One of the options allows switching window focus, and another allows switching through windows in the active application. There's no option for switching backwards, however. The way I deal with that is to separate any xmonad specific functionality behind a prefix-key submap in my XMonad config.
Any hotkeys that don't take the prefix I can use on any OS, the ones that do are xmoand specific. To me this keeps things nice and organized, while still letting me exploit the xmonad-contrib stuff to the full extent.
For example, instead of mod-j/mod-k, I use the window navigation extension behind the prefix so I get finer control over focus navigation, and this makes xmonad function precisely like tmux just with a different prefix key.
Can you tell I hate context switching?