Theoretical orientations
Study the built-in formulation frameworks, or upload your own material, a chapter, handout, or notes, and Compass extracts a structured framework you can apply to any case, compare side-by-side, or be graded against.
Every therapy shares one stem: the relationship, and the skill of building it. Orientations are the arms that grow out of it, each with its own account of what keeps a problem going. Learn the stem first.
Build the alliance and hear ambivalence.
“What would be different if this changed?”
Test a belief against evidence.
“What told you they were angry?”
Notice the pattern repeating with you.
“You braced just then. Familiar?”
Ramezani, A., Rockers, D. M., Wanlass, R. L., & McCarron, R. M. (2016). Teaching behavioral medicine professionals and trainees an elaborated version of the Y-Model: Implications for the integration of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), psychodynamic therapy, and motivational interviewing. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 26(4), 407–424.
Plakun, E. M., Sudak, D. M., & Goldberg, D. (2009). The Y model: An integrated, evidence-based approach to teaching psychotherapy competencies. Journal of Psychiatric Practice, 15(1), 5–11.
Your orientations
Frameworks you've uploaded. Only these can be deleted, the built-in library below is read-only.
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Theoretical orientations
The built-in library. 21 frameworks with study material, key questions, interventions, and quizzes.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
You cannot delete a painful thought, but you can stop it running your day. Make room for it and move toward what matters.
In practice"I'm having the thought that I'll fail." Notice it as a thought rather than a verdict, and make the phone call anyway, because the call matters to you.
A third-wave psychological intervention grounded in Relational Frame Theory and functional contextualism that treats psychological suffering as a normal part of human experience rather than a pathology to be eliminated. The aim is psychological flexibility. Values-aligned, meaningful action even in the presence of difficult internal experiences.
Sources: [4]
Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA)
Behaviour is selected by what follows it. Change the antecedents and the consequences rather than the person.
In practiceThe tantrum ends when the demand is withdrawn, so withdrawing the demand is what taught the tantrum.
The systematic application of the principles of operant and respondent learning to socially significant behaviour. ABA formulates behaviour by its FUNCTION, the relationship between antecedents, the behaviour itself, and its consequences (the three-term contingency, A-B-C), and changes behaviour by rearranging those contingencies. Widely used in autism and developmental disability, and the empirical backbone of behaviour-change technology across settings.
Sources: [24]
Clinical Psychopharmacology (for Therapists)
You are not prescribing. You are noticing what the medication is and is not doing, and saying so clearly to patient and prescriber.
In practiceTwo weeks into an SSRI: sleep better, mood unchanged. That is the expected course, not failure. Tell the patient that.
Not a psychotherapy but a body of working knowledge every therapist needs: how psychotropic medications work, when to refer for a medication evaluation, how to support adherence, what side effects and red flags to watch for, and how to collaborate with prescribers, all while staying inside a non-prescriber's scope of practice.
Sources: [8]
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
Distress is held in place by thoughts we treat as facts and by the avoidance that protects them. Test the thought, drop the avoidance.
In practicePatient: "They didn't reply, so they're finished with me." Therapist: "What told you that? What else can a silent phone mean?"
A structured, time-limited psychotherapy grounded in the idea that psychological distress arises from maladaptive thoughts, beliefs, and learned behaviours rather than unconscious conflict. CBT targets the interconnection between cognition, emotion, and behaviour to achieve symptom reduction and durable change.
Compassion-Focused & Mindful Self-Compassion (Gilbert; Neff & Germer)
Shame makes the threat system louder. Deliberately switching on the soothing system is a trainable skill, not a personality trait.
In practice"What would you say to a friend in exactly this spot? Now say it to yourself, in that tone."
An integrative third-wave family of approaches grounded in the conviction that self-criticism, shame, and chronic threat-system activation drive much psychological suffering, and that the systematic cultivation of compassion, toward self and others, is both a stance and a trainable capacity that rebalances the brain's emotional systems. Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT; Paul Gilbert) and Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC; Kristin Neff & Christopher Germer) are the two principal traditions and are deeply complementary.
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)
Two things are true at once: you are doing your best, and you need to do something different. Skills bridge the gap.
In practiceAfter a row: "I understand why you hung up, and hanging up cost you the conversation. What skill could go there instead?"
