What Values Actually Are

This is where the framework diverges from almost every other model in psychology, coaching, leadership development, and organisational behaviour.

In common usage, “values” means things like honesty, integrity, loyalty, punctuality, compassion. These are the items on personality assessments, the words printed on corporate walls, the answers people give when asked “what matters to you?” Frameworks like Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Values, Rokeach’s Value Survey, Barrett’s Values Centre model, and every corporate values exercise in existence operate at this level. They treat values as identifiable, rankable, sometimes measurable constructs that guide behaviour.

In this framework, those are not values. They are Frames.

Values – true values, as this framework uses the term – are core personhood. They are the person’s purpose, being, and existence. They sit at the deepest level of identity, before thought, before language, before any framework can reach them. There are multiple perspectives on what this core actually is – philosophical, religious, atheistic, spiritual – and each offers a different lens. A theologian might call it the soul. An existentialist might call it authentic being. A Buddhist might call it original nature. What matters for this framework is not which lens is correct. What matters is the distinction between this deep layer and the specific, definable concepts that most people call “values.”

The distinction looks like this:

Common Usage This Framework
“I value honesty” “Honesty is one of my Frames”
“My core values are…” “My core Frames are…”
Values drive behaviour Values are core personhood; Frames filter perception; behaviour follows from the full pipeline

This is not a semantic game. The distinction has practical consequences that change how a practitioner works with a client, how a leader understands their team, and how any person makes sense of their own apparent inconsistencies.

Consider the most common accusation in interpersonal conflict: hypocrisy. Someone says “I value honesty” and then lies to protect a relationship. In conventional values frameworks, this is a failure of character – the person does not truly hold the value they claim. In this framework, it makes perfect sense: their Frame (honesty) was overridden by a deeper Frame (relationship preservation), which itself serves a Value (connection, belonging, love). The “inconsistency” is actually a complex negotiation between Frames, and understanding that negotiation is far more useful than labelling someone a hypocrite.

The practitioner who understands this distinction stops asking “what are your values?” – a question that produces rehearsed answers – and starts asking “what happens when your Frames conflict with each other?” That question opens the actual territory.

Clinical vignette: A client presents with chronic guilt. She describes herself as “someone who values family above everything.” She also works 60-hour weeks and has missed her daughter’s last three school performances. In a conventional values framework, the intervention targets the gap between stated value and behaviour: “You say you value family, but your actions suggest work is actually more important.” This produces shame. It reinforces the guilt. And it misses the mechanism entirely.

In this framework, the practitioner hears something different. “Family” and “work” are both Frames. The question is not which one the client truly values – both Frames are real, both are actively operating. The question is what Value (core personhood) each Frame serves. After exploration, it emerges: “family” serves connection and love. “Work” serves security – specifically, the terror of financial vulnerability she inherited from growing up in poverty. Both Frames serve real parts of her. The conflict is not hypocrisy. It is two Frames, each serving a genuine aspect of core personhood, pulling in different directions because one of them has been hijacked by unresolved fear.

The intervention is completely different. Instead of moral instruction (“you need to prioritise what really matters”), the work becomes: heal the fear that drives the work Frame so that it can operate in proportion rather than in overdrive. The client is not a hypocrite. She is a person with an unhealed wound driving one Frame to consume the others.

This is why the values/Frames distinction is not semantic. It changes the diagnosis. It changes the intervention. It changes the outcome.

Frames: The Lenses We Build

Frames are the specific, definable concepts through which we view the world. They are what personality systems and development tools typically call “values.” Much like a picture frame, a Frame decides which elements of reality we perceive and give weight to.

When someone says “I believe in fairness,” they are describing a Frame – a lens that highlights certain features of any situation (who is getting more, who is getting less, whether the distribution matches a principle) while backgrounding others (the history that produced the distribution, the complexity of competing needs, the possibility that “fair” means different things to different people). The Frame is not wrong for backgrounding those features. It is simply a lens. Every lens includes and excludes. The question is whether the lens is serving the person who holds it.

How Frames Form

Frames form through five primary pathways:

Experience. What we have lived through teaches us what matters. The child who was praised for academic achievement develops a Frame that academic performance equals worth. The child who was punished for emotional expression develops a Frame that emotions are dangerous. The adult who built a business from nothing develops a Frame that self-reliance is paramount. Experience is the most powerful Frame-former because it carries somatic weight – the body remembers what happened, and that body-memory shapes perception long after the specific events have faded from conscious recall.

Culture. The society we are embedded in provides default Frames that most people adopt without examination. In Singapore, the cultural Frame around education is so powerful that academic failure carries existential weight – it is not merely disappointing but threatens the person’s fundamental legitimacy as a member of society. In Scandinavian cultures, the Jante Law (“don’t think you’re special”) installs a Frame that individual ambition is antisocial. In American culture, the rugged individualism Frame treats asking for help as weakness. None of these are objectively true. All of them shape the perception and behaviour of billions of people.

Cultural Frames are particularly resistant to examination because they feel like reality rather than interpretation. The fish does not notice the water. The person raised in a culture of emotional suppression does not notice that “leave your feelings at the door” is a Frame rather than a law of nature. This is why cross-cultural experience is often developmentally powerful – encountering a different culture’s Frames makes your own visible for the first time.

Teaching. Explicit instruction about what is right, good, and important. Religious education installs Frames about morality, justice, and the nature of reality. Formal education installs Frames about what counts as knowledge, which methods of inquiry are legitimate, and which questions are worth asking. Parental instruction installs Frames about how the world works: “people can’t be trusted,” “hard work always pays off,” “family comes first,” “money is the root of all evil.” Teaching differs from culture in that it is deliberately transmitted – someone intentionally decided this Frame should be installed.

