 Okay, bonboneme. It's time to wake up and face harsh reality in the Sam Vaknin horror show. My name is still Sam Vaknin and I will forever be the author of Malignancy of Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm also a professor of psychology, which is the main reason why this video will deal with psychological issues. And no brainer, I assume. I hope. Today we are going to discuss resistance. Resistance is futile out there, but regrettably it's very efficient in here. And today I will try to explain why I use the word regrettably, what's wrong with resistances and how they lead us astray. Stay tuned, because resistances are possibly the most ancient topic in psychology. They had first been described by Bloyler and Freud about 130 years ago. And yet they are still very far from fully understood. They are still enigmas. So I will take, I will attempt to shed some light on this very dark topic. Resistance is the coherent deployment of psychological defenses in order to cope with ego-dystonic information about oneself. You got that, I bet you didn't. So let me try and help you, because I'm such a nice altruistic guy. So resistance is when people use psychological defense mechanisms. Now we have many psychological defense mechanisms. For example, denying something, denying a fact is a psychological defense mechanism. Repressing information conveniently forgetting it or cutting it off consciousness. That's called repression. And it's a form, it's a defense mechanism. Dissociation is a first cousin of repression. Then we have intellectualization or rationalization where we try to explain our heinous and odious acts in a way that would fit our self-image and other people's expectations of us. So resistances are ways, in other words, to falsify reality. And so resistances use, they deploy psychological defenses. Psychological defenses are filters in a way they are cognitive distortions. Psychological defenses help us to render reality more livable, more survivable, more palatable. Reality is harsh. If we were to face reality without defenses, without these firewalls, without these protections, we would fall apart. We would disintegrate. And like borderlines, we would act out. It is commonly said that people with borderline personality disorder have no skin. They're in direct touch with reality. Their defenses are not working well. A process called decompensation. So resistance is not the same as defense mechanisms or defenses. Resistance uses defenses. So defenses are like infantry and resistance is like the commander in chief, a specific commander in chief with orange hair. Yes, I couldn't resist it. Now, I also said at the beginning of this torturous video that resistance is used to cope with ego-dystonic information about oneself. Again, let me break it down. Very often, we are exposed to information which makes us feel uncomfortable. It makes us feel bad about ourselves, about others, about our relationships, about the world at large, etc. And this discomfort or pervasive unease is what we call ego-dystonic. So some information is the capacity to drive us into an ego-dystonic state. Again, we need to defend against this information. We need to fend it off. We need to somehow ignore it or bury it or eliminate it or erase it or eradicate it or delete it or do something with it. And this process of doing something with this kind of information that is, you know, uncomfortable. The process of doing something with this information is what we call resistance. Now, resistance is an organizing principle. It's an algorithm that puts together optimizes psychological defenses to obtain a self-efficacious outcome. In other words, you could think of resistance as Google's or YouTube's algorithm. It selects defenses according to environmental cues, according to the information that has to be tackled. It selects defenses and the resistance puts these defenses together in a kind of a strategic pincer movement, puts them together in order to encircle, besiege the information, and then eliminate it. It's very similar to the way the immune system works. The system of immunology in the body does essentially the same. It has multiple types of organs and multiple types of bodies in the blood, for example, antibodies, bacteriophages, and so on. And what they do, they engulf foreign invaders like bacteria and viruses. They engulf them and then they digest them or they dismember them or they destroy them or they disable them or they destroy cells which are infected. So the immunological system in the body and the immunological system in one's psyche, in one's psychology, essentially are identical. And these defenses use psychological defenses to dismantle and destroy the aspects of information which could create ego dystonia. Now this is on the individual level, but we have the same identical process on the collective level. So resistance could be a collective response. But in certain cognitive behavioral patterns are also resistances. One very famous example is what Freud called repetition compulsion, the repeating dysfunctional self-defeating and self-destructive behavior patterns in a compulsive way. You can't help it. You keep repeating this. You keep choosing the wrong or selecting the wrong mate. You keep managing your relationships in a way that guarantees failure. You keep running your business into the wall defeating yourself. So this is repetition compulsion if you keep doing it time and again and you can't help it. And it's a form of resistance in effect. So certain cognitive behavioral patterns are also resistances. It's very important to understand that all these operate on the individual level. But as I said, equally on the collective level, and that's where it gets really, really dangerous. Because on the collective level, the self-defeated self-destruction can metastasize and it usually generates, fosters, genders, all kinds of crisis, which are, which become very fast, totally unmanageable. There are four groups of resistances. And I'm going to go through all four because I'm sadistic. Okay. Group number one, comfort zone preservation. Resistances whose main role is to preserve the comfort zone. The comfort zone is a set of behaviors, choices, and decisions coupled with cognitions and emotions that make you comfortable. You know the rules. You know the ropes. You