Given the tyrannical and fascistic behaviors of the current U.S. administration, many of us are feeling emotions of horror, disgust, and anger. I’ve decided to blog out the text of a 2020 article I wrote for the Journal of Humanistic Psychology on the emotion of indignation. I often highlight this word when working with people in unhealthy relationships, because they are uncomfortable with anger as an emotion. But I tell them emotions are there to signal something important — wisdom from our primal past. Indignation is one of the moral emotions that tells us our anger is due to feeling we or others are being harmed, demeaned or treated unjustly. It is a protective emotion that we should not ignore in personal relationships or in the current political climate. Are you feeling indignation right now? What does that tell you about a relationship or political situation you’re experiencing? 
Excerpt:
Years after my [abusive] marriage ended and I had become a psychologist, out onto the national political scene came a severely disturbed and disturbing personality in the form of Donald Trump.
I avoid celebrity gossip, the get-rich culture, and reality TV, so had not previously paid any attention to Trump. My initial exposure triggered a visceral response — I felt agitated, the hair stood up on the back of my neck, and it was nearly impossible to listen to his voice. I felt instinctively that Trump was abusive, amoral, and predatory. He had the exact personality that could become an authoritarian dictator. Trump is a man who has succeeded, certainly due to wealth and privilege, but largely due to a freedom from conscience that gave him the empathy-free ability to prey on and abuse others. Pathological narcissistic personalities in individual relationships almost always cause destruction; if he became president, Trump, in his relationship with the country, could cause immense destruction of our democratic and social norms.
My reactions were the primal emotions of fear, repulsion, and outrage — the same experiences I had in my abusive marriage. These prosocial emotions are part of our ancient heritage used to signal that a relationship is not reciprocal or may even be dangerous: “Friend or foe?” The correct emotional response to unfair behavior is self-protective indignation and a desire to hold the person accountable. Secondary anger can have a connotation of out-of-control irrationality. In contrast, the primary emotion of indignation is a steely, righteous outrage in opposition to immoral, disgusting, or unjust behavior that is aimed at reducing the dignity or worth of others.
_________________
In Praise of Indignation
by Harper West, MA, LLP
Citation: West, H. (2020). In Praise of Indignation. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 60(4), 532-547. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167820916378
Abstract
As a survivor of interpersonal violence and expert in recovery from relational abuse, I instinctively reacted with indignation when I recognized Trump as an abusive personality. Indignation advocates righteous anger in opposition to immoral, disgusting, or unfair behavior aimed at reducing the dignity of others. Accessing indignation to confront abusers is essential for the health of interpersonal relationships. In the same way, I had a moral obligation to be a truth-teller about Trump in service of the country. Prosocial emotions help manage antisocial behaviors universally judged as nonreciprocal.
When Trump’s mental health was first discussed, I predicted it would be frustrating, because the medical model of psychiatry has lost its way in many regards, notably its disavowal of the role of emotions. Evolution designed emotions as essential guides for healthy human relationships. A case formulation model I designed advocates identifying those like Trump as other-blamers — people with low self-worth who manage shame and social downranking by blame-shifting. They are attracted to partners with low self-worth who readily accept blame (self-blamers). The profession should educate on the power of shame, the widespread harms of narcissistic abuse, and help clients access indignation and assertiveness. Moral elements should be re-integrated into psychology.
“Always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
—Elie Wiesel
As a calm, reserved person, I never expected that I would be ensnared in the emotional maelstrom of an abusive relationship. As with all abusers, my husband initially hid his violent temper. As the episodes of abuse became more frequent and severe, I was shocked that my kind, patient, and logical personality could be so overwhelmed by emotional extremes of desperate pleading, fearful flight, and bursts of anger.
Although I never spoke up against my husband in public, I did have an urge to put his name and face on a billboard in his small town to publicly shame him, but dismissed it as petty vindictiveness.
Years after my marriage ended and I had become a psychologist, out onto the national political scene came a severely disturbed and disturbing personality in the form of Donald Trump.