Trauma. Unresolved wounding creates Frames aimed at preventing recurrence. This is the most consequential pathway because trauma-formed Frames carry the greatest somatic charge and operate with the least conscious awareness. The person who was abandoned in childhood develops a Frame: “people leave.” This Frame is not a belief they chose. It is a conclusion their nervous system wrote during an experience of overwhelming helplessness, and it now operates as a perceptual filter – scanning every relationship for signs of impending abandonment, interpreting ambiguous signals as confirmation, producing the very vigilance and clinginess that drives people away.

Trauma-formed Frames are the raw material of anti-values, which we will examine in the next section. But it is important to note here that trauma does not always produce destructive Frames. A person who was abandoned and subsequently did deep healing work might develop a Frame that reads: “people sometimes leave, and I can survive it, and connection is still worth pursuing.” The trauma is the same. The Frame that forms around it depends on whether the wound healed or merely scarred over.

Visioning. The unconscious sensing of purpose that precedes language. This is the least understood pathway but among the most important. Some Frames do not come from what happened to us but from what we sense we are meant to move toward. The artist who has always been drawn to visual expression, long before anyone encouraged it. The healer who noticed suffering before anyone taught them to care. The builder who saw structures in everything before they knew the word “engineering.” These Frames emerge from the Vision stage of the Thought Action Paradigm – from the person’s intuitive sense of direction – and they shape perception just as powerfully as trauma-formed Frames, though typically with less distortion.

Frames Are Neither Good Nor Bad

This must be stated explicitly, because the instinct to classify Frames as “positive” or “negative” is strong and leads practitioners astray.

A Frame of self-reliance can produce extraordinary capability in one context and crippling isolation in another. A Frame of loyalty can hold a family together or keep a person trapped in an abusive relationship. A Frame of ambition can build an organisation that transforms an industry or burn out every person involved. The Frame itself is neutral. It is a lens. The question is not “is this Frame good?” but “is this Frame serving this person, in this context, right now?”

And more precisely: which direction is this Frame pointing?

Adopted vs Hijacked: The Directional Test

This is the mechanism that connects the Emotional State Model to everything downstream. It is, in my assessment, the single most important distinction in the entire framework – the one that changes clinical practice, leadership coaching, and self-understanding more than any other.

Every Frame has a direction. It points either towards something or away from something. These two directions feel completely different to the person running them, produce completely different behaviours, and require completely different interventions. But from the outside – and often from the inside – they can look identical.

Adopted Frames are creation-based. They point towards something. They emerge from conscious or semi-conscious engagement with experience:

“I value honesty” –> I actively build truth in my relationships. When someone lies to me, I engage with them to understand why and work toward honesty. The energy flows towards creating something.

Hijacked Frames are destruction-based. They point away from something. They emerge from unresolved trauma – wounds that have not healed and are now running the show:

“I value honesty” –> I am actually anti-betrayal, anti-lies, anti-hiding. When someone lies to me, I punish, withdraw, attack, or cut them off. The energy flows away from the thing I fear. I am not building honesty. I am destroying deception.

Same topic. Same words. Completely different energy direction.

Values (in this framework’s specific use of the term) are the creation-based direction: towards, building, engaging.

Anti-values are the destruction-based direction: away-from, punishing, avoiding, destroying.

The terminology matters because it provides a single, clean test that any practitioner can apply. When a client describes something they care about – any Frame at all – the diagnostic question is: what happens when this Frame is violated?

Response to Violation Direction Classification
Engage, understand, build Towards Values-driven
Punish, withdraw, attack, avoid Away-from Anti-values-driven

A person who “values family” and responds to a family conflict by engaging, listening, and working to understand – that is values-driven. The energy flows toward the thing they care about.

A person who “values family” and responds to a family conflict by guilt-tripping, withdrawing love, or demanding compliance – that is anti-values-driven. They are not protecting the family. They are protecting themselves from the fear of losing it. The energy flows away from the threat, not toward the desired state.

This test is not a moral judgment. Anti-values-driven Frames are not evidence of bad character. They are evidence of unhealed wounds. The person running an anti-values Frame is doing the best they can with the nervous system they have. But the distinction matters enormously for intervention, because the two directions require completely different approaches:

  • A values-driven Frame that is producing problems needs skill development – the person’s direction is right, they just need better tools for expressing it.
  • An anti-values-driven Frame that is producing problems needs healing – the person’s direction is the problem, and no amount of skill development will fix a direction issue.

Teaching communication skills to a person whose “honesty” Frame is actually anti-betrayal does not work. They will use the communication skills as more sophisticated weapons for punishment. The skills become ammunition for the anti-values engine. You have to heal the wound first. Then the communication skills serve their intended purpose.

The Brothers Example

Two brothers both value family.

One believes in bringing back money through hard work and is not often at home. The other earns less but spends much more time with the family. Both are expressing what they value through different means.

Through their different Frames, they view each other as not valuing the family sufficiently. The hard-working brother sees the other as irresponsible – “he’s not providing.” The present brother sees the other as absent – “he’s never here.” There is an overall lack of understanding of the other’s thought processes.

What they fail to see is how this is complementary. One provides socioeconomic comfort. The other provides emotional and physical interaction. Together, they create a more dynamic and stable family than either could alone – if they could appreciate and expand upon the difference rather than judging it.

