeling when Judy said that to you…How could you have handled her more assertively…?” “When Ben picked you up thirty minutes late, what did you really want to say to him?” “When you wanted to change banks and the teller frowned at you, how might you have held your ground instead of capitulating?”

To outgrow habitual responses, the counselee needs new perceptions to support this risk-taking. For instance, the counselee says, “My buddy Jason wants to borrow my new car, but he’s wrecked two other cars and I don’t trust him. What can I say?” The therapist suggests, “This is probably one of those instances that everybody faces if they’re going to becoming more of an individual. You just tell him the truth and then relax your body and breathing to help counter your usual anxiety. And you say in your head, ‘There, I’ve stood up for myself and Jason can think what he wants about it. But I feel great that my car won’t get wrecked!’”

By now the counselee is getting acclimated to transferring insights and growth suggestions from therapy sessions into real life. Although there will be occasional relapses, you can show patience when they occur, stop long enough to troubleshoot them, and keep focused on complimenting the counselee for any increments of change in the directions of Assertion and Strength.

Dependent Personality Disorder

 Eventually, when the counselee has become fairly adept at self-preservation and self-expression, the question will arise about how to integrate newfound strengths with the lower quadrants of Love and Weakness. After all, the counselee doesn’t want to change from a clinging vine to a know-it-all arrogant bully.

So you now use cognition, emotion, physiology, and spirituality to cover the new ground of how to apologize or make amends if the counselee shows too much aggression, and how to experience forgiveness and caring for those in the counselee’s life who are making behavioral adjustments to the counselee’s use of the LAWS of the Self Compass.

For example, your counselee’s friend Jason may make a promise that he doesn’t keep. You guide your counselee to form a rhythm between Love and Assertion, first by calling Jason on his misbehavior. If Jason develops a reliable track record, then the counselee can move toward trusting again. But if Jason lies or makes another shallow promise, the counselee firms up the self-boundary by assessing whether further trust is warranted. A mature quality of love with discernment replaces the naïve gullibility of the dependent pattern.

You can tell when you are nearing completion of therapy, because there is less need for the therapist to guide sessions, and more autonomy with less distraction in the counselee’s life. At this time you can move from once a week to every two or three weeks, to help the counselee make a successful separation and get on with life beyond therapy. 

For more, read:

COMPASS THERAPY:

CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION 

Compass Therapy and the Paranoid Personality Disorder

You can recognize when someone with the paranoid personality disorder has entered your practice because you feel uneasy, as though someone is sizing up your weaknesses to use against you. 

Paranoid Arguers exaggerate the Assertion compass point to the exclusion of the Love compass point. They exude an attitude of suspicion and testiness that reflects their penchant for blaming and attacking others. Just as a shark snaps up a mackerel, the paranoid pattern will take a bite out of the naïve therapist.

You can grow apprehensive if there are several paranoid Arguers in your practice, because they try to make you walk on eggshells, revealing their hidden agenda that the one who is going to change is you. Their edgy tension, abrasive irritability, and sarcastic humor contribute to a formidable defensive armor. 

THE PATTERN'S INTERIOR

Fearing the vulnerability that accompanies love, Arguers harden their hearts to the needs or suffering of others, ruling out the possibility of intimate bonding. Instead, the Love compass point is used to manufacture displays of fake charm. Likewise, the humility and soul-searching of the Weakness compass point are twisted into self-pity, where Arguers berate people, institutions, or life itself as unfair to them. The Strength compass point inflates the Arguer with airs of self-importance and invincibility, even illusions of omnipotence, and a burning need to get their way.

Paranoid Arguer Personality Disorder

The paranoid pattern exists as a pure prototype of fixation on the Assertion compass point with aggressive trends. It is also found in combination with the adjacent compass points of either Strength or Weakness. In the case of Strength, paranoid aggression combines with narcissistic pomposity or compulsive obsession. With Weakness, the paranoid develops avoidant depression or schizoid detachment. In all instances, the opposite polarity of Love is shut off and prohibited expression.

These compass distortions mean that paranoid Arguers believe people are out to get them, and that they are justified in the hostility and bullying they direct towards others. They levy castigating remarks with impunity because there is no remorse. Antagonism and suspecting the worst in others color everything they do. 

This pattern is expressed on a continuum from mild to moderate to severe levels, as are all personality patterns. This means that actualizing individuals need a mild dose of paranoid suspicion for healthy skepticism about advertising claims, product guarantees, smooth-talking sales tactics, and conning or cajoling behavior from other people. But the paranoid Arguer congeals these self-protective strategies into a mistrustful worldview that pervades the mind and heart, body and spirit.

