Cognitive Dissonance the Ultimate boundary breaking disrupter

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The long term aim Breaking Boundaries
1m04s

Why traditional boundary setting advice fails
1m56s

Cognitive Dissonance Skillful Use overview
11m48s

Fundamentals 101 Recognition, Tolerance & Basic Counters
1h30m

Tactical abuse/interrogation strategies

‘Alice in Wonderland’ interrogation technique
1m47s

extended version
9m30s

Former FBI agent and interrogation/persuasion instructor Jack Schafer’s
2 part podcast on the Jordan Harbinger show
https://www.jordanharbinger.com/jack-schafer-getting-people-to-reveal-the-truth-part-one/
https://www.jordanharbinger.com/jack-schafer-getting-people-to-reveal-the-truth-part-two/

Victimize oneself 101
1m49s

Dealing with an Emotional Terrorist
5m30s

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Hidden Interrogation tactics (eliciting information) excerpts from Former FBI agent Jack Schafer’s
2 part podcast on the Jordan Harbinger show
https://www.jordanharbinger.com/jack-schafer-getting-people-to-reveal-the-truth-part-one/
https://www.jordanharbinger.com/jack-schafer-getting-people-to-reveal-the-truth-part-two/

exploiting cognitive dissonance…

[00:44:55] Jordan Harbinger: How do we use cognitive dissonance to get information?
Because this is probably one of the most useful everyday examples of elicitation that I think anybody could deploy immediately.

[00:45:13] Jack Schafer: Yeah, with cognitive dissonance, we cannot possess two incongruent ideas.

In other words, we have an idea of how we are and we have an idea of how people see us.
And those two ideas have to be congruent in order to relieve anxiety.
But if we have an idea of ourselves and somebody else has a different idea of how they see us, then that causes cognitive dissonance because we can’t live with two incongruent ideas.

So we have a tendency to do is — we either agree with that person and say, “Yes, maybe I should correct my behavior. And maybe I’m the person you say I am. So I have to make the change.” Or, “I can try to convince you that I’m not the person you think I am,” or the third thing is I can outright dismiss you.

[00:46:02] And a good example is this. I teach a writing class at Western Illinois University. And all the students who come into my class think they’re good students, good writers. And I say, “No, you’re not a good writer. Your writing is very substandard.” And some of the kids will do what causes cognitive dissonance. They think they’re good writers. I tell them that they’re not good writers, cognitive dissonance. So what they’ll do is they’ll either fight the whole semester to try to convince me they’re a good writer, or they will say, “Yes, my writing sucks. And how do I get it better?” Or they will outright dismiss me and just say, “You’re crazy. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

So either one of those options reduces that anxiety of cognitive dissonance.

I guess, a more down-home example is I was teaching a class. In fact, it was up in Canada.
And I was teaching elicitation and the one woman in class, she says, “I want you to demonstrate how that works, because I don’t think that works.”

So I said, “Okay.” I said, “Are you a mother?” She said, “Yes, I am.” And I said, “What does it take to be a good mother?” And one of these things she told me among other things is to be with your children all the time.

And I said to her, “So you volunteered for this job, right?” “Yes.” “You knew you’d be TDY most of the time, which is temporary duty assignment. You’d be away from home a lot of times on business.”
She goes, “Yes.” And then she caught herself in one in one, “Wait a minute. I am a good mother.”
And she actually started crying because she did not live up to the expectations that she set for herself as being a good mother.
So that caused cognitive dissonance in her.
And so what she attempted to do was to tell me, and try to convince me that,
although she has this job, she is a good mother.
And she went on to reveal, “I think a woman should be able to go out and work. I think she should do this and fulfill this.” And she gave me all this personal information she gave me because she wanted to rationalize why she was a good mother.

Presumptive statements

(asking questions but not looking like it)

[00:13:13] Jack Schafer: Yes. And one of the techniques that we can get into right now is there’s a human predisposition to correct others. So if I give you or I make a false statement to you, there’s an overwhelming desire in you to correct me.
And so if I want to get information from you, I will just give you what we call a presumptive statement. In other words, it’s either a false statement or a true statement. But you’re going to corroborate and say, “Yes, that’s true.” Or you’re going to say, “No, that’s not true. It’s this.”
If I wanted to find out, say, your political affiliation. What I’ll say is, “Oh, you’re obviously a Republican,” and there’ll be an overwhelming desire if you’re not a Republican to say “What? No, no, no, no. I’m a Democrat.”