The conflict is not a values conflict. Both share the Value – the deep, core personhood pull toward family. It is a Frame conflict – and it can only be resolved by understanding that different Frames can serve the same Value.

This is a critical insight for practitioners working with couples, families, or teams. When two people appear to have conflicting values, the first diagnostic question is: do they actually share the Value but express it through different Frames? If so, the intervention is not values alignment (which usually means forcing one person to adopt the other’s Frame). The intervention is Frame translation – helping each person see how the other’s Frame serves the same Value they hold.

The brothers do not need to agree on whether financial provision or physical presence is more important. They need to see that both Frames serve the same underlying commitment. That recognition alone can transform the relationship from adversarial to complementary.

The Objectivism Case Study

Ayn Rand’s Objectivism provides one of the clearest examples of how the values/anti-values distinction operates at the level of an entire belief system.

The core of Objectivism contains a genuinely values-driven insight: the idea that rational self-interest, pursued honestly, produces outcomes that serve society. An Emotionally Intelligent person who creates value, charges fairly for it, and refuses to sacrifice their purpose to guilt – that is a functional expression of this framework’s values-driven framing. The direction is towards: towards building, towards honest exchange, towards purpose. There is nothing wrong with creating something of worth and expecting fair compensation. There is nothing inherently destructive about refusing to sacrifice your life’s work to someone else’s demands.

But Rand’s implementation of the philosophy was hijacked. The elitism, the contempt for perceived “moochers,” the vague and exclusionary criteria for who qualifies as a worthy human – these are anti-values. The energy is away-from: punishing the unworthy, destroying the dependent, avoiding contamination by the masses. Rand did not merely advocate for creation. She actively demonised those she perceived as parasites. Her fiction does not merely celebrate the builder – it humiliates the person who needs help.

This is precisely what the values/anti-values distinction is designed to expose. The content of a belief system can appear values-driven while the energy direction is destructive. Rand’s philosophy contains a real insight wrapped in its creator’s own unexamined shadow material – her experiences of Soviet collectivism, her personal history of betrayal and control, the trauma of having her family’s business confiscated by the state. Those wounds are understandable. But they hijacked the implementation of a genuinely useful idea.

The test is not what someone says they believe. The test is what happens when the belief is violated – do they engage and build, or do they punish and destroy? Rand’s response to disagreement, to people she perceived as intellectually inferior, to former followers who questioned her – was consistently punitive. She did not build understanding with critics. She excommunicated them. The philosophy said “creation.” The energy said “destruction.”

For the practitioner, this case study illustrates a common clinical pattern: the client who has built an entire identity around a genuinely valuable principle (independence, self-reliance, excellence, integrity) but whose expression of that principle is destructive. The principle is not the problem. The hijacking is the problem. And the intervention cannot be “stop valuing independence” – that would strip the person of something genuinely meaningful. The intervention is: keep the principle, heal the wound that distorted its expression, and watch the energy redirect from away-from to towards.

The Mechanics of Hijacking: Defense Mechanisms

If the directional test tells you whether a Frame has been hijacked, the next question is how. The mechanism is not mysterious. Anna Freud’s defense mechanisms – formalised in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) – are the specific operations by which trauma converts adopted Frames into hijacked ones.

This is a reframing of defense mechanisms that most practitioners will not have encountered. In classical psychoanalytic theory, defense mechanisms are described as strategies the ego employs to manage anxiety. In cognitive-behavioural therapy, they are sometimes treated as cognitive distortions to be corrected. In this framework, they are neither mere strategies nor errors. They are the operating system of the anti-values engine. They are the specific, identifiable processes by which the psyche protects itself from overwhelming experience – and in doing so, converts creation-based Frames into destruction-based ones without the person’s awareness or consent.

Defense Mechanism How It Hijacks a Frame ESM Stage Where Dominant
Repression Pushes the threatening emotion below awareness; the Frame operates without conscious access to what drives it Muted
Rationalization Constructs a logical justification for the anti-values Frame, disguising destruction as reason (“I’m not angry, I’m just being realistic”) Muted
Intellectualization Strips emotion from the Frame entirely; the person can describe the pattern but cannot feel it Muted
Projection Attributes the rejected Frame to others (“they’re the dishonest ones, not me”) Inhibited
Displacement Redirects the Frame’s energy to a safer target (anger at boss becomes kicking the dog) Inhibited
Reaction Formation Inverts the Frame – performs the opposite of what the trauma drives (“I’m the most generous person” masking deep selfishness born from scarcity) Muted / Inhibited
Regression Reverts to an earlier, simpler Frame when overwhelmed Inhibited / Distracted

Several patterns in this table deserve attention.

First, notice the stage distribution. The Muted stage hosts three of the seven mechanisms – repression, rationalization, and intellectualization. This is not coincidental. The Muted stage is the willpower stage, the stage of controlled performance. Repression, rationalization, and intellectualization are all willpower-compatible mechanisms. They do not produce visible breakdown. They produce the appearance of functioning. The Muted person who has repressed their grief, rationalised their anger, and intellectualised their fear looks like a high-functioning adult. They are a high-functioning anti-values engine.

Second, projection and displacement dominate at the Inhibited stage because they produce visible, externalised disturbance. The Inhibited person cannot contain the hijacked Frame internally (they lack the willpower infrastructure of the Muted stage), so the energy leaks outward – onto others (projection) or onto safer targets (displacement). This is why the Inhibited stage is the stage of interpersonal chaos: the anti-values engine is running but the containment system is insufficient.

