Malformed conscience (or worse, a virtually nonexistent or absent conscience), lies at the heart of most character disturbances. And that’s largely why traditional psychology theories and practices fall horribly short when character disturbance is involved. It’s also why folks seeking to understand, deal with, escape, or recover from toxic relationships often experience itatrogenic or “therapy-induced” trauma. (For more on the latter topic, see:  Character Disturbance: Getting the Right Kind of Help and Getting the Right Kind of Help – Part 2.

The Traditional Paradigm

For many years, the dominant orientation to helping people overcome psychological and emotional problems was a variant of psychodynamic or “traditional talk therapy.” But the central tenets of psychodynamic psychology arose during a very repressive era. In that era, some highly conscientious individuals actually suffered so much unwarranted shame and guilt that they developed bizarre symptoms. And those symptoms brought them to the attention of doctors. (Most of those symptoms haven’t been seen in a long, long time.) To explain the symptoms and the causes for them, theories were developed about what makes people tick on an emotional and psychological level. In the process, the concept of “neurosis” came to be.

Understanding the various neuroses people can suffer and the possible causes of them was never the problem with traditional psychology. The problem came – as it almost always does – in over-generalizing the approach and the theory behind it. That is, making a relatively valid explanation for one kind of phenomenon the explanation for all human human psychological dysfunction. Traditional psychology paradigms conceptualized everyone – at least to some degree – as neurotic. And many experts insisted that the behaviors the different personality types commonly display are manifestations of their unique brands of neurosis.

The Heart of Neurotic Inner Conflict

True neurotics experience much anxiety born of inner emotional conflicts. The conflicts are usually between their primal urges (i.e. “id”) and their acquired set of moral values (i.e. their “superego” or conscience). Traditional approaches overgeneralized because they assumed that everyone has an intact conscience. And to account for the fact that some folks act in a way that seems devoid of conscience, they proposed certain primitive unconscious “defense mechanisms.” It seems that theorists operating within traditional psychodynamic frameworks couldn’t fathom that a malformed conscience, or even no conscience at all could lie at the root of anyone’s behavior or relational style.

In my book Character Disturbance, I explain in detail how different from neurotic folks are from those with a malformed conscience or  who have no conscience whatsoever. While it’s hard to accept that such folks exist, they most certainly do. And it’s precisely because their makeup is so different that traditional approaches to helping people change don’t work. In truth, the approaches simply can’t work. Their very design suits an entirely different kind of problem. I make this point in In Sheep’s Clothing and all my other books, also.

Why Matters of Conscience Are So Important to Intervention Approaches

When a malformed conscience, virtually nonexistent conscience, or absent conscience lies at the heart of someone’s character pathology, intervening in traditional ways is futile. Only a skilled effort to build or enhance conscience has a chance to succeed. Even then, the task is monumental, requiring special training. But even more important than the training is the therapist’s mindset. Sadly, even when both the therapist’s training and mindset are optimal, because of the nature of things, the prospects are nowhere as good as they are when the issue is neurosis as opposed to character disturbance. That’s why it’s so important that toxic relationship survivors, most likely enduring years of gaslighting and other trauma, get the right kind of help should they manage to drag their character-impaired partner into therapy.