The Heartbreak of Cognitive Dissonance: Is this terrible condition affecting someone you love?

Do you know someone who is “black and white” on every issue? Do they refuse to be even the slightest bit flexible on an issue, even when you throw irrefutable proof of their errors right in their face? Do they continue to throw totally crazy or irrelevant arguments back at you? That someone might be suffering from (dramatic music) cognitive dissonance.

Defined by its discoverer, Leon Festinger, cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The ideas, or “cognitions,” in question may include attitudes and beliefs, the awareness of one’s behavior, and facts. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people are motivated to reduce their discomfort by either changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, which I will refer to as the “reasonable approach,” or by justifying or rationalizing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors no matter how unreasonable they might appear to others. I’ll call the latter the “rigid approach.”

The reasonable approach can provide the sufferer with an instant cure and a way of life where cognitive dissonance is easily warded off, like being immune to a disease. The rigid approach, however, can cause all kinds of trouble, including unjustified wars, lack of response to natural disasters, disbelief of scientifically-proven facts such as global warming and evolution, religious beliefs and, admittedly, a debate about what the meaning of the word “is” is. However, it also seems to provide the sufferer with at least temporary relief, by providing the self-delusion that the sufferer is, in fact, correct. You betcha! (wink)

Most brains, as they develop, face constant bombardment with one set of ideas (religious, political, scientific, artistic, always ideological), while taking in sensory information that often contradicts those ideas. I believe that cognitive dissonance involves how the brain gets wired up to handle these dilemmas. This wiring, I theorize, occurs on a continuum, ranging from what I will call “conservative rigidity” on the far right end and “liberal rigidity” on the far left end. The owners of these brains have succumbed to the propaganda put forth by parents, teachers, clergy, etc. In the former case, the brain displays a deep red color. In the latter case, a deep blue color. In each of these cases, the brain wiring forms a closed loop, constantly recycling the same talking points, scripture verses, and so on. As the names imply, brains on these extreme ends of the continuum rely heavily on the rigid approach to learning and problem-solving, and remain very difficult to change, since nothing new is allowed in. This can lead to other conditions, such as Bush Derangement Syndrome, Palin Derangement Syndrome, Obama Derangement Syndrome, or even Religion.

Toward the middle of the continuum lies “centrist, or independent, flexibility” which displays in a brilliant, pulsating spectrum of purples. Here, the brain owner has become aware of the contradictions described above. These brains’ wiring forms an open system, taking in all ideas, processing them with critical thinking, and producing a response that considers all points. This response might be “the heck if I know” (because uncertainty is allowed), but even this comes only after all the data, both red and blue, is in. Brains on this part of the continuum make use of the reasonable approach to learning and problem-solving. Typically, this does not lead to other serious conditions, but may result in minor conditions such as frequent Eye-Rolling, Head-Shaking and/or Deep Sighs.

So, there you have it, my theory of the causes and effects of cognitive dissonance. If I ever figure out how to treat brains on the extreme ends of the continuum, I will let you know. In the meantime, if you happen to disagree with my theory, don’t bother to tell me, because I just know you are wrong.

Why Psychologists “Ignore the Evidence”

Note: This is a response to an article called, “Ignoring the Evidence: Why Do Psychologists Reject Science?” by Sharon Begley in Newsweek on October 12, 2009. Click here to go to this article.

Psychologists reject science because it’s too primitive to be useful! The human brain and mind are far too complex for the current state of psychological science to be truly useful in the treatment of many or most real-life psychological issues. Academics, such as Timothy Baker, choose methods such as cognitive and cognitive-behavior therapy for their experiments because they can boil down these methods to a cookbook where, allegedly, one size fits all and results can be easily measured. The former assumes that all humans are alike. The latter assumes that you should look for your lost contact under that streetlamp only because the light is better over there.

These “scientists” use subjects who are convenient (we do know an awful lot about college freshmen who elect to take Psych 101) and that fit their purposes. They then demonstrate that those subjects who comply with the cookbook method get good results. This is like you calling technical support for your computer and having a problem that fits nicely with the script the person at the other end of the line is reading. However, if your problem is off-script, what happens then? The tech person just keeps reading the script to you and hasn’t a clue as to how to help you. How great is that?

In my private practice (I am a licensed psychologist with a Psy.D. degree), I can’t imagine using a cookbook with a client who has multiple personalities to help one alter address his or her panic attacks. What do I do if another alter doesn’t want to do that? What if the first alter gets too scared and the client switches to another alter? You get the picture. I then have to rely on my training (scientific or not), experience (empirically verified or not), professional intuition (developed over years of dealing with this type of situation), and a tad bit of on-the-fly creativity. Put that in a cookbook and run some statistical models on it!