I avoid celebrity gossip, the get-rich culture, and reality TV, so had not previously paid any attention to Trump. My initial exposure triggered a visceral response — I felt agitated, the hair stood up on the back of my neck, and it was nearly impossible to listen to his voice. I felt instinctively that Trump was abusive, amoral, and predatory. He had the exact personality that could become an authoritarian dictator. Trump is a man who has succeeded, certainly due to wealth and privilege, but largely due to a freedom from conscience that gave him the empathy-free ability to prey on and abuse others. Pathological narcissistic personalities in individual relationships almost always cause destruction; if he became president, Trump, in his relationship with the country, could cause immense destruction of our democratic and social norms.
My reactions were the primal emotions of fear, repulsion, and outrage — the same experiences I had in my abusive marriage. These prosocial emotions are part of our ancient heritage used to signal that a relationship is not reciprocal or may even be dangerous: “Friend or foe?” The correct emotional response to unfair behavior is self-protective indignation and a desire to hold the person accountable. Secondary anger can have a connotation of out-of-control irrationality. In contrast, the primary emotion of indignation is a steely, righteous outrage in opposition to immoral, disgusting, or unjust behavior that is aimed at reducing the dignity or worth of others.
In early 2016, I felt the urge to call out Trump’s egregious behaviors, just as I had thought of erecting a billboard about my ex-husband. However, I initially hesitated to speak up. I read about the controversy over the Goldwater rule, which advises psychiatrists to avoid diagnosing a public figure. I am not a psychiatrist, and therefore am not technically held to this rule, but as a private practice clinician, I wondered if my public activism would damage some of my therapeutic relationships.
I was also writing a book about psychology that would be sidelined by time spent on activism. I considered, however, that there was no more important psychological issue in our time than educating about the dangers of a tyrant masquerading as a hero and manipulating the masses.
As I sorted through my personal and professional ethics, I returned to my initial emotional reactions as a touchstone. Emotions are evolution’s way of helping us assess relationships and situations for safety. Everything in my being was signaling that Trump was very dangerous. I also told myself that I had become a psychologist to help victims of relational abuse. As I had learned the hard way, secrecy empowers the oppressor, whether it is a partner or a president. Staying silent would violate my ethical principles to protect others; I had a moral obligation to be a truth-teller about Trump in service of the country.
In therapy, I advocate for clients to gain assertiveness to strengthen agency, self-identity, and empowerment in relationships. Confronting abusers is essential for the health of one-on-one relationships; activism is the identical mechanism on a social level. My activism would be modeling healthy assertiveness for clients.
I also saw this moment in history as an opportunity to educate about relational or narcissistic abuse, a topic that is often narrowly associated with domestic violence, but which actually occurs in millions of relationships of all types. Many clinicians fail to recognize the damage caused to victims of emotional abuse, which can result in insecure attachment, anxiety, depression, self-doubt, and low self-worth.
The motivations and psychology of abusive personality types are misunderstood and their negative impact underestimated, allowing dictators to rise up throughout history (Phillips, 2018). Similarly, a significant number of Trump supporters may be blind to his personality traits (or may willfully ignore them because it gives them permission to engage in their own narcissistic behavior).
Pathological narcissists can get away with blatant violations of norms of kindness and mutuality because onlookers may see this behavior as incomprehensible. For those who understand narcissistic personalities, witnessing Trump’s extremely pathological behavior go unchecked by our democratic system has been nothing short of horrifying and traumatizing. I often feel I am watching a slow-motion train wreck and I can predict the conclusion, yet few seem to comprehend the significance and I am powerless to stop it.
As a person who had experienced toxic personalities firsthand, I felt the need to testify to the potential damage. With this in mind, I wrote my first blog about Trump in March 2016 in a muted and tentative tone (West, 2016). I began blogging more frequently and took my activism to the streets, canvassing door-to-door for eight hours every weekend that fall to support Hillary Clinton. I am proud of my efforts and that my county went “blue,” but Michigan voted for Trump by 10,000 votes, giving him an electoral college win.
In my 40-plus years of political activism I have worked on many losing campaigns (including my own) but have never felt the visceral, stomach-turning dread I did when Trump won. I mourned what I knew would be coming when a malignant personality gains power. It reminded me of a situation where an abuser is released by the police and returns emboldened to their partner — the abuser knows they have the upper hand and the victim is powerless.
