Blame-Shifting & Rationalization: External vs Internal?

ICD-10 Diagnosis for "Disocial Personality Disorder" (~ASPD) includes:

"Marked readiness to blame others or to offer possible rationalizations for the behavior that has brought the person into conflict with society."

I was wondering to which degree this may be more external (using the psychology of others to get away with stuff) vs internal (actually believing and needing the rationalization / blame shifting to feel ok acting this way, as HPDs, and mabe BPDs do)?

ASPD and BPD have quite some overlap so I'm wondering if this is one such overlap or if the ICD-10 Diagnosis may be misleading and giving too much importance to something that's more of an incidental behaviour which is simply the natural course of action flowing from deeper / more characteristics of yours as a person with a strongly antisocial profile?

I don't know about others, but I blame-shift a lot. Well, it's not really blame-shifting when I don't see myself at fault, and I often don't. When I do recognize I'm at fault I tend to use blame-shifting as a form of manipulation to avoid getting into trouble or to get out of the trouble I'm in.

It's not that I'm afraid of punishment because I'm not. I just don't see why I should accept the responsibility when I can throw it on someone or something else.

When I'm talking to others I tend to blame shift, unless it's something of no consequence.

Internally, I try to identify when I'm actually to blame for something.

Reaper wrote:I don't know about others, but I blame-shift a lot. Well, it's not really blame-shifting when I don't see myself at fault, and I often don't. When I do recognize I'm at fault I tend to use blame-shifting as a form of manipulation to avoid getting into trouble or to get out of the trouble I'm in.

It's interesting and casts a different light on ASPD for me. If it is internal as much as it is external, than it is an internal protection mechanism too, and means perhaps conscience is not entirely deficient in ASPD (why would you have to convince yourself you are not to blame if you didn't have any moral conscience that might be bothering you at least a bit if you knew you were to blame?).

Reaper wrote: When I'm talking to others I tend to blame shift, unless it's something of no consequence.

Internally, I try to identify when I'm actually to blame for something.

My two cents on that topic: If you are genuinely interested in learning to detect when you are to blame and when not, it might be interesting to experiment with not blame-shifting at all for a period.

When you lie to someone else, you lie a bit to yourself too at the same time, so you are less likely to see reality as is, whether or not you are doing it on purpose. In a similar fashion, NPDs may lie to others / externally embellish things as to their achievements or status on stuff they perfectly know are not true or accurate, but even though they initially know these things are not true or perfectly accurate, they subconsciously fool themselves to a portion of the external lie they distribute. For them more specifically than for others they might be the ones they end up hurting the most by lying to others. You can only lie so much to a single external person, but you are yourself an ever-present witness exposed to your own lie, so even if you fool yourself only to a part of it, you might end up fooling yourself more than the sum of your surrounding (this is particularly detrimental for NPDs when they convince themselves that they are more capable than they truly are, but it applies to ASPDs as well when lying not to manipulate but in the same way NPDs do, and might put themselves in risky situations and end up losing their life or physical integrity from it).

I think this may be most critical for Risk-Taking ASPDIs > Reputation-Defending ASPDIs > Compensatory NPDIs who might put themselves physically at risk, but also important for any ASPDI > NPDI in terms of personal success, interpersonal relationships, not ending up in jail and stuff like that.

If one is internally strong enough to bear it, I think it's a general advantage to see things as accurately as possible (wether it be one's true accountability in different matters or one's true capacities). Seeing reality doesn't mean one needs to act on it all the time (I think ASPDIs are very well accustomed with not feeling guilty even when they know they perfectly are, for instance), but it's still good to know where reality truly stands (so you may avoid exposing yourself to prison time for instance, if you find yourself in a situation in which by fooling others you may fool yourself into believing that your involvement in this or that matter was not as bad as it really is).

it's downright comical how extreme my blame-shifting is. i think it's my mother's fault i ended up this way.

-- Thu Aug 09, 2018 1:57 pm --

seriously though. i'm reading a book right now. the very popular 7 Habits of Successful People. I'm generally not a fan of self help books, but this one is alright so far. The first part, or first habit is all about blame shifting. That we lack success and happiness when we shift blame because we are putting all of our problems in a box that we think we have no influence over. If we decide to figure out how we can change ourselves for the situation, then our problems become things we can influence and things are much better off. can't really improve anything in our life until we do that.

It's decent if you ignore all the Christian messages in there, though probably serves more as a reminder than something to provoke changes in attitude I think

solemnlysworn wrote:It's decent if you ignore all the Christian messages in there, though probably serves more as a reminder than something to provoke changes in attitude I think

that's a shame. i can't take any christian seriously. i'll probably just go through the bullet points now.

VeritasCE wrote:I was wondering to which degree this may be more external (using the psychology of others to get away with stuff) vs internal (actually believing and needing the rationalization / blame shifting to feel ok acting this way, as HPDs, and mabe BPDs do)?

I think what's known as "blame-shifting" is typically a focus of a person on how another person's behaviour influenced their own behaviour, rather than literal blaming. Neither that nor rationalisation by the person of said behaviour necessarily indicates a need to do so in order to feel okay about it. I would guess, based on my understanding of Psychopathy/Antisocial Personality Disorder, that many of these people don't need to hide from guilt because they aren't capable of experiencing guilt.

VeritasCE wrote:

Reaper wrote:I don't know about others, but I blame-shift a lot. Well, it's not really blame-shifting when I don't see myself at fault, and I often don't. When I do recognize I'm at fault I tend to use blame-shifting as a form of manipulation to avoid getting into trouble or to get out of the trouble I'm in.

It's interesting and casts a different light on ASPD for me. If it is internal as much as it is external, than it is an internal protection mechanism too, and means perhaps conscience is not entirely deficient in ASPD (why would you have to convince yourself you are not to blame if you didn't have any moral conscience that might be bothering you at least a bit if you knew you were to blame?).

I don't think that relates to me because I don't try to convince myself I'm not at fault. I only try to convince others I'm not a fault to avoid or get out of punishment. It's got nothing to do with morality.

Reaper wrote: When I'm talking to others I tend to blame shift, unless it's something of no consequence.

Internally, I try to identify when I'm actually to blame for something.

My two cents on that topic: If you are genuinely interested in learning to detect when you are to blame and when not, it might be interesting to experiment with not blame-shifting at all for a period.

When you lie to someone else, you lie a bit to yourself too at the same time, so you are less likely to see reality as is, whether or not you are doing it on purpose. In a similar fashion, NPDs may lie to others / externally embellish things as to their achievements or status on stuff they perfectly know are not true or accurate, but even though they initially know these things are not true or perfectly accurate, they subconsciously fool themselves to a portion of the external lie they distribute. For them more specifically than for others they might be the ones they end up hurting the most by lying to others. You can only lie so much to a single external person, but you are yourself an ever-present witness exposed to your own lie, so even if you fool yourself only to a part of it, you might end up fooling yourself more than the sum of your surrounding (this is particularly detrimental for NPDs when they convince themselves that they are more capable than they truly are, but it applies to ASPDs as well when lying not to manipulate but in the same way NPDs do, and might put themselves in risky situations and end up losing their life or physical integrity from it).

You quoted the wrong person. It was jomp who made that comment you responded to, not me.