Third, reaction formation deserves special attention because it is the most deceptive mechanism. A person driven by deep selfishness who presents as extravagantly generous. A person driven by deep shame who presents as aggressively confident. A person driven by deep hatred of a group who becomes its most vocal public advocate. The Frame appears to be values-driven – towards generosity, towards confidence, towards advocacy. But the energy is away-from: away from the shame of being selfish, away from the terror of being seen as weak, away from the guilt of their own prejudice. Reaction formation is the mechanism that produces the most convincing performances of values-driven living, which is why it is the hardest to detect and the most resistant to intervention.

Clinical vignette: A client presents as “the most supportive friend anyone could ask for.” She describes herself as someone who drops everything for others, who never says no, who puts everyone else first. She is exhausted. She is resentful. She cannot understand why her generosity has not produced the deep, reciprocal friendships she craves.

The conventional intervention targets boundaries: “you need to learn to say no.” This is not wrong, but it misses the mechanism. This client’s generosity is reaction formation – the inverse of a deep, trauma-born selfishness that terrifies her. As a child, she was labelled “the selfish one” in her family (the scapegoat in family systems terms). The wound was: I am fundamentally selfish, and selfish people are unlovable. The reaction formation: perform such extreme generosity that no one could ever accuse me of selfishness again.

The intervention is not “say no more often.” The intervention is: heal the wound that made selfishness intolerable. Help her see that having needs is not selfish. Help her integrate the rejected self-interest into a larger Frame that includes both self-care and care for others. Then the generosity can become genuine – towards connection rather than away from the terror of being seen as selfish. And at that point, boundaries emerge naturally, because a person who is genuinely generous (values-driven) can also advocate for their own needs without existential panic.

Defense Mechanisms Are Not Pathology

This must be stated clearly, because the language of defense mechanisms carries a clinical connotation that implies sickness. Defense mechanisms are not pathology. They are how the psyche protects itself from overwhelming experience. A child who represses grief after losing a parent is not malfunctioning. They are surviving. A teenager who intellectualises their emotions in a household that punishes emotional expression is not in denial. They are adapting. An adult who projects their insecurity onto colleagues is not defective. They are running software that was installed during a period when that software was necessary for survival.

The problem is not that defense mechanisms exist. The problem is that they run unconsciously and convert creation-based Frames into destruction-based ones without the person’s awareness or consent. They were installed as temporary survival strategies and became permanent operating systems. The child who needed to repress grief at six does not need to repress grief at forty – but the mechanism keeps running because no one ever showed them it was safe to stop.

Shadow work, in Jung’s terms, is the process of making these mechanisms visible. The shadow – the rejected, unconscious material – is the anti-values content. Shadow integration does not mean destroying the defense mechanisms. It means seeing them, understanding what they are protecting, and gradually reclaiming the Frames they have hijacked.

The Aware stage (Stage 4 of the Emotional State Model) is where shadow work becomes possible – because for the first time, the person can see the defense mechanisms operating. Below Aware, the mechanisms are invisible. The Muted person cannot see their own rationalization because they experience it as genuine reason. The Inhibited person cannot see their own projection because they experience it as accurate perception of others. At the Aware stage, visibility arrives. The person can see: “I am rationalising. That logical argument I just made is actually a defense against feeling something I do not want to feel.” This visibility is painful – it strips away the illusion of rational control – but it is the prerequisite for change.

Above Aware, the mechanisms become manageable. The Emotionally Intelligent person can notice projection arising and choose not to act on it. The Transcendent person can feel the impulse to rationalise, recognise the emotion underneath, and engage with it directly. The mechanisms do not disappear. They become visible, and visibility creates choice.

Identity Clusters and the Splitting Phenomenon

Anti-values do not operate as isolated Frames. They cluster into identity islands – coherent sets of hijacked Frames that activate together when triggered.

This explains one of the most dramatic phenomena in human behaviour: the person who appears to become “a completely different person” when triggered. The gentle partner who becomes verbally vicious when they feel disrespected. The composed executive who turns into a screaming child when they feel undermined. The loving parent who becomes cold and punitive when their authority is questioned. In clinical terms, this is splitting – most associated with Borderline Personality Disorder, but present to some degree in everyone.

In this framework, splitting is not a mysterious defense mechanism requiring its own explanation. It is the activation of an anti-values cluster. Each cluster is an identity island – a term I draw from Eviatar Zerubavel’s work on social mindscapes, where he demonstrates how we carve continuous reality into discrete mental categories with rigid boundaries between them. An anti-values cluster is a coherent set of trauma-hijacked Frames, complete with its own:

  • Frame set – how reality is perceived when this cluster is active
  • Emotional state – the trigger drops the person into a lower ESM stage
  • TAP pipeline – the cluster runs its own Vision, Frame, Plan, Execute chain
  • Behavioural repertoire – what the person does when this cluster is running

Each cluster is internally consistent. It has its own logic, its own version of reality, its own set of responses. The person who idealises you one day and devalues you the next is not inconsistent. They are running two different anti-values clusters – each internally consistent, each triggered by different stimuli, each operating as a complete identity island.

The neurological basis for this was outlined in Chapter 3: during extreme stress, cortisol suppresses the hippocampus, which normally time-stamps memories with context. The emotional and sensory content gets stored in the amygdala and basal ganglia without a timestamp. When triggered later, the midbrain activates these memories as if they are happening now – not as past events but as present-tense reality. The identity island is not just a psychological construct. It is a set of timeless affective memories that, once triggered, run as a coherent present-tense program.

What Trait Stability Actually Measures

This has direct implications for personality psychology’s most celebrated finding: the longitudinal stability of personality traits.

