Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. When Shame, Guilt, Remorse Drive Abuse (Alloplastic Defenses, Reaction Formation, Affect Matching)

1. 00:02 Paris is like a fun fatal. Hot yesterday, cold today. Hot and cold. I’m beginning to get trauma bonded. Today we are going to discuss remorse, guilt, and shame and how they can bring about your abuse. Yes, you heard me correctly. Shame, remorse, and guilt of
2. 00:29 your abuser can lead to your abuse. My name is Sanvaknin. I’m the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I’m also a shameless professor of psychology. Okay. Everyone in his dog will tell you that narcissists and psychopaths possess no remorse, no sense of guilt.
3. 00:57 Now the consensus is that psych that narcissists do experience shame. There is a reservoir a repository of shame within the narcissist that the narcissist spends a lifetime trying to avoid shield himself from firewall and isolate. But the shame is there. And when the
4. 01:18 narcissist experiences narcissistic injury or narcissistic motification, the narcissist gets in touch with this shame and it can become life-threatening. So shame is an important effect, an important emotion in pathological narcissism. However, exactly like the psychopath, the
5. 01:39 narcissist very rarely experiences guilt and never ever remorse. He has is never remorseful in borderline personality disorder and in secondary psychopathy. Um and to a large extent in histrionic personality disorder there is a sense of shame. There is
6. 02:03 there are feelings of guilt uh in the wake of misbehavior, acting out or other forms of misconduct. There is remorse. Border lines experience shame, guilt, and remorse. So do secondary psychopaths and so so do histrionics. But in narcissistic personality disorder, especially the
7. 02:24 pernicious variant known as malignant narcissism and in antisocial personality disorder and in primary psychopathy, there is no trace or hint or shadow or I don’t know what of guilt and remorse. There are defenses in place which render
8. 02:47 the psychopath and the narcissist impervious to a sense of guilt or remorse. There is a lot of refraraming taking place justifying their actions. They are never wrong. Whatever they do, they had good cause and reason to do. And they create narratives on the fly
9. 03:10 which validate their choices and decisions render them ineluctible, inevitable. And therefore they did what they had to do. Very often they elevate. Narcissists and psychopaths elevate themselves, extol themselves, praise themselves, and even brag about
10. 03:32 egregious misbehavior and sometimes criminal conduct. The difference between narcissists and psychopaths. Narcissists are capable of shame. Psychopaths are not. But one thing that we all neglected to mention even in scholarly literature is that shame, guilt and remorse
11. 03:57 can lead to abusive abusive behaviors. Shame, guilt and remorse are sometimes drivers and engines of abuse. They fuel the abuse. They bring it on. Now this sounds completely counterintuitive. Not to say inane or insane. How could shame, guilt, and remorse result in
12. 04:21 abusive behaviors? They’re inhibitory. These are inhibitory effects. These are effects that in inhibit action. So someone who feels ashamed, someone who feels guilty, someone who feels remorseful ceizes to act in a way that triggers and generates additional shame,
13. 04:41 guilt, and remorse. Shame, guilt, and remorse act as breaks in in the car of misconduct. They they stop the behavior. They inhibit it. They are not disinhibitory and they’re not motivational or attitudinal when it comes to abuse. In other words, shame,
14. 05:01 guilt, and remorse do not foster attitudes which lead to abuse and do not motivate people to abuse other people. On the very contrary, shame, guilt, and remorse are of course to a large extent social constructs. They are the outcomes of processes such as socialization and
15. 05:19 acculturation. And the edicts of society, the conventions, the mores, the norms of society are communicated via socialization agents like the parents. We tend to internalize these messages. They become part of us. And this is what is known as conscience. Conscience is an
16. 05:39 internal object, the container of all these instructions on how to not behave. And so people with a who experience shame, guilt and remorse are very likely to seize and desist to completely stop their abusive behaviors. Why am I saying that sometimes shame,
17. 06:03 guilt and remorse lead to to abuse? Because it depends who is experiencing the shame, guilt or remorse. Someone who has very high narcissistic defenses. Someone who is a bit antisocial psychopathic. For example, people with dark personalities, dark triad and dark
18. 06:24 tetra personalities, they are not narcissists. They are not psychopaths, but they are subclinical. They’re almost there. People with narcissistic personality style or psychopathic personality style, people with borderline personality disorder to a
19. 06:40 large degree. These people when they experience shame, guilt and remorse, it triggers them. They become aggressive. They act out. And I would like today to isolate three mechanisms out of many which mediate the transition between shame, guilt and remorse. these negative
20. 07:00 effects and abusive behavior which is disinhibitory and exter constitutes externalized aggression. Okay. So the first mechanism is aloplastic defenses. When someone with a dark personality, let alone someone with a cluster B personality disorder, when they experience
21. 07:25 shame in for example in the case of the narcissist or guilt and remorse in the case of the borderline, they tend to become angry and they are angry at the source of the ego destiny. They’re angry at the person who made them feel guilty. They’re angry at the victim of abuse