[00:14:00] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Like, “What makes you think I’m a Republican,” right? Yeah.

[00:14:02] Jack Schafer: Yes. And I do that in my classes all the time because a student will make a good comment about something. And I’ll say, during my elicitation classes, and I’ll say, “Wow, that’s pretty insightful for a junior or a sophomore.” And I just remember this one girl, she just was biting her lip and trying not to say anything. And then finally she blurted out and she said, “I know what you’re up to. And I’m not a sophomore, I’m a senior.” And she said, “Now I feel better,” because she was able to make that correction. So it’s interesting that people have this overwhelming desire to correct other people.

[00:14:37] Jordan Harbinger: There’s a rule — not a real rule, but it’s sort of a general principle of the Internet where you might even know what this is called. Instead of saying, “Hey, how do I get this thing working? Somebody help me with this.” What you do instead of posting a question, you post the wrong answer and then a thousand people will just sort of violently correct you online. Have you heard of this?

[00:14:58] Jack Schafer: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And where I first encountered this, this was when our scientists would go to China to give presentations. And what the Chinese scientists in China would do was they’d walk up to them and they would purposely show that scientists an erroneous equation, an erroneous fact, an erroneous computation or theory, and immediately those scientists will say, “What? No, no, no, you’re wrong. This is how it’s done because I’m an expert.” And in order to demonstrate expertise, you have to prove that you’re right and somebody’s wrong. So they use that a lot. And what they do is it’s like death by a thousand paper cuts because they get a little bit of information for every scientist and then pretty soon. That elicitation pays off and they can put that puzzle together.

status elevation & status demotion

(variation of cognitive dissonance + projection/snapshot - project too high or too low status to trigger corrective reaction from them)

[00:49:04] Jack Schafer: You can do it with status elevation.
My son and I went to a bookstore once. And there was an author over there and she seemed nice, but there was nobody over by the table. So I said, “Let me go over there and talk to her.” And I kind of thumbed through the book and I looked at it and I said, “Hmm, this is very Jane Austen-esque like book that you wrote.”
Now, she knows she’s not Jane Austen and she can’t live with that dissonance. So what does she have to tell me?
She then went on to tell me, “Well, I’m just learning how to write. This is my first book and I have a husband who’s in the military and I don’t have much time to write because I have three kids and he’s deployed.”
And she goes on and on and on and tells me the whole story of her life. And I go, “Wow. You have a very interesting life and you’re able to write too.” She revealed a lot of information to resolve that dissonance, trying to convince me or herself that she in fact is not like Jane Austen.

[00:49:57] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, because there’s an uncomfortableness associated with her status being elevated above her own estimation of where her status should be as a writer.

[00:50:04] Jack Schafer: Yes.

[00:50:05] Jordan Harbinger: Is it a rule that then status should be deserved, not made to butter them up because that would trigger their defenses, right?

[00:50:11] Jack Schafer: Yes. Well, even when you try to butter somebody up by elevating their status, they know they’re not where you say they are, and that will cause dissonance in and of itself.
And what I like to do is if I know somebody is a Democrat and I’ll talk to them for a while, and then I actually, “Geez, a lot of your ideas are Reagan-esque like. Ronald Reagan had a lot of those same ideas,” and they will just go off on me and say, “I’m not a Republican. I believe this, this, and this. And I do this and I do this.” And they’ll spend five, six, seven minutes trying to convince me that they’re nothing like Reagan. And all I did was cause cognitive dissonance and then they were predisposed to rationalize their being a Democrat. And in that rationalization, they reveal a lot of personal information that I’m looking for.

status demotion

[00:10:46] Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned status elevation. Is there the inverse of this?
Is there status demotion? And if so, how do we use that?