All I could do was gather myself for the coming fight. I organized protest rallies at the state capitol, marched in Washington, D.C., and blogged more frequently and vociferously. I decided to be more visible in my protest by contributing a chapter to a book about Trump’s dangerous personality (Lee, 2017; 2019). I was deeply honored to be included, but thought it would be an inconspicuous academic publication. Instead, there was a publisher bidding war and intense public demand made it into an instant number one bestseller that generated international media attention. There would be no going back.
The Role of Emotions in Morality
Because of the survival value of social affiliation, evolution has favored prosocial human behaviors, such as honesty, cooperation, reciprocity, obedience, trust, and altruism, and the emotions that foster them, such as empathy, kindness, and compassion. “Humans have evolved to want to create positive feelings about the self in the mind of others” (Gilbert, 2010, p. 83).
Humans have a contrasting fear of social exclusion, which has fostered the opposing prosocial emotions of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and remorse. When ostracized, most people have predictable reactions, including fear, humility, submission, and compliance. Shame is normally expressed with feelings of abject debasement, and behaviors of slinking away, lowering of head, avoiding eye contact, social avoidance, and blushing.
This indicates the emotion’s link to the concept of social rank – that every human group has more powerful, dominant members and more subordinate members. Healthy tolerance of shame encourages us to comply with social norms and social rank; unhealthy shame tolerance leads to maladaptive self upranking (narcissism and sociopathy) and downranking (depression, anxiety, etc).
Evolution designed emotions not just as intra-personal experiences, but also as essential guides for healthy interpersonal relationships. Self-conscious emotions, when well tolerated, help individuals recognize when they are behaving inappropriately. With this awareness, it ideally motivates them to change their behavior to repair a relationship. Shame is, therefore, an important primary emotion designed to encourage individuals to engage in socially affiliative conduct (Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007). Norms that encourage us to fit in and group together have emerged as morals that guide relationships and provide broader sociocultural codes and laws.
Abusive personalities are so difficult to understand and combat because they operate with antisocial morals that run counter to our instinct for social inclusion and pro-social behavior. Rather than humility, kindness and cooperation, they practice dominance, hate, and self-centered individualism. Abusive personalities self-uprank at the expense of their relationship partners, who are forcibly or coercively downranked through physical or emotional abuse.
This antisocial behavior can make it very confusing for victims of narcissistic/sociopathic abuse, whether that is an individual or the country. Most emotionally healthy humans enter a relationship eager to be liked and, to ensure this, engage in pro-social behaviors. They assume that their partner shares the same moral codes and belief system and is also willing to be reciprocal. With narcissistic/sociopathic personalities this is not the case, yet the healthier partner has difficulty recognizing and accepting this — especially when the abuser is an authority figure, such as the president. Most people find it difficult to believe that someone in that revered role would actively work to harm individuals, institutions, and other countries. They find it appalling that a president would work solely for his own personal enrichment or emotional protection. Yet that is the situation the United States finds itself in as of this writing. This is why so many people continue to discount Trump’s sadistic and outrageous behaviors: They imagine themselves in that role of responsibility for the country and cannot fathom acting as he does.
In relationships, our reactions of disgust and indignation and a desire to hold people accountable help us respond to nonreciprocal, unfair, or immoral behaviors. It is in this connection between emotions and pro-sociality that psychology and morality intersect. We must recognize that the foundational elements of human psychology — emotions — are primal signals of safety in relationships. These experiences are then expressed in the higher-order morals and values of societies as a way to regulate human behavior, an understanding with an ancient pedigree: Righteous indignation was one of the eleven moral virtues included by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics.
Survivors of emotional or physical abuse generally lack awareness of their emotions, having disconnected from them due to childhood emotional neglect or relational abuse, so they lack a sense of moral compass. In therapy, they usually describe a partner’s betrayals or violence with a passive acceptance and no sense of unfairness. I begin by gently observing their lack of indignation and educate them on this underused word. Accessing the prosocial emotions of disgust and moral outrage can empower survivors to tap into underused self-protective assertiveness.
A New Paradigm: Recognizing the Power of Shame
After I left my abusive marriage I underwent a complete personal transformation, a key part of which was learning how low self-worth and poor shame tolerance led to my submissive acceptance of abuse.