An evidence-based, multi-modal treatment developed by Marsha Linehan for chronic emotional dysregulation and self-harm. DBT combines second-wave CBT techniques with dialectical philosophy and Zen-influenced acceptance practices, and is the gold-standard for borderline personality disorder and chronic suicidality.
Sources: [5]
DSM Approach to Personality Disorders (Sperry)
A personality disorder is an enduring pattern across thinking, feeling, relating and impulse control. Not a bad week.
In practiceThe same fear of abandonment turns up in the job, the marriage and the therapy. That repetition is the diagnosis.
A diagnostic and treatment framework for the ten DSM personality disorders, organised around Len Sperry's characteristic profiles and integrative case conceptualisation. Each disorder is mapped across a consistent set of dimensions and matched to a tailored, evidence-informed treatment strategy.
Emotion-Focused Therapy (Greenberg)
Emotion is information, not noise. Reach the vulnerable feeling underneath the reactive one and it reorganises.
In practiceUnder the anger: "When she walks out, what happens in your chest?" Answer: "I feel about five years old."
An empirically-supported, neo-humanistic therapy developed by Leslie Greenberg and colleagues (originally as Process-Experiential Therapy) that integrates person-centered relational conditions, Gestalt experiential methods, attachment theory, and modern emotion science. EFT holds that maladaptive emotional responses, blocked emotional processing, and unmet attachment-based emotional needs sit at the core of much psychological suffering, and that lasting change requires patients to access, deepen, transform, and integrate emotion in the therapy room, not merely talk about it.
Sources: [15]
Existential Therapy (Yalom, Frankl, May)
Not all pain is pathology. Some of it is the cost of being mortal, free and separate. The work is to face it, not to fix it.
In practice"If nothing changed and you had one year, what would you stop doing tomorrow?"
A philosophical, depth-oriented approach that locates psychological suffering in the human being's confrontation with the ultimate conditions of existence. Death, freedom (with its companion, responsibility), existential isolation, and meaninglessness. The therapeutic task is not to remove these conditions (they are not removable) but to help the patient face them honestly, take ownership of their existence, and live with authenticity, courage, and meaning.
Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR)
Trauma is stored unprocessed. Holding the memory while attention is divided lets the brain file it as past.
In practiceThe image, the belief "I am powerless", and the body sensation, held through sets of eye movements until the charge drops.
An eight-phase, trauma-focused therapy built on the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model: symptoms arise from experiences stored maladaptively, 'frozen' with their original emotions, sensations, and beliefs, and healing occurs when those memories are reprocessed and linked into adaptive networks. During reprocessing the client attends to the memory while engaging in bilateral stimulation (eye movements, taps, or tones) under dual awareness, and the memory loses its charge and updates.
Sources: [25]
Gestalt Therapy (Perls)
Awareness in the present moment is what changes things. Work with what is happening now, not with the story about it.
In practice"You said 'fine' and your hand closed. Stay with the hand. What does it want to do?"
An experiential, present-centred, holistic psychotherapy developed by Fritz and Laura Perls and Paul Goodman. Gestalt holds that psychological health is the ongoing integration of awareness, sensation, emotion, thought, and action in the here-and-now contact between the person and their environment. Symptoms arise when contact is interrupted or when figures of awareness are blocked from completing their natural cycle. The work happens in the present moment, through experiment, awareness, and the lived therapeutic encounter.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
There are no bad parts. The protector is doing a job, and the exile it is protecting carries the burden.
In practice"The critic gets loud before presentations. If it went quiet, what would you be feeling instead?"
Richard Schwartz's model of the mind as a natural multiplicity: an inner system of 'parts', protectors and wounded exiles, organized around a core Self that is never damaged. Therapy helps the client access Self, build relationships with protective parts, and ultimately heal exiles by witnessing and unburdening them. Its radical premise: there are no bad parts, only parts forced into extreme roles.
Sources: [14]
Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC)
Self-compassion has three parts: kindness, common humanity and mindfulness. It is practised, not waited for.
In practiceHand on the heart: "This is a moment of suffering. Other people feel this too. May I be kind to myself."
A structured, evidence-based training programme (Kristin Neff & Christopher Germer) that teaches self-compassion as a skill. Neff defines self-compassion as three interacting components: SELF-KINDNESS (vs harsh self-judgment), COMMON HUMANITY (recognising suffering and imperfection as shared, vs isolating), and MINDFULNESS (holding painful experience in balanced awareness, vs over-identification). MSC cultivates the capacity to be a warm, supportive inner ally in moments of difficulty, which research links to resilience, motivation, and wellbeing.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)
Relapse in depression begins as rumination on autopilot. Catch the mode early and step out of it deliberately.