[00:11:01] Jack Schafer: Typical example that I’m thinking right off the top of my head is if I’m talking to you about an older person, I’ll say, “Well, that person’s kind of stupid because they don’t know Twitter. They don’t know how to use Facebook. They don’t know how to use a computer. What the heck?” So what you’re doing is you’re assigning qualities to that person that it’s a demotion, you’re demoting them, but obviously, somebody that’s older like that they wouldn’t know about Twitter. I barely know about Twitter and Facebook and all that. So what you’re doing is you’re demoting them, basically.

[00:11:32] The other example, what the Republican and Democrat thing, if you’re a Democrat, I can demote you to a Republican. And you’re not going to like that.

[00:11:39] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, right, so it causes that reaction, right? To try and regain status,

Jack Schafer has a new book: The Truth Detector exploring this, but the book doesn’t really offer that much more than what’s shared in the this podcast interview. Some examples are the same word for word, and he revisits similar theories from his earlier book The Like Switch.

Deef

I’ve had this Teal Swan & JP Sears interview in an unfinished watched open window for several weeks or a few months. I started watching it today and it’s a potential gold mine of cognitive dissonance examples.

Spirituality might be a realm of amazing and extreme examples of Cognitive Dissonance, along with teachers who are masters are using it aggressively, highly manipulatively but also being able to mask it as love/light and kindness.

Here’s an excerpt I pulled before, and might pull some more excerpts in the future.
1m13s

Philosophy also dabbles in cognitive dissonance though it’s typically not as evil and hidden as how it’s used in self-help, spiritual & religious communities.

9m10s

This is a nice illustration of moral high-ground posturing with projection of shadow onto the other. But also using Cognitive Dissonance actively but he labels it as hypocrisy and double standards. His tone, rhythm and pacing is also exaggerated CD.

3m27s

most one side fits all moral rules have the hypocrisy built right in

don’t be negative is negative

be intolerant of intolerance is intolerant

don’t generalize is a generalization

don’t be judgmental is judgmental

always be flexible is inflexible

one side fits all rules are:

easy to remember

fun to preach

handy to wield arguments

absolutely impossible to follow

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Sam Vaknin’s dissolving the snapshot tactic is using cognitive dissonance to frustrate a Narcissist

2m23s

When you dissolve the snapshot the narcissist is disoriented
he feels totally confused, things are happening and he cannot explain them as it is mind

your only existence is as an idealized snapshotted internal object
and suddenly this internal object is autonomous, defiant, independent, has agency and self-efficacy, defies him, disagrees with him, acts in ways which undermine and challenge the eternal object
and this is extremely disorienting

the more profound the gap between idealized internal snapshotted object and you
the more you draw away the more you drift away from the idealized internal object
the more frustrated and aggressive the narcissist becomes
and he’s going to express this frustration and this aggression with a torrent of negative sentences

So, you should pay attention to the positive sentences and the negative sentences,
You should write them down.
Then what you do:

you engage in defiance

you negate every positive sentence

and you uphold every negative sentence

just behave in ways which are so far removed from the idealized snapshot
that it would make it impossible for the narcissist to sustain the snapshot
the snapshot will dissolve
The more you withdraw from the idealized snapshot, the more threatened the snapshot is!

and finally under severe torsion and stress of discrepancies

the snapshot snaps and dissolves!

okay it’s a simple tactic simple technique
finally the narcissist will be forced to let go of the internal object
and then he will be forced to confront you

and then he will inevitably 100% of the time discard you
which is what you wanted

Live Fire played out techniques in 2/20/21 zoom group Language traps pt1

vs Michelle surprise Narcissist disruptive newbie visitor
vs Claudia newbie BPD playing SJW fragile victim card 2nd part

1h59m

rough playbook guide

Deef

Going back to the first post in this thread.

Deef Holy crap.. I was wrong about newbie Claudia… she’s much more BPD than fragile Narcissist… and not just that, she’s higher level in masking than the BPD medium, or Monica… she’s surgical in her pacing, patience, and illogical opposites & projections…

is this 4m35s clip of just Claudia B’s linguistic BPD masterpiece

from the epic 2/20/21 zoom meeting with aggressive over-talker Narcissist Michelle that I think I handled quite well, but I recall that we all sorta got played by Claudia’s BPD projections and shame attacks..