I made it my mission to become a psychologist and help others understand the role of shame in relationships. To guide my own clinical practice, I developed a case formulation paradigm that I later called Self-Acceptance Psychology (West, 2017). It simplified psychological labels and constructs in ways that normalize, rather than pathologize. Little did I know that a few years later these concepts would take on national relevance with the rise of Trump, who exemplified them so very clearly.
Ideally, self-acceptance begins when infants experience emotionally resonant attachment behaviors of caregivers. Parental emotional attunement fosters a child’s self-awareness and teaches that accepting care from others is a safe experience. By learning to accept compassion from loving parents, children grow up to believe it is safe to engage in the give-and-take that results in healthy adult relationships.
If parents are consistently unable to attune to and respond to a child’s emotional needs or are abusive, the child develops feelings of abandonment and unworthiness, yet has nowhere to turn for comfort. Because of a biological deference toward parents, a rejected child will assume he is inadequate and interpret the emotional disconnection in self-rejecting ways: “I am unlovable. How can I fix what is wrong with me so I get the acceptance and emotional safety I crave?”
Alan Schore has tracked how shame develops between ages seven months and 17 months, as a result of overwhelming, rejecting, or non-existent emotional mirroring with a caregiver (Schore, 1991). The key to developing empathy, healthy self-esteem, and the ability to accept compassion is not just for the parent to soothe during distress, but in the infant feeling understood and valued, no matter her emotional state.
As a child grows, parents may use shame-based punishments to force the child into experiences of social downranking, submission, and compliance.
Shame results from the fear of being discovered as flawed and unworthy and then rejected or debased by others or by oneself. Shame is powerful because it triggers a survival-related dread of social exclusion or social downranking, and even signals the adrenal gland to release cortisol, the primary stress hormone, leading to increased heart rate and the flooding of major muscles with glucose (Gruenewald, Kemeny, Aziz & Fahey, 2000).
It is no surprise that shame is the foundational emotion that fosters so much dysfunctional human behavior—it is an emotion that drives us away from love, acceptance, and belonging. What is often missed is this important fact: Poorly tolerated shame also drives us away from loving ourselves. Attachment or developmental trauma leads to a difficulty feeling safe in relationships with others, but also a tendency to feel unsafe with oneself, which is why it provokes distress that becomes labeled as mental disorders. Self-shaming messages can take on the weight of a trauma and can contribute to adult depression, anxiety, and stress (Pinto‐Gouveia & Matos, 2011).
Lack of self-acceptance is fundamentally a self-betrayal and self-rejection. If you doubt yourself, the world looks frightening, relationships look frightening, and even your intrinsic self looks unknowable, unworthy, and threatening. Self-shaming can be normalized as self-protective and adaptive as an attempt to fit in and be loved by others. More importantly, it is an attempt to figure out how to love yourself.
If a chronic sense of unworthiness continues in adulthood, experiences of shame or failure may trigger a fearful, self-protective over-reaction or shame-proneness. Research indicates that shame-proneness is associated with various forms of psychopathology, including depression (Andrews et al., 2002; Gilbert et al., 1994; Kim et al.,2011), anxiety (Fergus et al., 2010; Gilbert & Miles, 2000), eating disorders (Sanftner et al.,1995; Troop et al., 2008), child behavioral problems (Ferguson et al., 1999), adolescent depression (Gilbert & Irons, 2009) and personality disorders (Rüsch et al., 2007). Those with narcissistic personality disorder and pathological narcissism present with higher levels of explicitly reported shame and an implicit proneness to shame (Ritter et al., 2014). Considerable research has been done on the power of social affiliation or rejection sensitivity and its links to mood disorders. (Baumeister & Tice, 1990; Baumeister & Leary, 1995).
Because of the power of shame intolerance and attachment trauma, it is essential that the profession use these concepts to assess emotional and behavioral problems. Most of the diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (APA, 2013) can be simplified if we consider that maladaptive shame tolerance leads to the development of three predictable behavioral responses or blame-shifting strategies: 1) other-blaming 2) self-blaming, and 3) blame avoiding.
The key assessment for the three strategies is: When criticized or held accountable, what does the person do? Adults who achieve self-acceptance have an ability to accept messages of criticism and accountability with equanimity.
1. Other-blamers
Other-blamers manage shame by blame-shifting to others and self-upranking. The key behaviors are hyper-vigilance to primary shame, followed by over-reactive secondary anger. The result is high-conflict relationships because of the inability to admit fault or compromise.