 
CLINICAL LITERATURE

Paranoia is a term characteristic of the Arguer pattern meaning “to think beside oneself.” The term “paranoia” is of Greek origin, found in medical literature over 2000 years go, and precedes the writings of Hippocrates, capturing the sense of a delusional belief system that emphasizes suspicion and hostility. Unwilling to follow the lead of others, and accustomed to trusting only themselves, the paranoid Arguer pattern requires the reconstruction of reality in accordance with its dictates.

Freud termed paranoia a “neuropsychosis of defense,” highlighting how this pattern wards off reality through the defense mechanisms of denial and projection. Shapiro added that the projection of unacceptable feelings and impulses onto others both eliminates guilt and accounts for the lack of intrapsychic conflict.

Unwilling to acknowledge their faults or weaknesses, Arguers shore up their self-esteem by projecting personal shortcomings onto others, believing that it is others who are malicious and vindictive. This pattern is expressed in a variety of forms. They include: the “combative type” who wants to fight the world, the “eccentric type” who withdraws yet harbors persecutory delusions, or the “fanatic type” who recruits others into secret sects. 

Horney observed that paranoid-patterned persons exhibit “sadistic trends” that distract them from their hidden inferiority. By blaming and attacking they build a counterfeit self-esteem. This obnoxious behavior acts to isolate them from meaningful or intimate relationships, further confirming their suspicion that the world is against them and that the blame for their failure lies solely on external hindrances.

Compass Therapy has selected the term “Arguer” to stand for the perpetual contrariness and automatic argumentation that dominates the paranoid’s perceptual field. There are endless ruminations or “subliminal arguments” about past injustices or wounds to their pride; current quarrelsomeness with family members, work associates, or strangers; and plans-in-preparation for arguing their case in the immediate future. Like a disputatious defense attorney, they are always on the job, considering no detail too trivial for possible use in winning a battle in the courtroom of daily life.

For techniques to work with counselees diagnosed with the paranoid personality disorder, read:

COMPASS THERAPY: 

CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION

Personality Disorders Explained: Compass Therapy

On the eve of the publication of DSM-V, the world's major tool for understanding mental illness and personality disorders, psychiatrists are pulling their hair out, trying to find a central working model that makes sense of people's inner worlds.

The main problem psychiatrists and personality theorists find with the concept of personality disorders -- longstanding patterns of cognition, emotion, and perception -- is that so many of the present personality disorder categories overlap one other when observed in real life.

Called co-morbidity (a terrible word since it sounds like death warmed over!), it simply means that very few people are pure prototypes of the narcissistic, compulsive, antisocial, paranoid, dependent, histrionic, schizoid, or avoidant personality disorders. This rests on the assumption that human behavior and its attendant psychopathology should be neat and tidy, like the data found in most other hard sciences: chemistry, physics, and mathematics.

But humans are not purely objective creatures with totally predictable instincts. We are deeply subjective individuals with personal life histories and points of view. I say that it is time psychiatry wakes up to this fact of life, and accepts the simple truth that individuals seen in therapy can demonstrate elements of narcissistic entitlement, antisocial rule-breaking, and histrionic melodrama coexisting within their personality and relationships.

Compass Therapy makes a contribution here by asserting that all human beings possess personality rigidities that are behaviorally significant in varying circumstances. These rigidities increase under stress and decrease with personality integration, which needs to be a primary goal of all therapy.

What has blocked this perception from developing in psychiatry is the ongoing war between psychoanalytically oriented professionals who believe there exists an unconscious motivation for every inner conflict, the behavioral professionals who believe that medication and behavioral conditioning can remove symptoms without a client's subjective involvement in the process, and humanistic professionals who believe that giving a client an empathetic ear for airing their inner distress will eventually lead them into making more adaptive and self directing life choices.

Compass Therapy draws upon all of these perspectives in order to develop an overview that pertains to every single client: we need to see with X-ray vision into the objective structure of personality to grasp why people subjectively choose the way they do, especially when their choice patterns bring them anxiety, depression, hostility, withdrawal, alienation, and other symptoms that make life intolerable.

With a cursory glance at the diagram above you can recognize when your client is stuck favoring one of the universal compass points of personality to the exclusion of others, or if your client rigidly uses different compass points in different situations. This solves the co-morbidity problem because it is common for people to swing around the Self Compass in non-adaptive ways, precisely because they've never learned through cognitive and emotional maturity how to use a whole Self Compass to flexibly adapt to life situations.