It’s in the zoom archive, but easy to overlook.. but I put a updated & edited mixed-view format in the Cognitive Dissonance thread, excerpt here:

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Live Fire played out techniques in 2/20/21 zoom group Language traps pt1

vs Michelle surprise Narcissist disruptive newbie visitor

vs Claudia newbie BPD playing SJW fragile victim card 2nd part

1h59m

Might be worthwhile to review Claudia B for BPD tactics, and maybe try make text summaries to stay on major theme, along with pointing out her mindfucks (calling out others for behavior she’s actively doing). But it’s 30 mins of back and forth, so don’t know how much I can prune that down along with having to revisit and review it in slow motion…

BUT…. that might be one thing I haven’t figured out yet… how to handle a BPD! and often the group makes it harder, as codependents fall for their victim plea and vulnerable sad baby/despair bomb…. Though some BPDs are less disruptive and I can sort of contain them, though members do complain about tendency to eat up lots of time with their monologues.

However, I think I’m pretty good with past narcissists in the group and with fragile narcissists usually I can spot them fairly quickly.

I offered case studies in 1st part of 11/7/20 Dark Deception & Killer Instinct meeting:
1h32m

…. add on edit
oh.. I’m good with handling fragile narcissists in groups, but still NOT good at how to work with them… I can’t stand their fragility, virtue signaling and toxic positivity… I so want to call it out or crush it… but tend to hold myself back..

And for BPD’s 1-on-1 in work situations, I might be able to work with better than fragile narcissists. I’d just have to give them space, and if they get too needy I can just get sad to get them to back off a bit. But with BPDs it’s just a matter of time that I’ll scare them off with my excessive use of self shame and shame in general.

Deef

Skillful Cognitive Dissonance can be a doorway to paradoxical thinking and spiritual transcendence.

2m46s

Short excerpt from 2.5 hour freestyle post-meditation casual session.
I was directly working with long held patterns of chronic pain in her energetic & physical body, precise pointing with gentle noting/tracking practices, and guiding her to rest within the calm expansive space of non-dual awareness.

I actively used cognitive dissonance with spiritual/meditative tools for a shared transcendent, integrative and holistic experience.

Closing chant: Yeshe Tsyogal says “Space and the Awareness of Space. This is the basic message.”

2 more excerpts

3m21s

4m10s

Deef

Skillful Cognitive Dissonance starts to land into the territory of paradox

Why Paradox is Important

In multiple works Jung gave reasons why paradox is important.
In our general dealings with life, our ability to appreciate paradox will give us “… a more faithful picture of the real state of affairs.” than we would get just from our use of logic or reason. In interpreting reality, paradox can be “… a better witness to truth than a one-sided ‘positive’ statement” can be.”
Having an appreciation of paradox is also an excellent antidote to our human tendency to hybris, intellectual arrogance: when we come upon a paradox and experience a mind cramp, we are reminded of the limits of human reason.
In this way, Jung felt, paradox can help us “heal the irreconcilable conflict …” in our modern attitude.

Jung recognized how valuable paradox is in psychology. In holding the tension of opposites, paradox is a valid, effective way to foster growth. It supports the “widening of consciousness beyond the narrow confines of a tyrannical intellect,…” and it enriches life, because only paradox “… comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life.”
Jung understood that we are more than disembodied minds, more than just thinkers, more than just the “Rational Economic Man” so beloved in economic theory.
We feel; we sense; we intuit; we live in the interstices of opposites, and by recognizing this and appreciating it, we can experience the wholeness that Jung saw as one goal of the individuation process.

Paradox is also central to spirituality and religion—two realms that were very important in Jung’s philosophy.
Jung believed that every human being has an innate spiritual or religious impulse, a deep desire to know or sense a connection to the Whole, to contact the Divine, to awake to the Self, the inner divine core in one’s being.
Given this innate impulse, we quest for meaning in life. But the nature of the Divine is transcendent, i.e. more than we can comprehend with the intellect alone. We must approach the Divine and the quest for personal meaning with more than logic.
For this quest we need paradox—the irrational non-logic that allows for the expression of transcendental truth.
We must admit paradox into our lives, for only it allows us to approach the “sacred figures” that live within, and only paradox does justice to the unknowable.
By its very nature the unknowable cannot be expressed with logic and clarity; only ambiguity, contradiction and ambivalence can “give adequate expression to the indescribable nature” of transcendental situations.