Because other-blamers learned to link shame with social downranking, they engage in self-upranking through strategies that enhance a sense of personal agency, but can damage relationships by dominating and manipulating others. They may be self-aggrandizing, physically and emotionally abusive, hateful, and stubborn. They lie to themselves continuously, so they have no difficulty lying to others.
Ironically, other-blamers are so busy managing shame in counterproductive ways that they act in shameful and immoral ways. Other-blamers may be high-achievers, but more likely exhibit irresponsibility and laziness, such as inability to sustain employment or relationships, poor financial or lifestyle functioning, dependence on others, criminality, and addictions. Other-blamers control subordinates, demand loyalty, manipulate, and intimidate. They often search for relationships that will be submissive in order not to be challenged, corrected, or blamed. They often crave power because it helps insulate them from criticism and accountability.
While shame is a prosocial tool to hold most people accountable, it has little efficacy with other-blamers who have learned to disconnect from guilt through habitual blame-shifting, justifying, and rationalizing.
Other-blamers have difficulty following the normal moral and social codes that healthy individuals find to be a fundamental guide to their behavioral choices. That is because accountability is essential for morality, whether a person is held accountable by others or oneself. If a person is fearful of the experience of shame and lacks self-compassion to deal with their mistakes, they will be emotionally unwilling to look honestly at their own faults. They will do anything to relieve themselves of the painful experience of shame, including trying to blame other people and avoid accountability.
Under the DSM model, other-blamer traits could be described as narcissistic, sociopathic, borderline, and paranoid personality disorders, as well as oppositional and conduct disorders. However, millions of other-blamers have difficult behavior that does not meet DSM criteria and yet causes significant disruption and trauma in their relationships.
The lack of an accurate and accessible assessment model for this personality type is a flaw in the DSM that leaves us severely lacking in language with which to address dangerous personality types in relationships and in society. With just this brief description of other-blamer behaviors, it should be clear that dictators throughout history fall into this category. If we had options besides pathologizing or ignoring, perhaps it would help predict these behaviors in personal relationships and in potential leaders.
2. Self-blamers
In contrast to other-blamers, self-blamers internalize unhealthy levels of guilt. They conduct a never-ending crusade of self-recrimination to improve themselves as a way to gain acceptance from others and from themselves. When self-blamers experience shame they engage in self-induced lowering of social rank. They learned to self-downrank as a way to earn favor from others. They assume that if they are self-effacing or self-debasing in the face of criticism or failure, that others will like them and approve of them.
Self-blamers may be anxious, depressed, perfectionistic, obsessive, compulsive, conflict averse, and approval seeking. Self-blamers are often raised by or around an other-blamer, so that being victims of blame-shifting behavior feels normal to them. Because self-blamers avoid holding their partners accountable, they attract other-blamers and often end up in unhealthy adult relationships.
3. Blame Avoiding
Blame avoiders distance themselves from relationships as a way to prevent the possibility of embarrassing faultfinding or disapproval and to pre-empt feelings of inferiority and shame. Extremes may include a schizoid, sociopathic, or dissociative disavowal of the need for approval, empathy, and love.
The three blame-shifting strategies are clinically relevant, because nearly all DSM disorders could be re-characterized as using one or more of the strategies. They identify precisely the emotions and behaviors that cause difficulties in relationships with the self and others. These behaviors are learned, self-protective, adaptive traits that arose out of exposure to trauma and insecure attachment. The conundrum of shame is that evolution designed it to improve social relationships, but instead, when poorly tolerated, can block human connection and destroy self-acceptance.
Solutions to Prevent Another Trump
The mental health profession should use this opportunity to consider solutions that could have far-reaching clinical and societal implications. We should rethink our diagnostic constructs, educate clinicians and the public on the widespread and insidious harms of narcissistic (other-blamer) abuse, educate on the power of shame to drive behavior, help clients access their indignation, advocate for assertive truth-telling in relationships and society, and integrate moral considerations into psychology.
1) Establish accountability in professional language
When Trump appeared on the political scene, I predicted that discussing his mental health would be a frustrating venture, partly because of the many intrinsic flaws in psychiatry’s medical model. The DSM falsely assumes “mental disorders” are caused by imbalanced neurochemistry or faulty genetics and that personality disorders are “lifelong conditions.” The DSM provides limited options for diagnosing people with difficult personalities and low moral character.
