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.
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Theoretical orientations
The built-in library — sixteen frameworks with study material, key questions, interventions, and quizzes.
DSM Approach to Personality Disorders (Sperry)
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.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
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.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
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]
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)
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]
Schema Therapy
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]
Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
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]
Psychoanalysis (Classical / Contemporary)
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]
Person-Centered Therapy (Rogers)
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.
Existential Therapy (Yalom, Frankl, May)
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.
Gestalt Therapy (Perls)
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.
Emotion-Focused Therapy (Greenberg)
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]
Compassion-Focused & Mindful Self-Compassion (Gilbert; Neff & Germer)
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.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)
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]
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)
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]
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
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]
Clinical Psychopharmacology (for Therapists)
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]