The Compass Model introduces new learning on how mental health functions, exactly how it breaks down, and how to expand a client's personality into healthy compass points that foster health in personality and relationships. Understanding this system give a counselor invaluable information immediately, since it illuminates the client's personality structure in every moment of counseling.

Without this model you are left floundering, trying to figure out the complex causes of historical or developmental traumas, and then how how to promote healing and change. The Self Compass Model organizes an immense foundation of clinical and empirical data, yielding a simple and effective perception of the client's health or dysfunction. A second substantial advantage is that a therapist can share compass concepts directly with clients, since these concepts are understood even by school age children.

I encourage you to get an early start on grasping the new DSM-V by first mastering the principles of Compass Therapy. To help you along, here are five Compass Therapy books for you to consider adding to your core clinical and/or pastoral counseling library.

COMPASS THERAPY

THE SELF COMPASS

CHRISTIAN PERSONALITY THEORY

PASTORAL COUNSELING AND COACHING 

CHRISTIAN COUNSELING THAT REALLY WORKS

Christian Counseling, Psychotherapy, and Truth

Many therapists have been overly trained to view a client's ego as fragile and unable to handle dynamic truths about their condition and behavior.

I agree and disagree with this training. I agree that we therapists must provide a safe interpersonal environment in which our clients can risk disclosing themselves. I disagree that we must walk on eggshells in order to do so.

Would you rather a physician or dentist hide the results of what they knew about your condition in order not to make you anxious, or describe what is causing your pain and what effective treatment will entail?

However, professionals who do optometry, dentistry, and surgery perform physical treatments to a patient's body, whereas we therapists rely upon a client's subjective and personal dialogue with us to achieve therapeutic goals.

I had this point driven home to me when I worked in a medical clinic and received physician in-house referrals to treat people's anxiety or depression. Every one of the fifty or so clients I worked with perceived me through the lens of the medical model. That means they would sit there passively looking at me while waiting for their anxiety or depression to magically go away. I found it extraordinarily difficult to engage them in dialogue to draw out the attitudes, thoughts, and feelings behind their clinical symptoms. They just didn't see the point.

This disappointing experience guided me all the more to affirm in Compass Therapy the need to be straightforward with people from the first session forward. Yes, a therapist listens with empathy and reflect feelings accurately so clients know they are being understood. But we must be fearless in bringing forth our clinical intuition and the findings of our psychological testing so that clients can perceive how important their free will choices are in relieving their symptoms.

This rhythmic movement between empathic listening and truthful engagement gives clients tools, concepts, and practice in thinking and feeling their way to personality health and wholeness.

Here is where Compass Therapy introduces a construct not present in secular psychotherapy; that is, the human soul. Human beings are God-created individuals who are called by God to purposeful lives. As therapists we are called upon when people feel bogged down by overwhelming stress, relationship dysfunction, or the grinding self-defeat of personality disorders.

We are graced with a degree of scientific knowledge about psychopathology and healthy personality growth, combined with our spiritual faith that God will help the therapeutic process along. I don't know about you, but I never begin a day of therapy without prayer for God to bless, heal, and guide the clients he sends to me.

 In the Compass model, where psychological truths are co-mingled with spiritual and biblical truths, clients are encouraged to face their disorders so that they can meaningfully outgrow them. I may tell a man with a paranoid arguer pattern that his perpetual anger and need to put people down is going to assure that he'll die as he has lived...grumpy and all alone. This is a wake up call to his soul that says, "Your therapeutic growth stretches need to include learning to make amends to the people you have abused, and learning to value love and forgiveness more than hatred and revenge."

Or, I might tell a woman who is trapped in the rigid pattern of dependent pleasing and placating, "Your efforts to make everyone happy is what leaves you depressed. Learning healthy assertion will help you develop a personal identity."

In my experience, clients respect truthfulness and take pride and pleasure when they act on psychological and spiritual growth stretches and get gratifying results.

The Compass Therapist does not hesitate being a cheerleader when people start thinking more effectively and regulating their emotions more appropriately. "Don, I really like how you stood up for yourself to your boss this week. Now he's lost his power to damage your self-esteem."

Scripture has a way of illuminating all human activities. In providing therapy, Jesus passed on a truth worth trusting: "And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32).