It seems clear the profession has a responsibility to provide diagnostic constructs that offer useful, scientifically based explanations for human behavior.
A first step in holding individuals accountable could be the use of a more accurate and concise case formulation model, such as that proposed in Self-Acceptance Psychology. These clear, simple explanations more directly highlight the power of the “master emotion” of shame and the problems caused when it is not well managed. It provides a way to hold other-blamers accountable in ways that promote compassionate understanding and healing for their emotional wounds, rather than stigmatizing with a diagnostic label.
As long as the DSM continues to disavow the role of innate emotional responses in driving human behaviors, it will fail to provide accurate explanations for character disorders, severely limiting the profession’s ability to explicitly address problems, such as those exhibited by Trump. By ignoring the common-sense connection between prosocial emotions and moral behaviors, the profession misses an opportunity to provide helpful guidance and interventions to millions of people.
The profession should reconsider the traditional ways of defining mental disorders based on what is known about the emotion of shame and the power of self-acceptance to heal that shame.
2) Teach self-compassion as an antidote to shame
Considerable research shows that self-compassion is the antidote to self-criticism and low self-worth (Gilbert & Irons, 2004; Gilbert & Procter, 2006; Neff & Germer, 2013) and can address psychopathology in various populations (Candea, 2018; Zessin et al., 2015). Interventions such as self-calming and mindfulness meditation can down-regulate the threat system and compassion-focused interventions can re-engage an underperforming soothing system. Only when we can provide caring for ourselves can we extend care to others, or as Schopenhauer argued: “Compassion is the basis of all morality.”
3) Improve parenting education to strengthen attachment patterns
Because dangerous personalities are the result of failures in love and care in early childhood, society must break the cycle of childhood emotional neglect and abuse caused by emotionally self-absorbed parents. Parenting education should emphasize the importance of warm, emotional attachment and responsiveness toward children. We must stop the use of shame-based punitive styles of parenting and corporal punishment.
Most children with behavioral problems, such as opposition and defiance, come from homes where a parent has poor shame tolerance and is an other-blamer. These children are merely acting out what they see — refusing to admit fault or back down in an argument. Parents must model good shame tolerance to teach children it is acceptable to be wrong, admit weakness, and apologize.
4) Teach assertiveness and encourage activism
Because shame and social downranking are such painful experiences, many people (especially self-blamers) have a desire to protect others from embarrassment. As caring people they avoid holding others accountable and triggering shame. When dealing with destructive personalities, this caregiving instinct must be balanced by indignation and assertiveness.
Clinicians can reframe assertiveness as healthy, self-protective boundary setting that rebalances power in relationships and ensures mutuality and reciprocity.
Educating children about how to manage shame, how to be assertive, and how to identify abusive blame-shifting relationship patterns may help halt the proliferation of other-blamers.
As a society, truth-telling activism is an essential component to hold other-blamers responsible for immoral behaviors. We should encourage activism as moral accountability at a social level.
The rule of law in democracy is a form of accountability that protects the disempowered by maintaining social norms of fairness, reciprocity, and decency. It sends a warning signal to those who might consider unjust action.
5) Assess political leaders
Just as it is healthy to recognize traits of other-blamers before we invite them into personal relationships, the country must have a mechanism to check for fitness of those running for national office. Mental health professionals must be allowed to speak up individually and as groups about character disorders readily apparent in public individuals seeking to gain political power. To silence the very experts who could guide the country during an authoritarian takeover makes it more likely unstable individuals will gain a national platform without being held to account.
Honoring the Intersection of Morality and Psychology
Gilbert and Basran (2019) and others have outlined two dimensions of evolutionarily derived social competition strategies: antisocial strategies (self-focused, threat sensitive, and aggressive) and prosocial strategies (sharing, cooperative, and mutually supportive). Certainly, aspects of both dimensions can exist in all people and can even be essential for survival.
Other-blamers represent the antisocial pole of a number of human traits: individuality vs. community, autonomy vs. relatedness, competition vs. cooperation, exclusion vs. inclusion, selfishness vs. generosity, intolerance vs. tolerance, oppression vs. equality, injustice vs. justice, irrationality vs. rationality, hostility vs, friendliness, and hate vs. love.
