Compass Therapy Tips for Counseling a Dependent Client

Dependent clients transfer their indiscriminate hunger for people’s approval straight into the counseling setting. In terms of the Self Compass, they are stuck on the Love compass point in the Dependent trend, and their chief difficulty is a fear of using the Assertion compass point.

1. Resist being trapped by the niceness, politeness, and attempts at being ideal counselees. It is important to help dependent clients stay in touch with the need for healthy assertion, because they fear anger and confrontation. Watch out for the temptation of feeling flattered when they tell you how wise and wonderful you are. If you get hooked by this unconscious ploy, they will remain as dependent as ever.

 

2. How do you teach dependents about their self-defeating personality pattern without devastating them? You break the news gently by exploring how they first acquired the Dependent trend in childhood and adolescence. You ask them to recall who taught them to care so much about people’s approval. You predict that unless they outgrow the Dependent trend, they will keep feeling guilty about trivial matters, fearful of displeasing others, and depressed when others inevitably take them for granted.

3. Skillfully frustrate their tendency to lean on you. Ask them how they feel about different issues, and wait for them to spell it out. This helps them take responsibility for thoughts and feelings. Ask what they want and how they might accomplish it. This helps them think for themselves. Compliment every movement toward self-direction and emotional self-sufficiency.

4. Become the accepting parent your dependent client never had. Compliment them when they finally admit their anger towards others, disclose secret depression, or show disgust with their overdone niceness. Your acceptance of their negative feelings helps them accept more realistically their Strengths and Weaknesses—without fear. This is how they become more authentic human persons.

Dr. Jim Beck at Denver Seminary says about  

Christian Counseling That Really Works: 

"The 25 techniques alone are worth the price of the book."

 

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