22. 07:50 because it caused them it caused the abuser to feel remorseful or regretful. Whenever they experience shame, regret or remorse, they blame somebody. You made me feel this way. You made me feel guilty. You are guilt tripping me. You made me feel ashamed. You’re humiliating
23. 08:09 me. You made me feel remorseful even though I shouldn’t be remorseful at all. I acted the only way I could and I acted for the greater good. So aloplastic defenses kick in. They become very angry, enraged, furious at the source of
24. 08:28 their discomfort, at the source, at the person who they perceive to have been the cause of of the regret, shame, and uh remorse that they’re experiencing. Ego destiny is this sense of not feeling comfortable in your own skin, knowing that you’ve done something wrong. Um
25. 08:49 when your perception self-perception or self-concept or self-image as a good person is undermined or challenged somehow by another person. Now the other person doesn’t have to be active. The very existence and presence of the other person is sufficient to trigger
26. 09:08 sometimes guilt and remorse and shame. So it’s not like the other person has been abusive or the other person has triggered you the the narcissist or the borderline or it’s not like the other person has provoked the narcissist or the borderline or the histrionic or or
27. 09:27 the secondary psychopath. It’s not like the other person has done something to intentionally deliberately premeditatively trigger and provoke and evoke u these negative uncomfortable emotions in the other person. No, the borderline can feel highly uncomfortable
28. 09:49 having acted out against her intimate partner and she feels highly uncomfortable. She feels ashamed. She feels guilty. She feels remorseful not because the other person has done anything but because of what she has done. But she can’t admit it. She can’t
29. 10:07 say I feel guilty and ashamed and remorseful because of something I’ I’ve done because she is grandiose borderline personality disorder involves grandiosity and because she has aloplastic defenses. So she blames the intimate partner. She says you make me
30. 10:23 feel ashamed. You shame me. You you’re humiliating me. you you’re guilt tripping me. I’m remorseful and I don’t even know for what. Or whatever it is that I’ve done, my misbehavior, my misconduct, however egregious, my acting out, my externalized aggression, my
31. 10:41 defiance, my recklessness, you made me do it. You triggered it in me. You triggered these behaviors in me. You provoked me to misbehave. It’s your fault altogether, and I’m angry at you. So shame, regret and remorse in these disordered personalities
32. 11:02 lead to increased abuse. They become even more abusive, much more aggressive. They externalize the aggression in a desperate attempt to devalue or even eradicate, annihilate the source of these emotions, the reason for these emotions. So if you have an intimate
33. 11:23 partner, if you’re a narcissist, you’re a borderline, you’re histrionic, you’re a secondary psychopath and you have an intimate partner and you have betrayed this intimate partner in some way, infidelity or or legal financial abuse or whatever. Somehow you
34. 11:41 betrayed this intimate partner. You would feel regretful. You would feel remorseful. You would feel ashamed. And you would feel guilty. But immediately your defenses would kick in and you would say, “I’m feeling all these things. I’m feeling uncomfortable. I’m egoistonic
35. 12:01 because of my intimate partner. He made me do it. He pushed me to do it. Had he not been in my life, I would have never behaved this way. In his presence, I change. He brings out the worst in me. So there’s an a shifting of blame aloplastic defenses and this leads to
36. 12:21 abusive behaviors because if your partner has done this to you, he needs to be punished. He needs to be tortured. He needs to be made aware of his own transgressions and this leads to abuse. So this is the first mechanism aloplastic defenses. The
37. 12:39 second mechanism is effective matching. Effective matching is when we have negative effects where we we experience shame and experience guilt and remorse and we’re trying to justify these emotions. We’re trying to validate the negative effects
38. 12:58 by behaving in ways which correspond to these effects, make them make sense of them, uh validate them. So it’s like saying that’s who I am and there is nothing I or anyone else can do about it. That’s my true nature. I’m going to be loyal to myself. I’m going to be me. I’m not
39. 13:22 going to change. I’m not going to succumb to someone else’s narrative or or expectations or conventions or mores or norms. No way. I’m consummacious. I reject authority. I’m defiant and I’m reckless. That’s why I’m misbehave. I misbehave. Now I feel guilty. I feel
40. 13:43 remorseful. I feel ashamed. That’s the cost of doing business. That’s part and parcel of my existence. The price of being me. the cost of being me, the the unintended consequences of being me are these negative effects, are these negative emotions that I cannot help to
41. 14:02 to feel, to experience. I feel ashamed, I feel guilty, I feel remorseful. Now, should I change my behavior? Should I behave differently? No way. That would be betraying myself. That would be denying myself. And I am never going to deny myself. I’m not
42. 14:21 never going to betray myself. It’s my way or the highway. It’s a take it or leave it situation. And I reject any attempt to change me, to transform me, to make me someone else. So yeah, I accept myself as I am and I accept the consequences of of my actions and
43. 14:40 choices and decisions. Some of which some of these consequences are emotional and they involve shame, guilt, and remorse. And then I move on and I do exactly the same thing because that is my essence. That is my quidity. This is my authenticity. I’m an authentic person.