Antisocial behaviors of other-blamers arise partly because they are in a chronic state of fear — fear of being found out as unworthy and unlovable. Those living in a “fight-or-flight” survival mode have a limited capacity to engage in “tend-and-befriend” behaviors. Fear makes people self-interested to the point where they abandon moral and prosocial behavioral standards. Threat-focused cognitions also drive humans to engage in paranoid and tribalistic “us vs. them” thinking that shows up as hate, intolerance, and suspicion — or downranking of others in service of upranking the self.
At a social or organizational level, other-blamer traits are expressed as extremes of self-interested corruption, divisiveness, hatred, bigotry, hypocrisy, deception, rejection of the free press and free speech, inability to compromise, rejection of facts and truth, and rigid authoritarianism.
Ian Hughes (2018) has written about narcissists throughout history in his book “Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy.” Of Mao’s effect on China he wrote of a clearly threat-based culture: “Hatred took the place of love and tolerance; the barbarism of ‘It is right to rebel!’ became the substitute for rationality and love of peace. It elevated and sanctified the view that relations between human beings are best characterized as those between wolves.” (Hughes, 2018, p. 57).
Emotions have evolved to alert us to dangers and ensure our self-protective reactions, either with physical or social/relational responses. In this way, there is an inescapable overlap between psychology and morality that the profession must acknowledge. Rather than incorrectly medicalize behavioral and emotional responses, we should recognize certain behaviors for what they are — immoral.
Additionally, governments were formed to protect citizens and ensure equity and morality, hence: “Morals are the basis of government” (Noah Webster).
Conclusion
I find fascinating the overlapping circles of meaning I have made of my journey and its intersection with Trump. Early in my life I struggled to feel worthy and lacked confidence to speak up against mistreatment. Once I discovered self-acceptance I also discovered an inner dignity and the strength to be indignant in self-protection. I would no longer be submissive toward others in hopes of gaining acceptance.
I made it my goal to educate on the power of shame and unworthiness to destroy relationships with oneself and others. Helping individuals improve their shame tolerance will automatically reduce their sense of threat from interpersonal relationships and reduce destructive blame-shifting narcissistic and sociopathic behaviors.
By recognizing that other-blamers like Trump oppress their victims solely in service of their own emotional needs, we can approach them with a compassionate, non-pathologizing language to address this problem and offer a path toward healing. However, we must also respond with indignation and resist any violations of relational rights wherever we see them in our personal lives or politics.
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders(5th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.
Andrews, B., Qian, M., & Valentine, J. D. (2002). Predicting depressive symptoms with a new measure of shame: The experience of shame scale. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 41(1), 29-42. doi:10.1348/014466502163778
Baumeister, R.F., & Leary, M.R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychology Bulletin,117(3), 497–529. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497
Baumeister, R.F., & Tice, D.M. (1990). Point-Counterpoints: Anxiety and social exclusion. Journal of social and clinical psychology,9(2), 165-195. doi: 10.1521/jscp.1990.9.2.165
Cȃndea, D. M., & Szentágotai-Tătar, A. (2018). The impact of self-compassion on shame-proneness in social anxiety. Mindfulness, 9(6), 1816-1824. doi.org/10.1007/s12671-018-0924-1
Cartwright, D. E. (1984) Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche on the morality of pity. Journal of the History of Ideas. 45:1 83-98.
Fergus, T.A., Valentiner, D.P., McGrath, P.B., & Jencius, S.; (2010). Shame- and guilt-proneness: relationships with anxiety disorder symptoms in a clinical sample, Journal of anxiety disorders, 24(8), 811-815. doi:10.1016/j.janxdis.2010.06.002
Ferguson, T.J., Stegge, H., Miller, E.R., & Olsen, M.E. (1999). Guilt, shame, and symptoms in children. Developmental psychology, 35(2), 347-57.
Gilbert, P., & Basran, J. (2019). The evolution of prosocial and antisocial competitive behavior and the emergence of prosocial and antisocial leadership styles. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 1-19. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00610
Gilbert, P. & Irons, C. (2005). Focused therapies and compassionate mind training for shame and self-attacking. Compassion: Conceptualisations, research and use in psychotherapy, 263-325.