What the Big Five calls “high Neuroticism” is, in this framework, a person with deeply entrenched anti-values clusters that activate frequently. What it calls “high Agreeableness” may be a person with deeply entrenched reaction-formation Frames that produce the appearance of warmth (anti-values-driven compliance masking fear of rejection). What it calls “low Openness” may be a person whose curiosity has been shut down by trauma-formed Frames that code novelty as threat.

The “stability” of these traits reflects the stability of unhealed trauma patterns, not the fixedness of personality. The trait is stable because the trauma is stable. The pattern is consistent because the wound is consistent. The Big Five’s longitudinal data is real – these patterns genuinely are consistent over decades in most people. But the data is measuring the symptom (stable behavioural patterns) and calling it the cause (fixed personality).

This is not a dismissal of trait research. It is a reframing. The data stands. The interpretation shifts. Address the underlying trauma – heal the wound, reclaim the hijacked Frames, integrate the anti-values clusters – and the “trait” changes. Not because personality changed, but because the anti-values engine lost its fuel. Roberts et al. (2017) showed that traits shift with major life transitions and intentional effort. This framework explains why: life transitions can disrupt the triggering context for anti-values clusters, and intentional effort (therapy, coaching, contemplative practice) can heal the trauma that powers them.

Clinical vignette: A client scores in the 95th percentile for Neuroticism on the NEO-PI-R. His therapist has treated this as a stable trait – “you’re a highly neurotic person, and our work is about managing that.” After three years of management strategies (mindfulness apps, breathing techniques, cognitive restructuring), the client is marginally better at managing anxiety but fundamentally the same person.

In this framework, the assessment would look different. The practitioner maps the anti-values clusters: when does the anxiety activate? What triggers it? What is the internal logic when the cluster is running? The mapping reveals three distinct identity islands: one activated by performance evaluation (rooted in childhood academic pressure), one activated by romantic intimacy (rooted in abandonment by a parent), one activated by financial uncertainty (rooted in witnessing parental financial catastrophe). Each island has its own Frame set, its own emotional state, its own behavioural repertoire. The “Neuroticism” is not one trait. It is three trauma clusters running on different triggers.

The intervention targets each cluster specifically. The performance cluster requires healing the wound around conditional worth. The intimacy cluster requires healing the abandonment wound. The financial cluster requires healing the catastrophic memory. As each cluster heals, the corresponding “neurotic” behaviours diminish – not because the client learned to manage them better, but because the engine producing them lost its fuel.

After eighteen months of cluster-specific work, the client retakes the NEO-PI-R. Neuroticism has dropped from the 95th to the 60th percentile. His therapist is surprised. This framework is not.

The Narcissism Pattern: A Hole Disguised as a Sail

Scott Barry Kaufman’s sailboat model of human motivation (from Transcend, 2020) replaces Maslow’s rigid pyramid with something more dynamic: security needs as the hull of a boat (safety, connection, self-esteem) and growth needs as the sail (exploration, love, purpose). You need the hull to be intact before the sail can catch wind. But you need the sail to go anywhere worth going.

Kaufman identifies a specific failure mode that this framework must account for: narcissism as defensive self-esteem. In sailboat terms, it is a hole in the hull disguised as a sail – an unmet security need (connection, genuine self-worth) masked by the appearance of growth-stage behaviour (confidence, authority, vision).

In this framework’s terms: narcissism is an anti-values cluster that presents as Intelligent or Transcendent stage functioning. The person appears to have strong Frames, clear Vision, decisive Execution. They look like they are operating at the upper end of the Emotional State Model. But the energy direction is away-from, not towards. The confidence is built not on integrated security but on the maintenance of superiority over others.

Othering is the primary tool. The narcissist requires a “lower” class or group to sustain their fragile sense of “higher” status. This is Kaufman’s D-cognition (Deficiency-cognition) operating through the appearance of B-cognition (Being-cognition). The narcissist may talk about purpose, vision, and meaning – growth-stage language – while the actual mechanism is: “I am above you, and your acknowledgment of my superiority is what holds my self-concept together.” Remove the audience, remove the hierarchy, and the hull shows its holes.

This is why the anti-values test matters. The test is not “does this person look confident and capable?” Many anti-values-driven people look confident and capable. The test is “what happens when they are challenged, when their Frame is questioned, when someone refuses to occupy the ’lower’ position?”

A person at the Intelligent or Transcendent stage can hold the challenge. Their Frames enlarge to include the new perspective. They do not experience disagreement as an attack on their identity because their identity is not built on being right. They can say “I had not considered that” without experiencing an existential crisis.

A narcissist’s Frames contract under challenge. They punish, dismiss, or discard the challenger, because the challenge threatens the hull, not just the sail. The defensive self-esteem is a structure built to maintain the illusion of a sound hull, and any challenge to that structure feels like the ocean rushing in.

Clinical vignette: Two leaders present with remarkably similar profiles on a standard leadership assessment. Both score high on confidence, strategic thinking, and decisiveness. Both describe themselves as visionary. Both have track records of building successful teams.

The practitioner administers the directional test – not through a formal instrument, but through observation and probing questions. Leader A is asked about a recent situation where a team member fundamentally disagreed with their strategic direction. Leader A describes the conversation: “She made a good point about the timeline. I had not seen that risk. We adjusted the plan.” The energy is towards: towards the best outcome, towards incorporating the team member’s perspective, towards building something better than either could alone.