Compass Therapy Explains Borderline Personality Disorder

From a Compass Therapy perspective, the borderline is a flip-flop pattern. That is, the pattern favors one half of the Self Compass at the expense of the other, yet unpredictably flip-flops to its polar opposite.

Borderline-patterned persons primarily exaggerate the Strength and Assertion compass points as “top dogs,” yet make regular swings into the lower compass points of Love and Weakness. They feel boldly entitled in social situations, sweet-talking people to fill the emptiness inside. When others fail to fill this void, they shift into blame and attack mode without warning, aggressively challenging others to meet their insatiable dependency needs.

The borderline pattern’s self-system fluctuates drastically as emotional explosions alternate with the desperate need for reassurance. When caught in the grip of anxiety (Weakness compass point) or longing for nurturance (Love compass point), the person seeks assurance in the manner of the avoidant Worrier or dependent Pleaser patterns. This sends others an SOS signal that elicits a desire to rescue the borderline-patterned person from depression or loneliness. But since the borderline demands assurance that is absolute and comforting that is perfect, these demands are quickly frustrated.

Then self-righteous judgment erupts. Furiously accusing others of neglect and disregard, the behavior then more closely resembles that of the paranoid Arguer and narcissistic Boaster patterns.

Extreme emotional volatility, erratic shifts between aggression and neediness, and a lack of trust in self or others render the borderline’s Self Compass unstable; hence the Compass Therapy term, “borderline Challenger.”

Such shakiness is accentuated by ever-present and contradictory feelings toward others: dependent anger and anxiety-driven superiority. In other words, individuals with a borderline personality pattern experience life as a harrowing roller coaster ride.

For a clinical case study and successful treatment plan for treating the Borderline Personality Disorder, read

Compass Therapy: Christian Psychology in Action

Compass Therapy Provides Hope Over the Lifespan

Compass Therapy offers hope for transformative growth  throughout the lifespan.

The Bible affirms this hope by assuring that God has a positive plan for each person’s life, “For I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope” (Jer 29:11).

Neuropsychology supports this hope by showing clearly that human personality is malleable. The brain can respond to new learning even into old age.

In the therapeutic alliance the counselor and client are not just working to solve presenting problems, but growing together as persons along life’s way. Through the counselor’s behavioral modeling of caring and courage, humility and esteem, the client comes to experience the interpersonal dimension of hope for fulfilling relationships, giving and receiving love, and if the client chooses, loving and trusting God.

This brings us to a diagram that helps inspire counselees with an overview for their lifetime growth in Christ: “The Actualizing Ascent.” Upon showing the diagram to a counselee, you might say, “This represents the human lifespan.”

You explain that the first half of the curve slopes upward, which represents human development the morning of life, from birth to midlife. The tasks of this phase of life include the acquisition of language and culture, education, experimentation with social roles, identity formation, employment, and marriage and

child-rearing if so chosen.

As shown by the curve’s peak, the middle vertical line designates the high noon of midlife, and sometimes precipitates an identity crisis as people shift from the morning to the afternoon of life. While ambition and ego satisfaction characterize the morning of human development, the afternoon of life requires a more interior search for meaning, wholeness, and interpersonal fulfillment.

Carl Jung reported that virtually all of his patients in the second half of life were grappling with religious concerns. Though an individual may get by the first half of life without cultivating actualizing virtues, the lack of development in the second half of life can lead to confusion, frustration and despair.

It’s almost as if God imbues aging with the power to arrest everyone’s attention -- to finally say, “Look. You really are finite and temporal! You’d better grow in me while there is still time, for without me, you will be nothing.” The down-sloped side of the lifespan curve shows the inexorable decline of bodily health and stamina. Wear and tear in the body shows up in wrinkling skin, slowed metabolism, sagging muscles, stiffened joints, vulnerability to disease, and eventually, diminished mental capacities.

For those who refuse to challenge their rigid personality trends during this time, these trends intensify and take a tragic toll. 

Aggressive persons become crankier and more belligerent, ever more paranoid and chronically suspicious. Dependent persons feel more anxiety-ridden and scattered. Withdrawn people shrivel up like leather left out in the sun too long, adapting to marginal levels of subsistence, barely getting by, and isolating from human contact. Controlling people grow obsessively worried about the things they can’t control, raising their blood pressure and shortening their tempers.

The goods news, though, is that people can grow increasingly wise, patient, and mature in the second half of life. This is represented by the upward-sloped dotted curve, you explain, which shows a person’s potential for actualizing psychological and spiritual growth. 

