There is a psychological theory known as cognitive dissonance. Some people may remember from high school or college psychology classes. This theory holds that when we have ideas, beliefs, or behaviors in our heads that are contradictory, we seek to find consistency in them. We look for new knowledge or a new way of thinking to resolve our cognitive conflict.

For peace of mind we need to eliminate the dissonance. We either change one of the competing beliefs or behaviors, reduce one of them in importance, or add more "ammunition" to one side so that it clearly outweighs the other. We have to do this to eliminate the conflict in our minds.

Have some competing attitudes or behaviors floating around? I certainly do. I'm guessing that most of the people who read this post do. Its not a bad thing, is it? Part of the way we grow and change is letting new ideas in to compete with the old ones. We either accept the new idea, modify it to fit with the old, or ultimately reject it.

I'd like to play around with a few of these. Some are personal and some are not. All of them are situations many of us have been faced with. Ready?

When my wife decided to end our marriage I begged and pleaded for a chance to keep our family together. I begged like I'd never begged anyone for anything before, and I'm not exaggerating one bit. My very last scrap of pride is probably still embedded in the carpet fibers of that house. I was raised that a man should have dignity and pride and should never beg or humiliate himself. I did it anyway. There are your competing cognitions - my strong desire to keep my marriage and my need to retain a semblance of pride. Either you get rid of one or the other. You make a choice about which of those is most important and it eradicates the other. They can't both co-exist together.

Most of us have a desire to keep on living as long as we can. Its a definite idea we have in our heads. But we also drink, smoke, eat fatty foods, and avoid exercise. How do we resolve the dissonance? We pretend those things aren't that bad or that not living so long isn't such a bad thing. I have a passing familiarity with this one.

You value faithfulness and fidelity, but you find yourself involved in an affair. You want this other person but it violates your belief system. You have choices: A) end the affair and return to your belief system, B) leave your mate to join you lover, resolving the fidelity issue, or C) find a way to justify the competing notions. "He doesn't care about me anyway." "She's probably cheating too." Isn't rationalization just the neatest thing? Its a great help in resolving internal conflict.

You believe in honesty and integrity, but challenges to those values arise all the time. You find a wallet full of money in the parking lot. You look at that tax return and know you could change a couple of numbers and only stand a remote risk of being caught. Someone has a copy of the test. You find yourself in an uncomfortable or embarassing situation and its just much easier to lie.

You remember some of the unpleasant things about your youth and resolve never to inflict those things on your children. Fast forward many years and you're doing it anyway. Maybe you've grown up and realized those things weren't that bad. Maybe you've learned how to make excuses. After all, you are tired and stressed, right?

You wouldn't steal a nickel from Bill Gates but you download music like a fiend. *Raises hand*. You find a way to justify it in your mind. Somewhere you know its wrong, but after all, "those record companies make too much money anyway and charge too much for their CDs". Thats how you resolve the conflict....you introduce a third belief that mitigates the part of you that thinks you're swiping something.

You consider yourself an open-minded person but you cast aspersions on people every day. They belong to a different political party? They've gotta be evil or ignorant. They believe something different from you on some hot button issue? They're stupid. They have a different lifestyle than you do? What the hell is wrong with them? This dissonance is easy to resolve. Its THEIR fault.

We face these internal conflicts...this dissonance...every day of our lives. New things meet the old. We find a way to resolve it. Sometimes for the good and sometimes not. How we resolve our internal conflicts plays a large role in who we are.

Just the fact that we have conflict says something about us. Think Ted Bundy had internal conflict going when he killed those girls? Think Bin Laden lost any sleep over financing the deaths of innocents? When you don't have the conflicts...that is when you should worry.

I had a little cognitive dissonance over putting up this post. How did I resolve it? I clicked...."Publish".
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