Cognitive dissonance can prevent addicts from taking responsibility for their lives and lead to a distrust of those who want to help them. Even in recovery, individuals may still battle cognitive dissonance and justify relapses. Therapy, such as group therapy, can help address cognitive dissonance in addiction treatment.

• Ultimately, they may aim to guide you to discover for yourself that you can manage your emotions by changing your thoughts.
• Unresolved cognitive dissonance can strain relationships, particularly when it involves conflicts of interest or values with others.
• Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon where an individual experiences discomfort or inner conflict due to holding contradictory beliefs, values, or attitudes simultaneously.
• Dissonance makes us feel unsettled, guilty, uncertain, fake, or bad about ourselves.
• The degree of dissonance experienced can depend on a few different factors.

Coping with Uncertainty Meditation

Discomfort and Sadness are not included in these factors due to indistinct loadings. Mean (and standard deviation) for different negative emotion factors, all negative emotions, and all positive emotions in the different groups. As discussed above, there is good reason to suggest that some clusters of emotions might be related to specific reduction strategies. Note, however, that these suggestions are not part of the core assumptions of the general model.

Experimental cognitive dissonance studies experiments by social psychologist Leon Festinger

• This mental tug-of-war is the essence of cognitive dissonance in addiction—a phenomenon that’s as fascinating as it is heartbreaking.
• When your actions don’t align with your core values, you might feel guilt, regret, or anxiety.
• This can help reduce the intensity of cognitive dissonance and provide a foundation for more constructive problem-solving.
• They can also help you come up with an action plan to align your behaviors and values, build self-esteem, and cultivate acceptance.

Let’s dive into the fascinating world of cognitive dissonance and explore how therapy can help us navigate these internal conflicts. Trust me, by the end of this journey, you’ll have a new perspective on those nagging inconsistencies in your thoughts and behaviors. Cognitive dissonance was first introduced by social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1957. He proposed that people are driven by a need for consistency between their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. When there is a mismatch, it creates dissonance, leading to discomfort that we are naturally inclined to reduce. As your actions begin to align more closely with your beliefs, the discomfort you feel should decrease.

Understanding Mental Disorders

By practicing mindfulness, you can identify dissonance early and take steps to address it. People sometimes use psychological tactics like rationalization, projection, blaming, minimizing, and defensiveness to protect their ego when experiencing cognitive dissonance. In sum, these simple re-analyses demonstrate the danger in over-emphasizing general trends in Twelve-step program typical dissonance studies. They also show that conceptualizing dissonance reduction in the broader terms of emotion-regulation could be a viable approach moving forward. Factor analysis revealed three factors for negative emotions and one factor for positive emotions.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory Suggests Ways to Reduce It

All of those routes help you get back to a mental state without conflict, where you feel like your beliefs, values, and actions are all in harmony. But each way of reducing dissonance requires that you recognize what feelings you have and do something about it, Curry adds. “The tension that gets created when you hold certain beliefs or values but act in a way that conflicts with your belief systems generates an internal discomfort that most people have to subconsciously work very hard to ignore,” Curry says. More research may be needed on the efficacy of online therapy, specifically for addressing cognitive dissonance.

If you spend a lot of money on a new car, you might come up with reasons to justify why it was worth the price tag. Festinger’s work inspired plenty of additional theories and experimental models. Some theories attempt to expand on, challenge, or reinterpret Festinger’s original proposal. When you’re with a certain group cognitive dissonance treatment of friends, you feel compelled to laugh at offensive jokes that you’d otherwise find distasteful.