Leader B is asked about a similar situation. Leader B describes the conversation differently: “He didn’t understand the strategy. I had to explain it three times. Eventually he came around.” Further probing reveals that “came around” means “stopped arguing” – the team member learned that disagreement was futile. The energy is away-from: away from the threat of being seen as wrong, away from the possibility that someone else’s perspective might be equal to their own.

Same assessment scores. Same observable competencies. Completely different energy direction. Leader A is values-driven. Leader B is running a narcissistic anti-values cluster disguised as leadership. The intervention for Leader A is skill development – refining what already works. The intervention for Leader B is therapeutic – healing the wound that requires superiority as a coping mechanism. Sending Leader B to a leadership skills programme will make them a more skilled narcissist. The hull is the issue, not the sail.

How Emotional State Determines Frame Direction

This is the bridge between the Emotional State Model (Part 1 of this framework) and the values/anti-values analysis. It answers the question: if Frames can point in either direction, what determines which direction they point?

The answer is emotional state.

Emotional Stage Default Frame Direction Mechanism
Distracted Neither – survival mode No stable Frames to direct
Inhibited Anti-values Trauma triggers hijack Frames before conscious processing
Muted Anti-values (disguised) Frames maintained by willpower, energy is avoidance-based
Aware Both visible Can see the hijacking but cannot yet choose
Intelligent Values (predominantly) Conscious Frame management, creation-based default
Transcendent Values (integrated) Frames as tools, no attachment, creation is natural

At the Distracted stage, the question of Frame direction is moot. The person is in survival mode – fight, flight, freeze, fawn. There are no stable Frames to direct. The concept of values-based living is meaningless to a person whose nervous system has determined that the threat level is too high for conscious processing.

At the Inhibited stage, Frames exist but are unstable, and the default direction is anti-values. Trauma triggers hijack Frames before conscious processing can intervene. The person can hold a perspective, but it collapses under emotional pressure. What looked like a firmly held value dissolves when triggered, replaced by the anti-values cluster associated with that trigger. The Inhibited person is not choosing destruction. They are being overridden by a nervous system that has not healed.

At the Muted stage, the default direction is still anti-values, but it is disguised. This is the stage where the distinction between values and anti-values is hardest to detect – both from the outside and from the inside. The Muted person appears values-driven because they perform the right behaviours. They show up. They are responsible. They say the right things. But the internal engine is avoidance: “I must not be seen as dishonest” rather than “I move towards honesty.” The energy is spent on not being the bad thing rather than creating the good thing. This is metabolically exhausting, which is why the Muted stage is unsustainable and periodically collapses into the “black state” – the addictions, binges, and breakdowns that punctuate an otherwise controlled exterior.

The Aware stage is the turning point. For the first time, the person can see both directions operating. They can see that their “value of honesty” has actually been operating as “hatred of liars.” They can see the trauma underneath the Frame. They can see the defense mechanisms running. But they cannot yet flip the direction. Awareness without skill produces suffering – you can see the prison but cannot yet find the door. The Aware person is often excellent at managing other people’s emotions but finds enormous difficulty managing their own, because they can see the mechanism clearly but lack the tools to change it.

At the Intelligent stage, the default direction shifts to values-driven. The person has done enough healing work and skill development that their Frames predominantly point towards rather than away from. Anti-values patterns still surface under extreme stress – the old clusters can still activate – but the person can recognise them and correct. The default is creation.

At the Transcendent stage, the integration is complete. Frames are tools rather than identity. The person can feel the impulse toward destruction (the anti-values pull) and choose to build instead. This is not suppression. It is not willpower. It is the natural output of a nervous system that has healed its critical wounds, integrated its shadow material, and developed the capacity to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously.

The Implication for Practitioners

This mapping has a direct, practical consequence: you cannot do genuine values work with someone below the Aware stage. You can teach values language. You can help them identify what they want to move towards. You can give them frameworks and exercises. But the Frames they identify as “values” will be anti-values in disguise, because their emotional state determines the direction of whatever Frames they hold.

The instruction to “just choose positive values” is useless to someone in the Inhibited or Muted stage. Their nervous system is locked in survival or controlled performance. They need emotional development first – movement through the Emotional State Model to at least the Aware stage – and then the values work becomes possible. Reversing this order produces what I see constantly in personal development and coaching: people who can articulate beautiful values statements and continue to operate destructively, because the values statements are Muted-stage performances rather than genuine directional commitments.

This is not the client’s failure. It is the practitioner’s failure to assess the preconditions for the work they are attempting.

Healing as Enlargement, Not Replacement

If anti-values are Frames hijacked by trauma, then healing is the process of reclaiming those Frames. But the mechanism of healing matters enormously, and the conventional understanding gets it wrong in a way that has significant clinical consequences.

The traditional view of healing – across much of CBT, coaching, and personal development – is replacement. The old Frame (“dogs are dangerous”) is challenged, discredited, and replaced with a new Frame (“dogs are safe”). The old belief is wrong. The new belief is right. Progress is measured by the strength of the new belief.

Michelle Craske’s inhibitory learning model challenges this. Craske’s research on exposure therapy demonstrates that the original fear memory is not erased or overwritten by successful exposure. The old Frame remains. What exposure creates is a new, competing association – the person now has two associations (dogs are dangerous AND dogs can be safe), and the therapeutic task is to strengthen the new association until it dominates.

This framework takes Craske’s insight further and diverges from her framing. Competition implies replacement – Frame A versus Frame B, where B “wins.” Replacement just creates another rigid Frame: a different conclusion about the same stimulus, equally fixed, equally vulnerable to being hijacked in turn. It is another cycle of the same structure. If you replace “dogs are dangerous” with “dogs are safe” and then a dog bites you, the entire new Frame collapses because it was built as a counter-position rather than as an integration.