Many academics seem to have a need to gratify their egos by thinking of themselves as real scientists. No doubt they do their best with the tools they have and the knowledge they have upon which to build theories. These are very primitive at best, relative to modern physics, chemistry, biology, and the other “hard” sciences. But then they whine about how we “in the trenches” don’t use their results. I say, thank you very much, but keep trying until you’re useful to us.

Unfortunately, Ms. Begley’s article served to take one person’s journal article and generalize its propaganda. I’m sure Dr. Baker is delighted. However, all of us chickens who were unfairly denigrated by the article (in my mind) now have yet another misunderstanding to explain to an already skeptical public about the value of our work. Did we forget to thank you?

Lastly (yes, I am winding this up), the first person to apply scientific methods to psychotherapy was Carl Rogers, Ph.D. He was president of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the first recipient of the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions. This was back in 1956 when the APA was dominated by academics (as Rogers was). He scientifically developed a set of conditions therapists must establish within their relationship with a client (he coined this term) so the client has the most likely chance of improving psychologically. Therapists still learn and follow these criteria to this day. So, maybe psychologists are not ignoring all the evidence, just the evidence that does not help them help others.

This is Your Brain on Therapy, Part Deux

Note: If you have not read Part One, please do so before embarking on this article. Thanks!

In Part One, we looked at how therapy can change our brains regarding relationships. Now, let’s look at how therapy can change our brain in another way.

Let’s imagine our brain is a large (very large) collection of roads, ranging from dirt roads to superhighways (or freeways, depending on where you’re from). These roads get built according to what we learn as we go through life. They allow the mind that emanates from our brain to locate information that the brain collects. In childhood, these roads get built and information gets collected at a frantic pace. Then things start to taper off in our late teens and early twenties. After that, our brains continue to collect and connect information, but more slowly.

Along the way, new roads get constructed. Old, unused roads get destroyed. Some small roads become larger. Some large roads become smaller. Highways acquire entrances and exits. All this happens in the service of more effective access to collected information.

Now, imagine a child whose brain is building roads like crazy connecting all the various things he (for sake of pronoun ease) learns. Some of what he learns comes from his father, say, in the form of insults, criticism, and outright neglect. The more the boy learns these negative “facts,” as the boy’s brain comes to treat them, the more roads his brain builds heading toward them and the larger those roads become. In the parlance of brain science, “the brain cells that fire together, wire together,” meaning the more a road gets used, the more substantial it becomes.

Sooner or later, the boy grows up to become a (chronological) adult. For better or worse, this man carries with him into adulthood all the facts his brain collected and all the roads his brain built between those facts while he was growing up.

Can you see where this story is headed?

Let’s say that within our hero’s brain lies a pile of information with the basic message, “I am worthless.”  This information has formed into a “fact” as far as his brain knows. Along with the pile, there is a superhighway, with lots (billions?) of entrances, heading right into “Worthless Town.” Our hero’s sense of worthlessness gets “triggered” or “activated” constantly, as a result. You get the picture?

If our hero enters into therapy, the therapist helps our hero become aware of his “fact” of worthlessness and helps him change the roadway system. This might involve building exits off the highway. Some of the highway entrances (e.g., negative self-talk) might get identified and demolished. Maybe our hero will spend more time visiting Worthless Town and either start to feel more accepting of life there or develop the ability to leave whenever he wants to. This all happens due to the plasticity of our hero’s brain, its ability to change, re-wire itself, create and undo connections within it.

At some point, our hero either spends less time in Worthless Town, feels OK with being there, or never gets there in the first place. This feels wonderful to our intrepid hero and he gets to experience his brain after therapy.

This is Your Brain on Therapy, Part One

What really happens to your brain when you go to a therapist? Hey, be kind!

Let’s start from the very beginning (a very good place to start). In the beginning, our brains have a lot of “hardware,” estimated at one hundred billion brain cells, but they have very little “software.” We only have “programs” that let us do things like cry, sleep, poop, suck, poop again (and did I mention poop? Oh, and cry too).

As we grow up, our brains act like little organic computers that program themselves by creating or undoing connections between brain cells, estimated at about 10,000 connections per cell, or about one quadrillion (that’s a one with 15 zeroes after it) possible connections in all. That’s a lot!

The connections we can make in our brain reflect the “genetic potential” we receive from our parents. It’s like your parents each had a deck of cards and threw in some of them to give you your hand. So, you play with the cards you were dealt, so to speak. If both your parents throw in a “smart” card, then you have a good chance at being smart. The same holds true of height, eye color, hair color, temperament, attention deficit, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and so on. You would have the “potential” (possibility) for those but may or may not “realize” (acquire or fulfill) that potential.

