Cognitive Dissonance

            “Have you ever heard of Cognitive Dissonance?” Eric, whose last name is still a mystery to me, sat a short space away from me in a desk chair, and continued staring a hole through my head.

            “...No.”

            “Well, did you ever play a musical instrument?”

            “I used to play the violin.” I crossed my legs and glanced around the room I noticed couldn't possibly be solely his office. There was a pink bunny on the top of the bookshelf.

            “Well, Cognitive Dissonance is when you play a chord... can you even play chords on the violin?”

            “Okay, I took piano when I was little.” After all, he was an adjunct. Thats why I had gotten him so cheap.

            “Good. So when you play a chord thats all wrong, where the notes don't sound good together, that's dissonance.” I nodded.

            “So my brain is out of tune? Like I'm thinking out of sync?”

            “Yes. And there are two things we can do about that.”

            “Oh?” I crossed my arms. Because here would come the part where he'd say I was fixable.

            “You can either play a different chord, or you can make adjustments to the notes you're playing out of sync so that they sound good--”

            “So, okay, its the same shit.”

            “What?”

            I was annoyed because I had just talked about how I hated being given ultimatums. “You're asking me to choose whether my actions are okay, or whether they're evil and I need to stop.”

            “I said make adjustments.”

           

Kassin, Saul. “Cognitive Psychology” Microsoft Encarta, 2008.

“Sometimes people change their attitudes not in response to a persuasive communication, but by convincing themselves, a process of self persuasion. Cognitive dissonance theory says that people often change their attitudes to justify their own actions. According to this theory, people who behave in ways that contradict their own attitudes experience an unpleasant state of internal tension known as cognitive dissonance. To reduce that tension, they adjust their attitudes to be consistent with their behavior.”

 

            It was 4am and I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom. I had just spritzed myself with air freshener to cover up the smell of cigarette smoke and probably booze that I couldn't smell myself, but knew was there. Looking at myself in the mirror, I wondered if I would gain five pounds from drinking and then going to bed. The circles under my eyes meant I would look even worse in the morning, though. Well, later that morning. I paused. Toothpaste foaming out the corners of my mouth, I stared hard at the left side of my neck. Shit. With one hand I pulled down the collar of my t-shirt. Damn it! There were gray/blue bruises all up and down both sides of my neck in symmetrical lines. The left side was particularly dark.

            I wanted to cry.

            Why the hell did I do this shit? For the sake of variety? I didn't even want to stay out this late. Now I would have to wear collars and turtle necks all weekend and possibly during the week. It wasn't even cold enough! And Breckin didn't even care about me. If I had said, I don't want to come over, he would have said fine. Now I've ruined myself and I can't even cover it up. Breckin doesn't even matter. And he wouldn't even care if he knew I was walking around with him crawling up my neck for the next seven days. Join the crowd, Breckin, really. I should really kick his ass, he wasn't even good at it.

            That night I sat at in the living room and cried because I felt like I was coming apart. I was two people. The girl who was supposed to go to church in the morning at 10am, and the girl who would have slept in since she closed down the bar with a couple guy friends. Well.

 

            So... cognitive dissonance? Yeah, thats a big check.

            But what blows my mind is that I always thought I just didn't agree with the values I'd been taught. I thought they were close minded and simple. And that I was going to be different, in fact I was made to be different. Because I refused to be a lemming, and I believed in experience as opposed to blind faith. And I'm still a little confused here, but I really think that all this time I've been telling myself these things and knowing that I don't believe that at all. Because my values still mean more to me than I let on. My values are why I cry at night when Breckin Ley gives me massive hickeys, and why I feel like escaping to the plains where there's no one but me to feel accountable to.

            Its all a huge lie to myself.

            All this I'm-such-a-bad-girl stuff after Lipscomb was really making me unhappy. But I convinced myself it made me happy because of the way I had been behaving. It was all a symptom.  All the self-hatred and the perpetuation of my actions, the part where I go to Breckin's house or to the bar for no good reason, are my reconciling actions. I am perpetuating my “bad” behavior because just like those people in the psychological study who got paid 1$ to lie, I'm not satisfied by my actions that compromise my values, so I'm going to play like they do satisfy me. I'm going to own my behavior and play like these “bad” things make me happy, since my actions aren't in sync with what my “true” self thinks I should have done. And this way I was tricking myself out of being upset when people looked down on me for getting kicked out of Christian school, or for having too much baggage. I'd be the first to prove it to you that I hadn't made mistakes, oh no, I just had different values.

            Contrary to what you believe, Dr... Eric, here is how I will fix me.

            All I have to do is recognize the voice after I come home from Breckin's as the real me, or the true me. I am NOT a “bad girl.” And I'm seeing now that I never really wanted to be, anyway. I fell into it. The Eifel Tower collapsed under my weight and instead of sitting around in the rubble, crying about it, I stepped back a bit and said, “oh yeah, I meant to do that.” And while I kinda liked being different and knocking down buildings so to speak, it was never supposed to be who I was.

 Its not, and I need to start acting like myself.

            Oh, and by the way, two weeks later I uncovered the fact that Breckin is a Repulican, and was therefore never worth my time anyway.