can predict what's going to happen. You feel familiar. You feel you're in a familiar territory. So comfort zone preservation is about maintaining control by rejecting the unfamiliar, the countervailing, and the challenging. And this fosters a sense of safety, predictability, stability, certainty, agency, and self-efficacy. Within the comfort zone, we feel good because we feel empowered and enabled. We have this information asymmetry. We know everything there is to know about the comfort zone, and we know next to nothing about everything outside the comfort zone. So we tend to preserve the comfort zone, defend it with our lives, fight for it, and fend off challenges and challengers to the comfort zone. We even become hostile. We can become even violent. Resistances. Some resistances are intended to preserve the integrity and the boundaries of the comfort zone. We enter the comfort zone, functional and active, to preserve the comfort zone in the face of onslaught of information, data, other people, relationships, interactions, societal mores, authority, authorities, anyone. Anyone who threatens to upend the balance and the equilibrium and the homeostasis of the comfort zone is met with comfort zone preservation resistances. The second type of resistance is the oldest, or the first one described actually. Coffee breaker. You're lucky I don't smoke, would have taken five minutes. Okay, the second type is resistance to dread and panic inducing insights and interpretations. So this is the oldest, the first described type of resistance in writings by early psychoanalyst Freud himself included. Whenever we are exposed to an insight, someone, a close friend, a therapist, a mother, you know, a neighbor, a colleague, puts a mirror to you, shows you something about yourself that you were not aware of or that you preferred to not be aware of. This is called insight. Now insight has two components, cognitive and emotional. When we digest the insight cognitively, we then have an emotional reaction to the insight. We all have myths, myths and stories about ourselves, our self image and self perception are totally unrealistic, they're divorced from reality. And so when we are confronted with insights, especially in a structured way, for example in therapy, when we are confronted with the truth about ourselves, with interpretation of our unconscious processes and the resulting conscious content. When we are confronted with analysis and criticism of our choices, decisions and behaviors, when new light is shed upon who we are and what we do, and why we do what we do. This is insight and the interpretation of the insight. And so we become very defensive. We become very resistant to learning. We fight back, we deny, we walk away, we refuse, we become aggressive, we counterattack, we devalue the source of the insight, whatever, these all types of resistances. And the reason is that if we were to really accept the insight and the interpretation, we would have a panic attack, we would have anxiety. This is dread-inducing, angst-inducing. So resistances, resistance to insight and interpretation is intended to reduce anxiety. It's anxiety mitigating and ameliorating. In other words, it's angziolytic. Okay. The third group of resistances are known as cognitive distortions. These are resistances intended to buttress, to uphold, to support, to prove a fantastic inflated grandiose or otherwise unrealistic sense of self-worth and self-image and self-perception. So when you have a view of yourself that is widely divorced from reality, you would need to defend this view much more vigorously because of what I call the grandiosity gap. The gap between reality and the way you see yourself is very hurtful, potentially modifying, and to avoid this pain, this hurt, you would distort your thinking processes. That's why it's called cognitive distortions, and you would reframe reality, you would perceive it wrongly through a filter, through a lens, darkly usually. So by resisting your own thinking and reality, you would then support, uphold your grandiose sense of self-worth and inflated self-perception and self-image. That's the third family. The fourth family of resistances, these are resistances intended to cement and defend a narrative, a story, a piece of fiction, which provides meaning and structure. Now, meaning is by far the most important thing psychologically. We can survive without food and without water even to a certain degree without air, but we can't survive when we can survive without loved ones. Sometimes we want to survive without loved ones, but we can't survive without meaning. We need to make sense of the world and we need to make sense of other people, otherwise we feel seriously threatened. And so what we do, we create narratives, we create stories, and we embed the environment and everyone around us in these stories, in these plays. It's like writing theatre plays, you know, Shakespeare said it, we're all on a stage. So these narratives allow us to continue to live, to survive, to go on, to function somehow, because we don't feel anymore that we inhabit a meaningless, senseless, coincidental, incidental world. We feel that we get a hold, we have a handle on what's happening, and we can to some extent predict because everything makes sense. Everything is logical, everything can be reasoned with, everything A follows B, causation, for example, is this kind of narrative. We know in physics that it's a very dubious proposition, but people use causation as a form of narrative. So narratives provide meaning and structure. In other words, the narratives are organizing and hermeneutic principles narratives allow us to organize reality in a way that would make sense to us, and then interpret the alleged interactions and connections between the parts of reality in our narrative. So we would tend to interpret our narrative and the structure of our narrative on the collective level. And there are meta narratives or mega narratives, for example, science is such a narrative. It attempts to make it to reorder the world to introduce structured into chaos, and then to make sense of it all by interpreting by interpreting what we so called discover that science, politics, a political affiliation, a professional academic degree, whatever, politics, they make sense of the world for you. They introduce