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).