Indeed, Christians are blessed to know that Christ will help them become more whole through anything they face, and will personally welcome them to everlasting life at the moment of death.

Compass Therapy encourages continued growth and development throughout life. You explain to counselees that individuals who begin growing psychologically and spiritually in their thirties, forties, or fifties tend to keep growing in their sixties, seventies, and beyond.

Since the human personality is malleable, exercising the LAWS of personality (Love and Assertion; Weakness and Strength) and the compass virtues (caring and courage; humility and esteem) promote health and fulfillment even into old age.

Perhaps the single most important attitude that Compass Therapy seeks to impart is that change is normal and the need for growth common to all people. Equipped with an actualizing perspective, stagnation is forsaken in favor of the ongoing transformation of one’s personality and relationships, conjoined with a deepening trust in the Holy Spirit’s help and guidance.

When counselees internalize this health model for hope, grace, and transformation, they learn to face the coming years with increased flexibility and resourcefulness.

The Actualizing Ascent Diagram helps counselees see the importance of exchanging rigidity for rhythm, egocentricity for actualizing development, manipulation for authenticity, and personality   idiosyncrasies for compass virtues.

In this way, the invitation of Christ, the witness of the counselor, and the vision of the counselee converge in the pursuit of a life lived gracefully, accruing in wholeness and purpose. Though there are quintessential tough times and challenging adversities, the overall direction is toward an actualizing ascent in Jesus Christ.

Compass Therapy Promotes Direct Action

Not long ago I was in a therapy session with a twenty year old woman (I'll call her Rachel) who was struggling to recover her battered self-esteem from an eight-month relationship with a domineering and misogynistic man. Of course her boyfriend (I'll call him Bill) had his charm. He bought her a few gifts. He made her laugh sometimes. But that hardly compared to how badly he ran her down in his presence.

We began our work with her describing Bill's many ways of verbally abusing her, at the same time trying to convince her that she deserved this treatment. 

Now in the present session I show her the Self Compass diagram, explaining how people need access to the four compass points of Love and Assertion, Weakness and Strength—the LAWS of personality health.

Rachael immediately got it. She said, "I was definitely stuck on the Love compass point, pleasing and placating Bill in every way, always trying to keep the peace, and always wondering why he was so mean and critical. I didn't dare show Assertion or Strength." Likewise, she identified Bill as stuck on the Assertion compass point with relentless aggression. "He always became angry and impatient, especially if I hesitated to do whatever he wanted."

Once we both grasped the relationship dynamics, I offered insights for developing healthy Assertion and Strength in Rachel's personality. But we needed more than insight alone. We needed to exorcise the emotional anxiety from his reign of terror in her life. In the next session, I moved into a Compass Therapy action technique.

"Rachel, our talking so frankly and fully about the emotional wounding you received from Bill is the first step in recovery. But the next step requires action on your part."

"What do I need to do?"

"Just relax where you are sitting and follow my instructions for the next couple of minutes. We're going to go deep in your psyche, where your unconscious has stored hundreds of painful memories—humiliation, false guilt, and fear of displeasing Bill or any other man. We're going to cast these feelings out of you by replacing them with their polar opposite: peace, dignity, and self-love."

Rachel agreed to follow my lead. I guided her into a deep breathing and muscle relaxation sequence, where she tensed and then relaxed muscle groups from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes.

Once she was physically and mentally relaxed, I said, "Now while you continue to melt your muscles and breathe deeply, I'm going to speak to you the way Bill often did, and use the same tone of voice. Your task is to keep relaxing, and come up with new responses that tell him now—based on your newly developing Assertion and Strength—what you wish you had said back then, but were too afraid."

Once she fully understood what we were doing, and did indeed relax, I repeated many of the criticisms that Bill once used, and was pleased to see her standing up to them. She drew from the Strength of our relationship, and trusted the process of Self Compass expressiveness that Bill inhibited. I cheered her on until she actually felt this healthy assertion in her body/mind/spirit.

A session like this isn't an instant fix. But it does have psychological power to generalize into a person's current and future life. And for Rachel it was lifesaving to develop a new sense of peace and self-confidence. She was taking the first steps to learning how to build a self-boundary strong enough to ward off any future encounter with a misogynistic man.

There are twenty-five counseling techniques in one of my books on Compass Therapy. To read the first chapter, 
visit Amazon.com here:

Christian Counseling That Really Works: 

Compass Therapy in Action