Brief Overview of Compass Therapy: Dr. Dan Montgomery

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 

Restoring the Supernatural to Pastoral Counseling

We live in a time when much that is precious to Christian faith and doctrine has been removed from some approaches to pastoral counseling. I know one reason for this development. 

One of the founders of the pastoral counseling movement in twentieth century America, Seward Hiltner, wanted to apply modern psychology to the work of the clergy. He sought and received help for doing this from humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers. The help Rogers provided turned traditional pastoral care into an extension of humanistic psychology.

Seward Hiltner

Hiltner and Rogers taught pastoral counselors how to show empathy instead of judgment toward counselees. They emphasized that each counselee is unique, and lives within a perceptual field can only be disclosed in an atmosphere of trust and positive regard. This helped pastoral counselors get out of the rut of offering superficial advice or moralist platitudes, and taught them how to listen more deeply and respond more humanly to their counselees.

Carl Rogers

As a psychologist, I too knew Carl Rogers. I read all of his works and had several memorable conversations with him. I asked him once if he believed in God. He said, "Dan, I am uncomfortable with the personal God that is presented in the Bible. I believe that the highest authority should be a person's own experience." When I asked why he had used the biblical term of "agape love" to describe the bond between people in his encounter groups, he said, "Perhaps it has to do with the Spirit of the Universe."

For all the good that Hiltner and Rogers brought to pastoral counseling, there was a downside.

My friend and colleague, theologian Donald Bloesch, a noted theologian of evangelical theology, knew Seward Hiltner at the University of Chicago. Don said he had felt very disheartened on hearing Hiltner discuss pastoral counseling. "He disallowed any sense of the supernatural, including any reference to Jesus' divine nature and miracles, or the activity of the Holy Spirit in pastoral care."

Donald Bloesch

Bloesch and I agreed, he as a theologian and me as a psychologist, that one of the distinctive elements of Christian pastoral counseling lies in the presence of Christ the Lord during sessions. There exists an unbroken continuity made possible by the Holy Spirit between the soul care offered by Peter and the disciples, and the pastoral counseling we offer to people today. Two months before he passed away, Don said, "Dan, I believe that God has called you to bring the supernatural back into pastoral counseling. My prayers are with you."

We can pray for supernatural intervention and expect the benefits of Christ's atonement to help heal personality conflicts, reconcile damaged relationships, and vitalize lost spiritual lives. We can use Scripture and biblical stories, including miraculous stories drawn from the Old or New Testament, as word pictures that inspire faith and hope. We can delight when the Holy Spirit moves through gifts of the word of knowledge or word of wisdom, in which our own knowledge is augmented by insights or interpretations that come from a higher power than ours. We can respect counselees' unique perceptual world, while inviting them into a larger world of God's in-breaking kingdom on earth.

Dan Montgomery

The Compass Therapy approach to pastoral counseling brings together the tools and principles of therapeutic psychology with a robust faith in the Word of God and Spirit of God to make Christ's presence real in counseling sessions.

For more about Christ's presence in pastoral counseling, see: 

Christian Counseling That Really Works

Historical Psychology Contributions to Pastoral Counseling

Insights from the field of therapeutic psychology have greatly enriched pastoral counseling. From Sigmund Freud (1920) came descriptions of the major ego-defense mechanisms, vital in helping counselees understand how they might be resisting the very truth that can heal them. These include rationalization, denial, projection, reaction formation, repression, intellectualization, passive aggression, and acting out.

Sigmund Freud

Carl Jung (1933) viewed faith in God as an essential dimension of mental health, saying, “I don’t believe God exists. I know God exists.” He reported that most of his patients in the second half of life were deeply concerned with religious issues, and helped us understand that symbols, whether in the form of dreams or daydreams, can carry religious meaning about discerning God’s will for one’s spiritual pathway.

Carl Jung

Viktor Frankl (1946) bore witness, through his survival of a Nazi death camp, that even in the most tragic of circumstances, persons retain a degree of freedom to choose their inner attitudes. He called the search for meaning a universal spiritual and psychological quest.

  

Viktor Frankl

Erik Erikson (1950) developed the concept of eight stages of life, suggesting that a successful resolution of these life crises gives birth to the life-affirming virtues of hope, will, purpose, competence, fidelity, love, caring, and wisdom.

Erik Erikson

Rollo May (1965) viewed the goal of pastoral counseling as increasing a person’s freedom, spontaneity, and genuineness. He described the counseling process as offering counselees “the grace of clarification” to release them from the anguish of egocentricity.

Rollo May

Carl Rogers (1965) recognized the importance of prizing the counselee. His work as a consultant to Seward Hiltner focused early formulations of pastoral counseling in the direction of developing warmth, congruence, and unconditional positive regard in the pastoral counselor’s therapeutic style.

Carl Rogers

Aaron Beck (1975) noted that what people are thinking directly influences the emotions they feel, and that cognitive assumptions about life need constant revision in order to become healthy and adaptive rather than self-defeating. Many pastoral counselors benefited by adding elements of Cognitive Therapy to their approaches.

Aaron Beck

My colleague Everett Shostrom and I suggested that self-actualizing in relation to God is a reasonable goal of pastoral counseling (1978). Further, we put forward the concept that counseling involves the whole of human nature: cognition and emotion, sensation and spirituality (1986).

Everett Shostrom

Dan Montgomery