Conclusion

We don’t like mind cramps. We recoil from confronting contradictions. We avoid situations that affront our reason.
In this our cultural bias serves us poorly, because much of the richness of life is found in the transcendental realms of life. Paradox helps us navigate through these realms, and Jung would urge us to develop our spiritual muscles and hone our psychological insight so as to appreciate the value of paradox.

https://jungiancenter.org/jung-on-paradox/

Fryek

ouch… does this mean i have to somehow appreciate or even enjoy listening to Fox news? Sounds like a worthwhile intellectual endeavor, but i’m pretty sure i’d find myself stepping infront of a bus if i succeeded?

Deef

Fryek somehow appreciate or even enjoy listening to Fox news

That’s a super advanced level of cognitive dissonance.

Here’s Matthew McConaughey explaining his version in an interview with Jordan Peterson, where Peterson is still somewhat terrified of doing it.. He calls it a Boomerang Reverb.

3m07s

i call it like a boomerang reverb

wherever i am strongest in my own life, i like to go to the, i actually can inhabit the opposite
even better, the deeper i go into, whatever would, be to create the opposition

meaning when i played prosecuting attorneys
i actually usually believe in the defense’s position more, and study their defense more, their position more,
which then makes me feel like an underdog over here
to go “i really got to know what my argument is, because i actually kind of agree with them.”
When i played defense attorneys, i’ll usually agree or push myself to a point of agreeing with the prosecution

Deef

Recently digging back into some older Peterson observations that men have NO roadmap on how to handle conflict with women. Part of it is that women use more language and social shaming tactics to escalate aggression. While men just act it out into a physical fight.

I’d argue that online communication norms, and social justice warrior tactics is using female types of aggression, and that’s really confusing men (and me also)… and I think the traditional method would be elders in the matriarchy would scold and shame individual women who get too crazy, but now that hierarchy is missing, that’s unleashed all kinds of chaos into society.

How’s that fit into Cognitive Dissonance?

Well… Innuendo is a tactic of appearing polite and sincere on the surface, but with hidden aggression, rudeness, attacks, judgments, shame with tone, body language, rhythm, etc.

Innuendo acted out by this interviewer multiple times
2m40s

Jordan describing implicit male rules for civil conversation & conflict.
2m42s

when men are talking to each other in any serious manner
that underlying threat of physicality is always there, especially if it’s a real conversation
and that keeps the thing civilized to some degree

men actually don’t have any idea how to compete with women

so that just doesn’t happen with women ever
you can’t unleash yourself completely
if you win you’re a bully, if you lose well you’re just bloody pathetic,
so how the hell are you supposed to play a game like that?

we don’t really have any idea how to integrate male and female dominance

Fryek

I struggle with Peterson at times… my life was so DOMINATED by women… my dad was a marine but codependent… and didn’t have great self esteem… my formative years were absolutely all sisters and mom… dad just worked. I was very verbal very sensitive… couldn’t deal with conflict. very concerned with reputation b/c that was part of the family livelihood.

I perceived the very present and real threat of violence in rural Indiana as a threat… not something that Peterson claims men adapt to and learn from… I saw masculinity from an artificially female point of view (obviously serious limits to how much I could actually experience in the same way)… but I did not learn how to fight… didn’t toughen up to male teasing… I went from nerdy popular kid (cuz family was wealthy for the neighborhood) to puberty wherein I became a sorta quarterback looking… upper body strength, big arms… but stocky and threatening… made for a great bluff.

I was terrible at sports team society… didn’t hang out with the jocks… but I was really good at dating cheerleaders.

I have a lot of baggage that doesn’t fit in to Petersons neat categories… nonetheless his information is interesting and observable in society at large.

Deef

Fryek I saw masculinity from an artificially female point of view (obviously serious limits to how much I could actually experience in the same way)… but I did not learn how to fight…
…
I have a lot of baggage that doesn’t fit in to Petersons neat categories… nonetheless his information is interesting and observable in society at large.