In practice"I'm going over the meeting again." Three-minute breathing space, then choose the next action on purpose.
An 8-week program combining MBSR's mindfulness training with cognitive therapy's understanding of depression, designed to prevent depressive relapse. Its core move is teaching people to recognize the early stirrings of rumination and low mood and to relate to them from 'being mode', with decentered, embodied awareness, rather than being pulled into the doing-mode struggle that reignites the episode.
Sources: [13]
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)
Stress is made worse by fighting the experience. Sustained, non-judgemental attention changes your relationship to it.
In practiceIn the body scan the knee still aches. The thought "this will never end" is noticed, and set down.
An 8-week, group-based training in moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness, developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn for chronic pain and stress-related conditions. Rather than fixing symptoms directly, MBSR changes the person's relationship to experience, including pain, stress, and difficult emotion, through sustained formal and informal practice.
Sources: [9]
Motivational Interviewing (MI)
People argue themselves into change once you stop arguing for it. Evoke their reasons instead of supplying yours.
In practice"On a scale of nought to ten, how ready are you?" "About a four." "Why a four and not a two?"
A collaborative, person-centred method for strengthening a person's own motivation and commitment to change. Rather than installing reasons for change from the outside, MI evokes the reasons the patient already holds, resolving the ambivalence that keeps behaviour stuck. It is best understood not as a set of techniques but as a way of being with people.
Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT)
When pain has outlived the injury, the target is the brain's danger verdict about the sensation, not the tissue.
In practiceThe back twinges on the stairs. Instead of bracing and testing it, the patient attends to it with curiosity, from a felt sense of safety, and the signal quietens.
A structured psychological treatment for chronic pain that is neuroplastic in origin: pain generated and maintained by learned brain pathways rather than by ongoing tissue damage. PRT works by changing how the brain appraises the sensation. Its central technique, somatic tracking, pairs mindful attention to the sensation with a reappraisal of it as safe, so that the sensation stops triggering, and stops being amplified by, the fear response. Randomised evidence in chronic back pain (Ashar et al., 2022) found substantial and durable reductions in pain relative to placebo and usual care.
Person-Centered Therapy (Rogers)
Given genuine warmth, accurate empathy and no conditions of worth, people move themselves. The therapist does not steer.
In practice"It sounds like you were furious, and also ashamed of being furious. Have I got that right?"
Carl Rogers' humanistic approach, grounded in the conviction that human beings possess an innate tendency toward growth, integration, and self-actualisation when met by a relationship characterised by three therapist-provided conditions: congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding. The therapist does not direct, interpret, or prescribe; the therapeutic relationship itself is the change agent.
Psychoanalysis (Classical / Contemporary)
What is out of awareness still steers the person. Free association and the transference are how it becomes visible.
In practice"You went quiet when I mentioned the ending. What came to mind, even if it seems irrelevant?"
The original depth psychology, developed by Freud and elaborated across a century by ego psychology, object relations, self psychology, Lacanian, and relational schools. Psychoanalysis assumes that mental life is shaped by unconscious processes, that symptoms encode meaning, and that lasting structural change requires the prolonged, disciplined exploration of the patient's inner world within an intensive therapeutic frame.
Sources: [7]
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
The past is not over; it repeats in the present, including with you. The relationship in the room is the evidence.
In practice"You have apologised three times in ten minutes. Do you find yourself doing that with your father too?"
A relational, insight-oriented therapy descended from psychoanalysis but typically shorter and more flexible. Psychodynamic work assumes that current distress is shaped by unconscious conflicts, early relational templates, and defence mechanisms; change occurs as these patterns become conscious within the therapy relationship and are progressively reworked.
Sources: [7]
Schema Therapy
Patterns learned early keep re-running in adult life. Name the mode that has just shown up, then meet the need underneath it.
In practice"Your voice went small just then. Is that the vulnerable child? What did that child need and never get?"
An extension of CBT developed by Jeffrey Young that addresses enduring maladaptive schemas rooted in unmet childhood emotional needs. Designed for entrenched personality patterns and chronic, treatment-resistant disorders, combining cognitive, behavioural, and distinctly experiential interventions including limited reparenting and imagery rescripting.
Sources: [6]