meaning and direction and goals into your life. The same with religion. These are all narratives. And so there are some resistances whose role is to cement the narrative to render it cohesive in coherent and not susceptible to attack to block all vectors, offensive vector vectors so that no information can actually crack the narrative somehow, crack it wide, wide open. And these resistances also defend and protect the narrative that firewall the narrative. So that it's not subjected to what could be perceived as malevolent or malicious deconstruction, or even well meaning deconstruction narratives are very often sacred. This is a secular religion. And so narratives, narratives providers with direction and goals, as I said, and they help us to make sense of the world, and they help us to make sense of others. So for example, what we call a theory of mind is a narrative. A theory of mind is our understanding of what makes other people tick, what motivates them. Our perception of the psychology of other people, their psychodynamic psychological processes. This is called the theory of mind, and it's a narrative. Similarly, what is called the internal working model, IWM is a narrative. It's the way we organize our understanding, our comprehension of our place in the world, reality, and other people in reality, and how they relate to us. The internal working model, the theory of mind is a private case of the internal working model. And these are narratives, and we defend them to the nail and claw. We are very defensive about our narratives. Sometimes we kill other people because of narratives, people kill each other because of an allegiance or affiliation with a football club with a nation with a religion. These are narratives. So, people become very aggressive and very violent. When you try to attack a narrative to challenge it to confront it head on. They are very invested, emotionally invested, perfected, they've perfected in the narrative. In fact, such individual and collective narratives can be construed as resistances writ large. In other words, while the prevailing view is that resistances are used to kind of protect and defend narratives. I think that narratives are, in effect, resistances. They're just so big, and so complex, and so multi layer that we fail to see the resistance element in them because most resistances are very primitive. In your face, go away. But narratives are more sophisticated and more subtle, but narratives do the same thing. The main function of a narrative is to distinguish between you and others. It's to create a sense of identity, continuous identity and so narratives are very involved with questions of memory. When you look, when you look at history, for example, the very discipline of history, history is a narrative by definition is story, a story, it's narrative by definition. So history is a resistance, because it's intended to classify, categorize, exclude, include, and it gives you, impuse you with a sense of continuity and identity and memory. So, resistances are externalized. In other words, resistances can be, can be observed. And they can be observed, not only by trained observers, but they can be observed even by simple people. People will sometimes tell you listen, you're not open to learn. Why would you keep repeating this or why won't you listen? Why are you so hard, you know, hot headed or hard headed or stubborn or obtuse. These are all colloquial ways of saying why do you have resistances. So resistances are externalized. They can be observed from the outside, and they have an effect on other people, because if you are very resistant, it's going to have an impact on your relationships in a variety of settings, your workplace, marriage, your intimate, your committed relationship with your neighbors, your colleagues, I mean, resistances have an impact on behavior, and therefore, they have an impact on the outside environment. People have to take into account your resistances. It's not a minor issue. It's sometimes a very problematic thing. But resistances are mostly externalized. Resistances are often linked, always linked actually, to what we call negative affectivity. I mentioned at the very beginning when we were all much younger, that resistances erupt or emerge or are activated when you feel uncomfortable, when you feel ego, dystonic, when you feel ill it is. So by definition, resistances are linked intimately to negative effects, negative emotions. Negative emotions, negative effects can be both interiorized, internalized and externalized. So it's tends to reason that resistances can be both externalized, but also internalized, which is a new way to think about resistances. The entire literature until this very day has dealt exclusively with externalized resistances, but resistances being intimately linked and triggered by negative effects can be internalized exactly as we internalize negative effects. So one way, one conduit for the internalization of resistances is aggression. Now resistances are always aggressive. They're always a defense. They're always an attack. So they're offensive and defensive. They're always the main aim of resistances is to eliminate sources of unease, discomfort and frustration. This could be another individual. So devaluation is a resistance. This could be a whole environment. This could be another collective. This could be an uncomfortable piece of information or insight or interpretation, whatever it may be. The resistance is the channeling of defenses, coupling them with aggression in order to eliminate an outside source of ego distance. So by definition, resistances are aggressive. But aggression is a negative kind of negative effect. Well, it's not exactly a negative effect, but it's linked to negative effect. So aggression can be, is no exception. It can be internalized and it can be externalized. Negative effects, negative emotions such as envy, anger, et cetera, can be internalized, can be externalized. Aggression can be internalized, can be externalized. And resistance is both negative emotions that yield aggression. So definitely resistances can be internalized and can be externalized. Consider, for example, depression. Depression is a form of internalized self directed aggression, but depression is also a resistance, because what's the main aim of depression, cutting