I’ve been struggling a bit this year so far. To say
anything. Aethelread posted a disturbing
entry to his blog yesterday, filled with honesty at how he is feeling (great
bravery and detachment), so I thought I could perhaps make more of an effort
myself. Time Traveller asked me if I was
writing recently, and I replied something along the lines that I had very
little time, hardly any focus and zero ideas.
This is true. She seems to be
barrelling along with a fury, which is righteous news, writing wise, as she’s
so good. I hope for a barrelling period of my own sometime soon.
In the meantime…
It’s been biblical, the rain, here. On and off, that 40 days and 40 nights. I start to wonder if it’s washing me away,
that being dry inside is some form of illusion.
I read a quote the other day by Orson Welles about the idea that you’re
born alone, live alone and die alone, and only the illusion of friendships and family keep you sane…along those lines.
I was really struck that he called friendship and family an illusion. I’ve long been convinced of the born, living
and dying alone bit. If you’ve ever had
a fit of depression or sadness you see quite clearly that you are utterly
alone, that that is no illusion at all. But
I’ve never seen the friendships I’ve made as illusory. They are real enough. (And family – what trouble they can be – they
definitely aren’t illusion!)
But Welles has a point.
I don’t think any relationship is what you think it is, as you can’t see
into other people’s heads. Even if you
sat down with your best friend, or your partner, and had a brainstorming
session where you swore to be utmost honest, and made ground rules for your
relationship where you both by the end, have some sort of list and are on the
same page with core values and beliefs, assumptions, basic ways of viewing the
world; so that even if you disagreed with one another, you would at least
understand each other…I still maintain you would likely not have a clue at all
as to what’s truly going on in your friendship or relationship.
I was talking to Fry yesterday. He is walking a torturous winding way and has
been for sometime. It’s a shame you
cannot save your children from the pits you fell into, that people cannot learn
lessons at second hand. Still. Fry postulated that most of my friendships
and all my relationships have worked along a pattern whereby I think in my head
that its ‘us against the world’. A unit.
Two freaks together, navigating an
uncertain and scary world, but together in seeing the joy, having moments of
wonder. And that if someone then does
something contrary to my idea of them, it breaks my ‘siege mentality’ and
throws me completely. Leaving me lost.
That has happened twice in close friendships recently. It leaves me feeling a bit like an idiot, a
bit disillusioned and unclear. Mixed
signals flying about all over the place.
I'll give you an example of one of the incidents. Someone being nice to me in quite a genuine seeming way though they know
they have done something that has really upset me. I expressed it, fully and clearly – and got…practically
zero reaction. I’m really not sure what I’m
supposed to do with little explanation, hardly any expression of remorse, and
being left with the feeling, due to another’s calmness, that I am merely having
a tantrum by myself. Instead of a
legitimate reaction to ( a repeated) wrongdoing. I then start twisting myself into a pretzel
trying to understand why the person did what they did, what their state of mind
could have been. I try to
understand. I try to understand the lack
of reaction, of talking. I make little
lists in my head – doesn’t want confrontation, feels explanation won’t be
listened to, is very angry and doesn’t want to say something that will be
regretted, or conversely, actually doesn’t really care much at all about the
issue and thinks I’m making a storm in a teacup, so the best way to blow over
it is to just act all business as usual.
Which would explain their being as nice to me as usual – as if I hadn’t
just expressed great upset and disquiet.
The person in question isn’t usually a game player
either. If anything, they are sometimes
in ignorance of their actions’ consequences for others. I don’t suspect (I think) any great
masterplan to freak me out or control me via withholding of reaction – as if I’m
an actor performing to a mannequin and getting nothing back to work with, no
two way street.
In a way, this is all great writing stuff. My total confusion at other people’s
motivations and actions, my attempts to understand. The contradictions of someone knowing I am
angry with them and not seeming to care enough to address it at all, but being
perfectly pleasant as they usually are – as if nothing at all had happened.
Bit of cognitive dissonance there on my part for sure. I remember saying ages ago that I was going
to do a post about cognitive dissonance and I never did. Maybe this is a quick post about that, then. Not a proper one, as I don’t feel in the mood
to relate any experimental examples.
Cognitive Dissonance
was proposed by Leo Festinger in the late 1950s. It’s basically the sense of acute mental
discomfort you experience when you experience or do something that is contrary
to your beliefs or expectations.
Something did not turn out the way you thought it would. That’s a massive over-simplification, but
here’s a very ordinary example so you see what I mean, one that’s happened to
me and probably some of you in the past –
"Imagine that you prepared
at great length for a dinner party at your home. You constructed the guest
list, sent out the invitations, and prepared the menu. Nothing was too much
effort for your party: you went to the store, prepared the ingredients, and cooked
for hours, all in anticipation of how pleasant the conversation and people
would be. Except it wasn't. The guests arrived late, the conversations were
forced, and the food was slightly overcooked by the time all of your guests
arrived. The anticipation and excitement of the great time you were going to
have are discordant with your observation of the evening. The pieces do not
fit. You're upset, partly because the evening did not go well, but also because
of the inconsistency between your expectation and your experience. You are
suffering from the uncomfortable, unpleasant state of cognitive
dissonance."
(Cooper, 2007)[1]
(Cooper, 2007)[1]
Now, Festinger went on to state:
"Festinger's insistence that
cognitive dissonance was like a drive that needed to be reduced implied that
people were going to have to find some way of resolving their inconsistencies.
People do not just prefer eating over starving; we are driven to eat.
Similarly, people who are in the throes of inconsistency in their social life
are driven to resolve that inconsistency. How we go about dealing with our
inconsistency can be rather ingenious. But, in Festinger's view, there is
little question that it will be done."