The connections we do make in our brain reflect how we use (realize) this deck of cards (potentials) to deal with our environment as we grow up. If Person A has an easy, pleasant, nurturing childhood, their brain will get “wired up” or “programmed” to process that kind of input. If Person B has a rough, abusive, lonely childhood, their brain gets programmed to deal in some creative manner (sometimes called “a defense mechanism”) with that kind of life.

Person A can readily deal with nice, pleasant, friendly people, but may have difficulty knowing what to do with a mean, unpleasant, abusive person because they have no program to process input from that kind of person. They may assume the mean person is just having a bad day (or life) and will change sometime in the future. This assumption may get them into trouble.

Likewise, Person B can deal in some way with abusive, mean people, but may have difficulty knowing what to do with a healthier person. They have no program to process input from a healthy person. To them, abusive behavior seems “normal” and they feel in some way comfortable, or at least familiar, with it. Person B may even find they are attracted to abusive others again and again because that’s the kind of person their brain (thus far) can deal with.

What kind of picture forms in your mind right now? Do you recognize any of this in yourself or others you know?

Both Person A and Person B can benefit from going to therapy (therapy is not just for crazy people any more). Person B has probably suffered through a string of bad relationships, not knowing why, or unable to figure out, how to establish or keep a healthy relationship. Person B’s brain does not “do” healthy. Person A, on the other hand, may have stumbled across a relationship that doesn’t make sense or may even have traumatized them, since Person A’s brain doesn’t “do” unhealthy.

Enter therapy. Please! (Apologies to Henny Youngman.) So let’s say Person B seeks relief by entering therapy with a relatively healthy therapist (not guaranteed, by the way, but that’s a whole other “Oprah”). At first, Person B may feel uncomfortable with the therapist because his or her brain doesn’t process input from the healthy therapist. Luckily, however, Person B’s brain has “plasticity” (fancy word meaning it can change) and during every encounter with the therapist, Person B’s brain gets slightly rewired or reprogrammed.

Almost regardless of what happens during these encounters, as long as the therapist behaves in a healthy manner, Person B’s brain creatively adapts to deal more effectively with “healthy.” Person B’s brain cells slowly undo unhealthy connections and create healthy connections. After a while, Person B finds they too can act in healthy ways and they can enter and maintain healthy relationships (well, healthier, at least).

Person A can benefit from working with a healthy therapist, too. Possibly some brain-expanding education, role-playing, or other method provided in therapy will help add to the existing programs in Person A’s brain that they can call upon when encountering unhealthy people.

So, your brain-on-therapy makes subtle shifts, disconnections, reconnections, new connections, and so on, leading to greater and greater health. One day you will wake up in the morning and realize your life feels much better.

This is the feeling of your brain after therapy.

In Praise of Slowness

No, I’m not writing a send-up of the Slow Movement or the book that exemplifies the movement’s principles, although what I’m writing about fits that movement well.

I am inviting you, dear reader, to slow down your self-improvement efforts so you can catch up with them and let them integrate within you. I am inviting you to accept how long it takes to make real change in a healthy direction. As the cliché says, “It took you (your age here) years for you to get this way, …” You know the rest.

Two current therapy treatment models (as well as the managed care movement) pressure therapists into providing quick fixes to those who allegedly want them. The “brief therapy” model attempts to crunch down useful work into just a very few sessions. The “medical” model leads patients (I call people I work with “clients,” but “patient” fits the medical model better) to expect they will leave a therapist’s office with a “prescription” that will cure all their ills.

For a very few persons, either clients or therapists, these models work well enough. Well enough, that is, to get them through until the next crisis happens (he said cynically). Somehow the phrase, “Pay me now or pay me later” comes to mind. Further, these models fit both the “time is money” and the immediate gratification values our society has adopted and that have led us to greater and greater emotional problems.

Contrary to these models, I favor a process that lets things happen as they happen, whether it takes a short time or long time. If possible (financially, schedule-wise, and otherwise), I recommend that you take your time and, as a mentor of mine once said, “tai chi” your way through life, moving slowly, deliberately, and mindfully in accord with the natural flow of your life.

This same mentor also recommended a lifestyle metaphor based on the life story of Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard brain scientist who took eight years to fully recover from a severe stroke. My mentor recommended taking “eight years” (or however long it takes) to fully recover from whatever gets in one’s way of living a fully-conscious, self-accepting life.

The relatively recent discovery of brain plasticity (the fact that our brains change over time, even as adults) also suggests that we need to be (or have to be) patient with our self-development progress. While our brains do change, they change slowly when we reach adulthood (25 and older). The therapy process and other self-development processes result in the rewiring of our brains, a slow but steady process. (More on this in a future article.)

I recently began living the slowness metaphors for myself and, like a good diet plan, they have provided a fresh, healthy, and lively way of life resulting in slow, yet very steady progress that feels like it will stick. I’m really liking it!

How does that sound to you?