This is quite insightful…. Peterson is overly masculine, so his categories are a bit too orderly and rigid….
But his weak spot in these recent video clips, and also illustrated in how he has struggled with feminine aggression from interviewers and also some debates I’ve watched… He hasn’t figured out how to counter feminine verbal aggression…

I can see how you’ve learned more feminine verbal skills to navigate conflict more so at home.. but then those skill didn’t translate well to school peers and what not…. so I sense there’s still confusion on how to navigate stereotypical male dominance sparring… But society has been moving more to feminine aggression, so that gives you an upper hand…

Anyway….. I suppose my autism puts me more towards the masculine style of aggression.. but my chinese culture puts me towards collective self feminine, and being youngest in the family put me at the bottom of the hierarchy…

Back to the actual content and message of the videos…… (not to get distracted by the messenger)…

His confusion around how to handle conflict with women who go over the line with aggression…
This breakdown, which he says comes from psychological research of over 30+ years..

Verbal attacks
Innuendo
Gossip
Reputation Demolition

The Reputation Demolition caught my attention… This is the other side of virtue signalling, they take moral high ground, and then attack the other’s character, reputation, and threaten social exile.

This is the Aggressive side of Aggressive Decency strategy of BPDs!

Unfortunately Jordan likely still hasn’t figured out how to fight back against this….. and maybe most of society hasn’t… I sense you have to fight irrationality with irrationality…. or shame with shame…. play emotional chicken back to them but your defense would be your humanity….

Onnaloves because the seed of doubt left its poison inside slowly weakening You.

This weaponized doubt, as a lingering poison…. that’s an integral part of the BPD playbook… it knocks a person off balance, and gets them focused on themself and their memories… distracting them from all the fucking smoke and mirrors they’re playing with on the surface…. as they slowly take you off topic into territory that gives them the upper hand….

…..

So we might be hacking new territory in figuring out counters against crazy women attack tactics (essentially BPD playbook)….. Part of it is mapping out the core patterns… then it’s about recognizing it on the fly… and then figuring out counters..

Not giving in and following them into new territory….
Recognizing insincere communication earlier..
Interrupting their monologue attempts
Return their cognitive dissonance with cognitive dissonance back
Doubt their doubt
Use redirect to topic or do random switching because of their memory gaps

Eventually I might be able to figure out how to get their shame bomb to implode within them… and even better if I can get it to happen when they’re in public or on get it exposed on social media…

I’m still want to get vengeance on the BPD medium that hung up on me… it’ll probably happen on it’s own without my active effort… but I’m researching and getting my skills up, in case I get personal opportunity or an indirect in…

Onnaloves

I know nothing about Peterson, but I think a woman’s venom is like poison. It burns you from within so deep a stab wound is easier to deal with. So maybe if you learn to inflict poison that would be an interesting metaphor.
possession and poison go together and inflict a weakening form of damage that saps your ability to recover after taking a big stab wound… because the seed of doubt left its poison inside slowly weakening You.
women that are vindictive and open are seen as psychopaths and reveal themselves easily, but the poisoness ones I like to target now and get them overt and out of balance. I’ve had quite a few on my channel and they’re easy to spot now because poisoness women latch on to one person out of the group, not recognizing simbionce, therefore blind of empathy because they do not see the group dynamic as they are extremely jealous of their target and project a lack of empathy onto that target.

this comes from a woman who was brought up by an overt bitch that constantly shamed me infront of my own acquaintances, yet I still forgive her for being a woman.

Onnaloves

Deef Not giving in and following them into new territory….

This is the tactic I use, I ALWAYS hold peoples feet to the fire on their opening sentence. Regardless what they wrote after to twist and logicize their way out. If a person starts a fight with initial words of “don’t mean to be rude but… you are a pest” then everything that comes after that is ignored. I aggressively keep them on their FIRST statement and fuck them over. Every reply after that is a distortion and trying to twist away from their first statement and I simply don’t let them.

that’s all I ever need to remember. Because if you enter the rest of their debate, you get pulled into their twisted logic and lose. Hold their feet to the fire according to the very first statement they made. The rest is irrelevant and twisted logic.