you off from the world. The main effect of depression, the main outcome, the main consequence of depression is avoiding contact with the world, avoiding interactions with others, denying or shunning reality. Depression is self containment, total psychological self sufficiency. It's bad, it's sad, it drives you mad, but it also isolates you from further adverse stimuli. In other words, when you're depressed, at least you're not exposed to additional stressors, which are inherent in any interactions with other people. So depression is a form of internalized self directed aggression, which is essentially a resistance. But aggression, of course, can be also internalized, externalized, I'm sorry. We are all acquainted with externalized aggression. For example, psychopaths externalize aggression. So it means this to some extent, not fully externalize aggression, or the lines externalize aggression to some extent aggression can be internalized as a resistance can be externalized as a resistance. It can even, but it can be also sublimated, or even institutionalized. So we have aggression, institutional aggression in the army, in the police, in medical surgery, operating room. And so these forms of institutionalized or sublimated socially acceptable, these forms of socially acceptable aggression are in many ways, reification of resistances because what's the role of an army. The role of an army is to keep invading enemies out. What's the role of the police to keep criminals out. And what's the role of medical surgery to keep disease out. These are, in many ways, reified resistance society rewards sublimated aggression, for example in sports, or in business and this social approbation is anxiolytic and antidepressant it reduces anxiety and depression. So on the collective level, we have resistances, which manifests as socially acceptable sublimated aggression, and which society rewards, and by rewarding them reduces anxiety and depression. It's exactly the same function. Exactly the same function as with an individual, individuals use resistances in order to fend off enemies, hostile information. So individuals use resistance aggressively to fend off insights and interpretations which are uncomfortable. And then they feel less anxious and less depressed society does the same. Society uses resistances in the form of aggression sublimated institutionalized aggression, and then by rewarding these behaviors, it reduces anxiety and depression. What about mood? Mood is reactive to affect. If you have negative effect, you're likely to have a negative mood. If you have a positive effect by subversa, hence positive psychology. But because mood is linked to affect, exactly like resistances, mood can be externalized as well. But how do, how do externalized expressions of affects and of attendant moods. How do they appear to outside observers and grateful to Dr. Daria Jukowska for raising this for raising this question, and I will tackle it in a minute. Important to realize that some resistances are wholly externalize. Some resistances are wholly internalized. But that is very misleading. They appear to be wholly externalized or wholly internalized. I'm sorry, but that's very misleading. All resistances and mood is a resistance, depression and so on. It's a resistance. Mood is a resistance. Negative affectivity is linked to all resistances. So, you know, it is linked to moods as well. So depression is the vector of resistance. But everything is both externalized and internalized. It's like an iceberg. An iceberg. There's a small part that protrudes above the ocean level. There's a big, the big bulk of the body is under the sea. This is very critical to understand because one way to modify externalizations to modify the external adverse bad outcomes of moods of aggression. One way to do this is to tackle resistances on the individual and collective level to dismantle these resistances to render them obsolete or unnecessary. To change the discourse so that resistances will no longer be needed, for example, by becoming a lot less combative and conflictive. Civilization is about harnessing resistances and defenses. And yet we've made a poor job of it, especially lately. And maybe it's time to return to a civil discourse, simply because it renders resistances and the aggression and negative effects and the moods attendant upon resistances or as forms of resistances. It renders them unnecessary. So, from the outside, people tend to monitor the visible part, the tip of the iceberg, which is about 10% of the iceberg. They monitor the visible part. The visible part are the actions of others. People don't involve themselves with deeper strata, with deep questions, with people hate to overanalyze, overthink. They don't care about behavioral etiology, reasons, causes of behavior. And so we have this kind of pop phenomenological psychology. Like, who cares? People say, who cares? I care about actions. I care about consequences of actions, especially to me, as far as I'm concerned. But I don't care why people do what they do. I don't really care what they do what they do. And so videos, for example, which deal with the psychology of narcissists, why they do what they do, get a lot fewer views than videos that deal with how to advice and tips. Because people care about outcomes, they're very bottom line oriented. And that's an enormous mistake. If you don't understand the 90% of the iceberg under the water, you're very unlikely, very unlikely to have any effect. Any noticeable effect on the 10% above water. If you want to change the way resistances shape our world to the worst. If you want to affect the way people aggress towards each other. If you want to impure people with positivity and counter negative affectivity and mood swings or modulability, you want to do or accomplish all these things. The first thing you need to do is understand people, not judge them, not manipulate them, not observe them and monitor them, understand them. And how can we understand them, if we keep relating only to the externalize manifestations of very deep processes, such as resistances, depression being one of them, aggression being the instrument. How can we accomplish anything if we keep focusing on the externalization and ignoring ignoring the internal submerged parts of all these finishes psychological phenomena.