Gilbert, P., & Irons, C. (2009). Shame, self-criticism and self-compassion in adolescence. Adolescent emotional development and the emergence of depressive disorders, 195-214.
Gilbert, P., & Miles, J. (2000). Sensitivity to social put-down: It’s relationship to perceptions of social rank, shame, social anxiety, depression, anger and self-other blame. Personality and Individual Differences, 29, 757-774. doi: 10.1016/S0191-8869(99)00230-5.
Gilbert, P., Pehl, J., & Allan, S. (1994). The phenomenology of shame and guilt: An empirical investigation. British journal of medical psychology, 67(1), 23-36.
Gilbert, P. & Procter, S. (2006). Compassionate mind training for people with high shame
and self-criticism: Overview and pilot study of a group therapy approach. Clinical
psychology & psychotherapy, 13(6), 353-379.
Gilbert, P. (2010). Compassion focused therapy. London, UK & New York, NY: Routledge.
Gruenewald, T.L., Kemeny, M.E., Aziz, N., Fahey, J.L. (2004) Acute threat to the social self: Shame, social self-esteem, and cortisol activity. Psychosomatic Medicine, 66:915–924.
Hughes, I. (2018). Disordered minds: How dangerous personalities are destroying democracy. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
Kim, S. & Thibodeau, R. & Jorgensen, R.S. (2011). Shame, guilt, and depressive symptoms: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 137(1), 68. doi: 10.1037/a0021466.
Lee, B., Ed. (2017). The dangerous case of Donald Trump: 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts assess a president. New York: St. Martin’s.
Lee, B., Ed. (2019). The dangerous case of Donald Trump: 37 psychiatrists and mental health experts assess a president. New York, NY: St. Martin’s.
Neff, K. D., & Germer, C. K. (2013). A pilot study and randomized controlled trial of the mindful self-compassion program. Journal of clinical psychology, 69(1), 28-44.
Phillips, T. (2019). Humans: A brief history of how we f*cked it all up. Hanover Square Press/HarperCollins.
Pinto‐Gouveia, J., & Matos, M. (2011). Can shame memories become a key to identity? The centrality of shame memories predicts psychopathology. AppliedCognitive Psychology, 25(2), 281-290. doi:10.1002/acp.1689
Ritter, K., Vater, A., Rüsch, N., Schröder-Abé, M., Schütz, A., Fydrich, T., … & Roepke, S. (2014). Shame in patients with narcissistic personality disorder. Psychiatry research, 215(2), 429-437.
Rüsch, N., Lieb, K., Göttler, I., Hermann, C., Schramm, E., Richter, H., Jacob, G.A., Corrigan, P.W., & Bohus, M. (2007). Shame and implicit self-concept in women with borderline personality disorder. American journal of psychiatry, 164(3), 500-8.
Sanftner, D., Hill Barlow, D.,& Marschall, D., & Tangney, J. P. (1995). The relation of shame and guilt to eating disorder symptomatology. Journal of social and clinical psychology,14, 315-324. doi: 10.1521/jscp.1995.14.4.315.
Schore, A. (1991). Early superego development: The emergence of shame and narcissistic affect regulation in the practicing period. Psychoanalysis and contemporary thought, 14(2), 187-250
Tangney, J. P., Stuewig, J., & Mashek, D. J. (2007). Moral emotions and moral behavior. Annual review of psychology, 58, 345–372. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.56.091103.070145
Troop, N.A., Allan, S., Serpell, L., & Treasure, J. L. (2008). Shame in women with a history of eating disorders. European Eating Disorders Review: The professional journal of the eating disorders association,16(6), 480-488. doi: 10.1002/erv.858.
West, H. (2017). Self-acceptance psychology. WingPath Media: Rochester Hills, Mich.
West, H. (2016) Blog: The correct way to interview Donald Trump or argue with any difficult person. Retrieved from: https://www.harperwest.co/the-correct-way-to-interview-donald-trump-or-argue-with-any-difficult-person/
Zessin, U., Dickhäuser, O., & Garbade, S. (2015). The relationship between self‐compassion and well‐being: A meta‐analysis. Applied psychology: Health and well‐being, 7(3), 340-364. doi: 10.1111/aphw.12051.