44. 14:57 And the third mechanism is reaction formation. Reaction formation is uh an attempt to display or exhibit behavior which would negate or contradict parts of oneself that one rejects. So if there’s something in you, a trait, a behavior, a belief, a a narrative, a
45. 15:23 value system, something in you that you don’t like, that you don’t appreciate, that you reject, that you hate about yourself, one way to negate it, one way to eliminate this nagging um extremely upsetting feeling that there’s part of me, part of you that you
46. 15:43 don’t like. One way of getting rid of this is by behaving in ways which ostentatiously public public facing publicly visibly negate and contradict these parts in you that you dislike. So the most famous example if you’re um you have a same same sex attraction
47. 16:07 you’re latent homosexual and at the same time you have had a religious upbringing and you hate the fact that you are attracted to the same sex. So what you what you would do you would become homophobic ostentatiously so like you would be all
48. 16:26 over the place declaring your homophobia and by becoming homophobic you would negate your homosexuality or latent homosexuality your homosexual tendencies you would negate that you’d say I can’t be ho I can’t be a homosexual look how homophobic I am so
49. 16:46 reaction formation also operates when you have effects which are alien to you. When you’re estranged from your emotions. When when the emotions you experience are so overpowering, overwhelming, so uncomfortable, so negative, so uh depressing that you want to get
50. 17:09 rid of these emotions. Guilt, shame and remorse are exactly such emotions. That’s why we call them egodistonic emotions. They’re emotions that make you feel uncomfortable, upset. And so, one way to get rid of them is reaction formation. Is to say, I feel
51. 17:29 guilt and shame and remorse. I hate it. I don’t want to feel guilt and shame and remorse. So, I’m going to make someone else experience shame and guilt and remorse. That’s projective identification. And the way to do this, I would devalue them. By abusing them, they should feel
52. 17:49 ashamed. Having been abused, they should feel ashamed. By attributing to them my own motivations, choices, decisions, and action, a process known as projection, I would then expect them to feel guilty and remorseful. Now reaction formation is simply
53. 18:12 um they should be guilty. They should feel guilty. They should feel ashamed. They should feel remorseful. Not I. So I don’t feel any of this because they should. It’s kind of uh transferring handing over the baton, transferring the burden, letting someone else cope with these
54. 18:33 negative emotions because you because the personality disordered individual cannot cope with them. They are dangerous. They they can lead to decompensation and disintegration and and even suicidal ideiation. So one way to get rid of them is to simply hand them over to someone
55. 18:55 else and say from now on you are the keeper of these emotions. You are the guardian of these emotions. You are the one who is going to experience these emotions and you’re going to experience these emotions because I’ve created this reactive formation narrative in which
56. 19:13 you are you are me. I am not me but you are me. I am not the part that I hate in myself. I I disown the portions of myself that I reject. I hand them over to you and they become you. That’s projective identification. They become you. And at that moment when this transfer of rights
57. 19:38 if you wish is effectuated, it’s done visibly and ostentatiously. It becomes an oifies into an ideology. It in other words forms the identity of the individual at that point it becomes reaction formation. So these are three mechanisms of many where the brief fleeting experience of
58. 20:05 guilt, shame and remorse in certain types of personality disorders actually leads to an exacerbation and worsening worsening of abusive behavior. Aloplastic defenses, reaction formation and effective matching. That’s it. Now, if you have suffered
59. 20:28 through this video, it’s your guilt. You should feel ashamed for having listened to the end. And I’m not remorseful at all for inflicting this video on you.