Instead, healing is enlargement. The old Frame (“dogs are dangerous”) is not defeated by a new Frame (“dogs are safe”). It is integrated into a larger Frame that contains both:

“I had an experience where a dog hurt me. That experience is real. AND dogs can also be safe. AND I can assess which is which in the moment.”

The larger Frame holds the old one as one perspective within a wider view. The old reaction does not disappear. It becomes one data point in a richer assessment rather than the only lens available. The person who has enlarged their Frame can still feel the spike of fear when a large dog approaches. They can also evaluate whether that spike is warranted in the current context. Both are true. Both are held.

Why Fear Returns Under Stress

This has a critical implication that practitioners must understand: fear can return when the larger Frame contracts.

Under stress, sleep deprivation, or PFC overload, the integrated Frame narrows back to its smallest component – the original hijacked reaction. This is not relapse in the sense of “going back to square one.” It is the larger Frame temporarily losing its capacity to hold multiple perspectives. The enlarged Frame requires cognitive bandwidth to maintain – it holds several perspectives simultaneously, which is a Tertiary/cortical operation. When the cortex is overwhelmed (exhaustion, crisis, acute stress), the Frame contracts to the subcortical default: the original, simple, threat-coded reaction.

This explains why a client who has done excellent therapeutic work can appear to “lose all their progress” during a crisis. They have not lost it. The larger Frame is intact but temporarily inaccessible. Recovery is re-expansion – regaining access to the full Frame once the acute stressor passes. It is not re-fighting the same battle. It is re-opening a door that temporarily closed.

The practical implication: healing is not a one-time event. The enlarged Frame must be actively maintained through the capacity to hold complexity – through ongoing practice of the skills that sustain the wider perspective. Meditation, journaling, therapeutic check-ins, relationships that support complexity – these are not “maintenance” in a grudging sense. They are the ongoing cultivation of the conditions under which the enlarged Frame remains accessible.

Why Avoidance Perpetuates Anti-Values

Foa and Kozak’s Emotional Processing Theory provides the complementary mechanism. For a fear structure (a hijacked Frame) to be modified, it must first be activated – the person must re-encounter the stimulus – and then receive disconfirming information – the feared outcome does not happen.

Avoidance prevents both conditions. The hijacked Frame never gets activated in a context where disconfirming information is available. The person avoids the stimulus, the Frame remains small, the anti-values direction remains intact. Every successful avoidance reinforces the Frame: “I avoided the thing and nothing bad happened, therefore avoiding was correct.”

This is the neurological basis for why avoidance is the single greatest perpetuator of anti-values-driven living. The person who avoids conflict to protect their “value” of peace is not building peace. They are preventing the conflict Frame from being activated in conditions where it could be enlarged. The person who avoids intimacy to protect their “value” of independence is not cultivating independence. They are preventing the intimacy Frame from being activated in conditions where it could be integrated with their need for connection.

Steven Hayes’ Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) identifies this pattern as experiential avoidance and correctly treats it as a core process in psychological suffering. In this framework’s terms, experiential avoidance is the mechanism that keeps anti-values Frames locked at their smallest, most rigid, most destructive size. The alternative – exposure, acceptance, willingness to encounter the feared stimulus – is the mechanism that allows enlargement to begin.

Clinical vignette: A client describes himself as “someone who values his independence.” He lives alone, works from home, has few close relationships, and experiences chronic loneliness. He frames the loneliness as “the price of independence” and presents it as a conscious trade-off.

The practitioner applies the directional test. What happens when someone enters his space – a friend who wants to visit, a colleague who suggests collaboration, a potential partner who expresses interest? The client’s response is consistent: withdrawal. He finds reasons to cancel, sets conditions that make the visit impractical, becomes suddenly busy. The energy is away-from: away from the vulnerability of connection, away from the risk of being needed and then abandoned.

The “independence” Frame is anti-values-driven. The avoidance pattern perpetuates it: every time he successfully avoids intimacy, the Frame contracts further. The intervention is not “you should value connection more” (he already does, at the Values level – the loneliness is evidence). The intervention is exposure: carefully titrated encounters with intimacy, in conditions safe enough for the nervous system to receive disconfirming information. “I let someone in, and they did not leave. I was vulnerable, and I survived. I needed someone, and that did not destroy me.”

Each exposure enlarges the Frame. “Independence” expands from “isolation as protection” to “autonomy within connection” – a larger Frame that holds both the genuine value of self-reliance and the genuine need for belonging. The old Frame is not defeated. It is included in something bigger.

The Shadow: Three Layers

Jung’s concept of the shadow – the unconscious repository of rejected aspects of self – maps precisely onto the anti-values framework. But the mapping must be precise, because Jung’s shadow is broader than trauma-hijacked Frames alone, and failing to account for that breadth limits the framework’s utility.

The challenge was raised in the stress-testing of this model: by mapping the shadow exclusively to anti-values, the framework may be narrowing a richer concept. A person’s shadow might include a Vision they are afraid to pursue (not trauma-based, just unexplored), or a creative capacity they have denied (not hijacked, just dormant). Jung’s shadow encompasses socially unacceptable desires, creative impulses that were suppressed, and what is sometimes called the “positive shadow” – strengths and potentials that the person has rejected or cannot acknowledge.

The response to this challenge produced a refinement that strengthens the framework. The shadow has three layers, not one:

Layer 1: Destructive Shadow

These are anti-values clusters – trauma-hijacked Frames, away-from in direction, actively defended by the defense mechanisms described earlier in this chapter.