Deef

Onnaloves I aggressively keep them on their FIRST statement and fuck them over.

That’s a pretty good simplification, and probably works a lot of the time or most of the time… I’ll have to test this out a bit more, but it does have a nice short cut quality to it… though ending statements can also be quite telling too..

But yah.. disarming the foundation of their attack is very good in principle.. often times it’s in the opening statement….

Or I’d also argue that Reputation Demolition as the underlying motive beneath virtue signaling could also be a very common motivation and hook many use online. So you could also ignore the other’s specific attacks and just key in on how they’re trying to appear virtuous.. poke, challenge, ridicule, doubt etc. around their excessive attempt at appearing virtuous…

Deef

5/15/21 Saturday summary clip
The dangers of Oversharing, Defending and setting boundaries.
2m47s

Cognitive Dissonance 102 Gaming Secrets of Social Belonging, Connection & Attachment
1h30m

and for advanced aggressive mindset, strategy & counter tactics:
11/7/20 Dark Deception & Killer-Instinct “Souring the Supply”(Outwit the Narcissist pt3)
1hr33m

Deef

New Sam Vaknin video covers wide variety of responses to cognitive dissonance. Might not be very practical, but maybe could help some recognize how their default reactions to dissonance and maybe expand the some options?

When Love Resembles Hate: Self-deception, Ambivalence, Dissonances
41m11s

Hate is often confused with love because it produces the same bonding/attachment to its subjects.
The transition from love to hatred is seamless and imperceptible.
The two emotions often cohabit (ambivalence which is a form of dissonance).

This is especially true when certain defense mechanisms - such as projection, reaction formation, splitting, projective identification - are at work and reframe reality.

Cognitive dissonance is when someone holds simultaneously two conflicting views, values, or bits of information which call for diametrically opposed decisions or actions. This state of things generates an inner conflict and triggers several primitive (infantile) defense mechanisms such as denial, splitting, projection, and reaction formation.

One way to cope with this predicament - to transition from dissonance to consonance - is to come up with a reconciling narrative, a theory which seamlessly accommodates both conflicting points of view or data.

Such soothing fiction falls into several categories (A=Love, Not-A=Hate):

Temporal: A is true at one time and not-A is true at another period. Or: A is a transient state of affairs.

Reactive: A is the normal. Not-A happened because of some trigger, provocation, or change in circumstances or conditions. Not-A is abnormal, and, therefore, an aberration or a mere curiosity.

Inclusive: both A and Not-A are pieces of a bigger puzzle, picture, or theory. Their contradistinction is only apparent because we have no access to or awareness of the true and full picture, our knowledge or capacity to know are limited.

Denial: both A and Not-A are true and lead to the same conclusions. There is no contradiction. For example: he loves me. He beats me up. But his battering just proves that he loves me, it is his way of showing that he loves me.

Defensive: both A and not-A are valid. But only A applies to me while not-A may apply to others (splitting). Not-A is bad (projection) and should be eradicated in others in order to restore A to its rightful place as the sole viable and ethical alternative (reaction formation).

Volitional Dissonance is when we act in ways which we perceive to be akratic, immoral, or antisocial, rather than phronetic. When we perceive our actions to have been the outcomes of akrasia (weak willed misbehavior contrary to our best judgment) and not of phronesis (good judgment, excellence of character, habits conducive to eudaimonia - a good life - and practical virtue).

Dissonance is intolerable. We resolve it by using a variety of, mostly alloplastic psychological defense mechanisms - like displacement or rationalization - and narrative solutions, such as reframing

We also tend to externalize the locus of control (and thus our agency, self-control, autonomy, or free will in the matter): It wasn’t my fault, something or someone made me do it or inexorably and irresistibly led to what happened!

Other dissonances include:

Emotional Dissonance (aka ambivalence): experiencing two opposing emotions (such as love and hate) which are elicited by the same object;

Axiological Dissonance occurs when two dearly upheld and deeply felt values are incompatible;
Deontic Dissonance is a subspecies of this dissonance: when one has two irreconcilable duties or obligations;

Attitudinal Dissonance is an inner conflict between two internalized beliefs, attitudes, statements or propositions held to be true.