welcome to my scientifically informed
insider look at mental health topics if
you find this video to be interesting or
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my channel oh this is dr. grande today's
question asks if I can discuss the
concept of blame-shifting in the context
of cluster b person is so this would
include antisocial narcissistic
borderline and histrionic personally
miffed thing is a failure take
responsibility and deflecting
responsibility we could think of it as a
cognitive distortion we can also think
about it as a type of manipulation and
it's a type of manipulation we can see
really with all of the cluster B
personality so as I mentioned at the
core of blame-shifting we have this
failure to take responsibility it could
also be considered an unwillingness or
an inability to take responsibility or a
refusal based on someone's
interpretation of evidence and of course
that interpretation could be distorted
so if I use borderline personality
disorder as an example so you're working
with a heterosexual couple and let's say
that the woman in the couple has
borderline personality and she's
manifesting symptoms like frantic
efforts to avoid abandonment
inappropriate intense anger and paranoia
and these behaviors these symptoms are
causing relational difficulties so in a
situation like this she could be
shifting the blame over to her partner
now the evidence could be that he's
going out friends staying out late
texting a lot and the woman in the
relationship could be thinking well this
means he's cheating but there could
actually be very good reasons why he's
engaging in those behaviors and maybe
when weighing that evidence is clear
that he's not cheating or it's unlikely
so by directly challenging the blame
shifting in a scenario like this you're
gonna end up in a stalemate some of the
time so direct challenging can just lead
to somebody continuing with the blame
shifting because of their interpretation
of the evidence
which of course you can contest but you
can't ultimately prove that their
interpretation is incorrect so to take
an example from antisocial personality
or say that somebody's caught with
heroin or cocaine or some other drug
that's clearly illegal and they deny
criminal responsibility because they say
the action should not have been a crime
in the first place and they have all
these reasons why the drug should never
have been criminalized or should be
decriminalized so again you end up in a
stalemate if you challenge that the
individual could just throw that back at
you and again you're in a stalemate or
they could sidestep the issue but either
way directly challenging that distortion
may not be successful so when working
with blame-shifting if direct
confrontation is part of the modality
you're using and direct confrontation
doesn't work how do you confront
distortions well I think one important
element would be you don't necessarily
have to get involved in the details so
if we use the example of drug possession
you don't have to get into why it really
should be a crime how destructive drugs
are and all these other societal issues
around drugs again this just ends up
with you're going in circles and you end
up really in a stalemate also where
there's one distortion often times there
are more distortions so even in therapy
if you can somehow prove that a drug
should be illegal they'll just be
another distortion waiting right behind
that so you end up in a situation where
you're just chasing down distortions and
trying to confront them on that level
trying to get into the legality of drugs
and drug possession and drug use and all
that it just ends up being oftentimes I
think a non-productive route so another
way to confront distortions like blame
shifting is to help the individuals see
the pattern of the distortions so you
don't necessarily contest or challenge
any particular distortion but you point
out the theme that you see over time and
in theory once the pattern is recognized
by that individual the distortions will
be re-evaluated in light of that new
pattern that's the idea anyway
what we know about treating cluster B
personality
is that this oftentimes doesn't happen
this strategy doesn't necessarily work
either and this is frustrating for
clients and it's frustrating for
clinicians so why does this strategy
sometimes fail well comes down to a
characteristic of all personalized
orders called lack of insight blame
shifting to some extent is maintained
because of a lack of insight sometimes
we call lack of insight honest Ignatia
so I'm going to use a few examples from
movies to demonstrate this point so I
want to issue a spoiler alert for a few
good men and for a movie called The
Sixth Sense so in the movie a few good
men we see this character played by Jack
Nicholson
Colonel jessep and there's this famous
court scene at the end where he says to
Tom Cruise's character he says you can't
handle the truth and I think this really
tells us something about lack of insight
essentially what you're saying there is
that even if the truth were offered it
couldn't really be successfully
processed a lot of times this what we
think of when we think of narcissistic
personality or
even if somebody's confronted with the
truth because they're trying to protect
a fragile ego they can't handle that
truth and they're gonna move back to
blame shifting and other cognitive
distortions now moving over to other
movie the success we see here a mental
health clinician played by Bruce Willis
the character's name was Malcolm Crowe
we see that he's trying to help a boy
who sees ghosts who communicates with
ghosts and who of course is scared by
them and when of course we learned
throughout the course of the movie at
the end is that Malcolm Crowe this
character was dead for most of the movie
he in fact was a ghost but he didn't see
that he was a ghost even though there
was a lot of evidence there presented in
the movie that he was we saw that he
didn't change clothes throughout the
movie we CD was never driving a car and
we see they never directly communicated
with anybody but the boy and of course
he had all these cognitive distortions
he had blame-shifting he believed his
wife was having an affair and of course
she wasn't because he had passed away
and all the different circumstances and
the dealings with the boy in terms of
trying to help him he didn't realize
this whole time that he was a ghost and
the reason I like this movie is an
example for lack of insight or honest
agnosia is because most of the people
watching the movie didn't realize it
either they didn't consider the
possibility where that possibility never
occurred to them so it gives a little
glimpse into what it's like to have lack
of insight sometimes it's actually
completely understandable that somebody
would not have insight now at the end of
that movie
of course the lack of insight dissipates
very quickly and Malcolm Crowe that
character realizes that he is a ghost of
course in clinical practice this isn't
what we see with a lack of insight it's
something that changes slowly oftentimes
two steps forward and one step back so
it's a process that takes time and
patience on the part of the client and
the clinician so when working with
blame-shifting if direct challenging
doesn't always yield success and pattern
recognition doesn't always yield success
are there any other possible techniques
well one technique that mental health
clinicians use they tend to use it the
entire time throughout all therapy in
the context of blame-shifting and in
other contexts would be to consider the
nature of blame in order to have
blame-shifting
somebody has to be blamed and counselors
use often a non-judgmental stance that
takes out the blame that allows the
client to focus on other areas instead
of being defensive now I know whenever
we get into the non-judgmental stance
with counselors I hear this argument
about moral relativism
that counselors believe that nothing is
good and nothing is bad it doesn't
really have anything to do with that the
idea here is that judgment and
counseling simply is not successful it
shuts down the development of insight
and we believe that insight is crucial
to reducing cognitive distortions so the
non-judgmental piece may be a core
philosophy of counseling but it's also a
successful
technique and of course it doesn't mean
that a counselor and their private lives
don't make judgments about certain
things everybody has to make judgments
in their life about certain situations
it means the counselors don't judge
clients so they take the blame
out of blame-shifting so I think that
the non-judgmental stance when combined
sometimes with direct challenging and
pattern recognition can help it can help
somebody with a cluster B personality to
recognize blame-shifting
to actually take responsibility and move
past that cognitive distortion to
untangle it of course sometimes as I
mentioned the techniques don't work I
know that when we talk about cluster B
personality and cognitive distortions in
particular blame-shifting
they're always going to be a great
variety of opinions on this people have
seen blame-shifting they understand what
may cause it what may help somebody to
move past it if you have any thoughts on
this please believe those thoughts in
the comments as always I hope you found
this video on blame-shifting and cluster
B personality be interesting thanks for
watching