This is the shadow most people think of when they hear the term. It includes the rage the person has repressed, the grief they have intellectualised, the fear they have projected onto others, the shame they have buried under reaction formation. It is the material that, when triggered, produces the identity-island splitting phenomenon. It is actively dangerous in the sense that it produces destructive behaviour without the person’s conscious awareness or consent.

The intervention for destructive shadow is the deepest and most difficult: healing the underlying trauma, making the defense mechanisms visible, and integrating the hijacked Frames into larger Frames that can hold the trauma as one perspective rather than the only lens. This is the work of therapy at its most fundamental.

Layer 2: Defended-Dormant Shadow

These are unfilled spaces with active Frames against exploration. They appear dormant but are actually defended by fear-based Frames.

The person who has “never been interested in art” but becomes visibly uncomfortable when art is discussed. The leader who has “no time for introspection” and responds to invitations for self-reflection with dismissal or irritation. The client who says “I’m just not a creative person” with a rigidity that suggests not absence of interest but active avoidance of it.

In each case, the space is not truly dormant. There is a Frame guarding it – a Frame that says “that territory is dangerous,” “that is not who I am,” “I do not go there.” The Frame may not be rooted in a single traumatic event. It may be rooted in cultural conditioning (“boys don’t do art”), in parental messaging (“that’s not a real career”), in early humiliation (a teacher who ridiculed a creative attempt), or in the well-documented negativity bias that causes unfamiliar territory to be coded as threatening by default.

The critical insight is that defended-dormant shadow has an active Frame against exploration, which means it tends toward anti-values territory. Research on intolerance of uncertainty confirms that unfilled spaces are perceived as inherently threatening by individuals with high anxiety sensitivity. We attach our previous fears to new fears – stimulus generalisation is well-documented, and overgeneralisation is a hallmark of trauma. The brain applies old threat Frames to tangentially related new situations.

There is a caveat: novelty also triggers dopamine. For individuals at the Aware or Intelligent stage, with a regulated nervous system and adopted Frames for curiosity, unfilled spaces can activate exploration rather than threat. The tendency is therefore stage-dependent: at lower ESM stages, unfilled spaces tend toward anti-values. At higher stages, they tend toward growth.

The intervention for defended-dormant shadow is gentler than for destructive shadow: identify the guarding Frame, understand what it is protecting against, and create conditions safe enough for the person to peek into the defended territory. This is not necessarily deep trauma work. It may be as simple as helping a client try something they have always avoided, in a context where failure is explicitly safe.

Layer 3: Genuinely Dormant Shadow

These are unexpressed values with no active defence – potential that has simply never been explored. No trauma is guarding it. No Frame is blocking it. The person has genuinely never encountered the stimulus that would activate this aspect of themselves.

This layer is rare, because most avoidance has a Frame behind it. What looks like genuine dormancy is usually defended dormancy on closer inspection – the Frame is just well-hidden. But genuinely dormant potential does exist. The person who has never been exposed to music and discovers at age fifty that they have a deep affinity for it. The person who has never been in a leadership role and discovers, when circumstances thrust them into one, that they have a natural capacity for it.

The intervention for genuinely dormant shadow is the simplest: exposure. Not therapeutic exposure in the clinical sense, but life exposure – encountering new domains, new experiences, new aspects of self. This is what travel, education, career changes, and new relationships can provide when the person’s emotional state is high enough to receive them as opportunities rather than threats.

The Growth Trajectory

The complete growth trajectory includes all three layers:

  1. Integrate the destructive shadow – heal the trauma-hijacked Frames, make the defense mechanisms visible, enlarge the rigid Frames into perspectives that can hold the trauma as one view among many.

  2. Expose the defended-dormant territory – identify the guarding Frames, understand what they protect against, and create safe conditions for exploration of the avoided material.

  3. Activate the genuinely dormant – seek new experience, new domains, new aspects of self that have never been explored.

In every case, the direction is enlargement. Not replacement, not deletion, not victory over the old Frame, but the expansion of perspective until the old Frame is one view among many rather than the only lens available. The person does not become someone different. They become someone larger – someone whose Frame set can hold more of reality without collapsing into a single, rigid, survival-coded perspective.

This is the developmental direction the Emotional State Model describes: from Distracted (no stable Frames) through Inhibited (unstable Frames, anti-values default) through Muted (rigid Frames, disguised anti-values) through Aware (Frames become visible) through Intelligent (Frames become conscious and values-driven) to Transcendent (Frames become tools, held lightly, creation is natural). The journey through the shadow – all three layers – is not separate from the journey through the ESM. It is the same journey, described from a different angle.

The values/anti-values distinction is the compass for that journey. At every stage, in every domain, for every Frame: is the energy flowing toward creation or away from threat? The answer tells you where the person stands, what they need next, and whether the work required is healing, skill development, or exposure.

The test remains simple. The implications are vast. And the work – the real, in-the-room, practitioner-facing work – is to apply this distinction with precision, with compassion, and with the understanding that every anti-values-driven Frame was once a survival strategy that served the person who holds it. The Frame is not the enemy. The wound underneath it is the territory that needs attention. Heal the wound, and the Frame finds its own way home – from away-from to towards, from destruction to creation, from anti-values to values. Not because someone told it to. Because that was always its direction, before the trauma redirected it.

The direction of a Frame determines everything downstream. In the next chapter, we examine what “downstream” looks like: the complete decision pipeline from core personhood through Vision, Frame, Plan, Execute, and Outcome – the Thought Action Paradigm.