(Cooper, 2007)[2]
(Cooper, 2007)[2]
He thought that people could not exist with the uncomfortable
feeling of knowing things were not as they thought or needed to think they
were, with themselves. E.g. man thinks of himself as environmentally friendly,
buys car he believes is sound to these principles; later finds out it does not
do good mileage and will harm the environment more by excessive use of fossil
fuels (ah, should’ve got electric car, he kicks self, knows that now…but he
took price into account, oh dear oh dear).
Festinger would say that in order to square the man’s view of himself with
his actions and their unforeseen consequences, he is going to have to find a
solution. He can’t just leave it as it
is. He’ll have to get another car, along
with all the time, loss of money through part exchange and general hassle this
will cause. But he will likely endure this discomfort because he wants to stay
true to the principles he has chosen for himself: it’s important to feel
consistent, authentic to self, true.
Festinger would call this trying to achieve consonance, recalibrate
his internal sense of who he is, what he does, what he’ll accept. If he can’t change the car, he’s going to
have a problem, he’s going to have to find somesort of rationalisation about
it. If there’s no money to do a further
change, he’ll possibly have to try and be philosophical – I have learnt my
lesson here, I’ll do better research next time, this experience isn’t wasted, I’ll
make sure my next car (in 10 years or whenever) is highly efficient and
environmentally friendly. In the meantime
I’ll try and use this one as little as possible, and …recycle more, or
something. I am a good person, I am I
am. See the sort of thing I mean?
I am experiencing cognitive dissonance myself here, as a
person was not the way I thought. And I
am having a troublesome time trying to achieve consonance about it. My own feeling of a sort of sad subsiding
into a sense that I will never know, because I think they just are not going to
want to explain themselves. That apparently
I’m not worthy of explanation. That
creates one of my usual steady sinkings into a good bit of unhelpful self
loathing. On the other hand – I could rationalise that I am merely allowing myself to be upset[3].
I could take a leaf out of the other
person’s book, they who briefly apologise with very little explanation indeed
and simply move along; knowing that if I choose to remain friends with this
person it is (highly) likely (I would say) that this behaviour that upsets me
will be repeated at some point in the future.
But that they have other good points that I am also taking into
account. So maybe I choose to remain
friends as I really and genuinely value these points. Let they who are sinless cast the first stone
etc etc. I’m not perfect either. In fact, as we all know, I’m a bit of a pill
most of the time.
I could say all that, in an attempt to recalibrate. I’m not sure if it feels true yet though. I
feel like the whole situation needs more investigation. But I don’t think the other party wants to
play ball with my desire to analyse or understand.
Which brings me back to Welles. The illusion of friendship?? Maybe some are illusory, no matter of how
longstanding. Or maybe parts are illusory. Maybe no matter how much we try to be awake
to our own preconceptions, and biases, our own wishes and casting of people
around us partially into roles of saviour or sinner or martyr or gogetter…no
matter how complex we try and allow for them to be, as complex as ourselves –
perhaps we simply can never have a proper friendship with someone because we
just do not know what they are really about.
So any or all parts of the friendship will be built around houses made
on sand. Illusion. Pattern making filling in the blanks. Likely erroneously. Cause for dissonance.
And as Fry said, breaking my siege mentality leaves me
saddened and quiet, and alone. But it’s
nothing I didn’t know, right? It is
highly possible I knew about this flaw (its happened before in a smaller way) but
didn’t want to know it again, so allowed myself to forget, spinning myself my
little tales of solidarity and sisterhood, togetherness, likemindednness. Which were only partially true. Maybe I was half asleep. Foolishly.
I wish I was strong enough to be awake all the time, and to
not be saddened by the actions of others when they do not turn out to be as I
fondly thought. I wish I could just say –
ok, you can’t be trusted on that
issue, or, you’ll always be a loose cannon where that’s concerned, though reasonable and kindly in other ways. Like someone who’s nice when they aren’t
drinking. Or your old granddad who’s
really nice apart from those really nasty inappropriate racist/homophobic comments he comes out with
sometimes. I wish I could separate people’s
bad points from their good ones and yet accept the whole. Not be surprised by either. I suppose it’s a goal.
And in the meantime – I have some interesting character
stuff to write about don’t I? We all
have people we know that we don’t understand half as well as we think we do.
The trick would then be to put the detachment hat on and
actually be capable of writing about it.
Instead of feeling sad and alone and sitting here simply relating the
matter slightly evasively. I haven’t
learned that trick either – though I did used to have it, so its there
somewhere. I used to be able to
fictionalise anything that happened to me to be able to make sense of it. In one way or another. Annoyingly, I think this would take more time
than I have in this case. So these
preliminary notes will have to do. And I
shall continue to sit here, confused, rather sad, and very quiet. In a state of dissonance.[4]
[1] Cooper,
J. (2007). Cognitive Dissonance: 50 Years
of a Classic Theory. London:
Sage Publications.
[2] I
think some forms of depression are strongly linked to being in a perpetual
state of cognitive dissonance: you can’t make any rationalisation that feels
good enough as to why things aren’t as you thought they were (or imagine they should
be). You can’t marry it up, so you
remain confused, and for some people, in a state therefore of perpetual
internalised self rejection…a sort of mind dysmorphic disorder (whoa – I’m
making up my own helpful pyschobabble labels now!). Just thinking aloud.
[3] One
of my past partners was a master at telling me all my upsets with him were a
result of this: me ‘allowing’ myself to be upset. He was never even 10% responsible for anything
that ever went wrong between us. Couple this
with a stance of ‘you mental patient, me caring psychiatrist’ and you can kind
of see why that relationship didn’t make it to the truly longterm…
[4] http://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-dissonance.html
Try this very good link if you want to read more on the subject than I’ve had time to tell you about today.
Try this very good link if you want to read more on the subject than I’ve had time to tell you about today.
