{"id":11780,"date":"2017-04-11T03:37:48","date_gmt":"2017-04-11T09:37:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unk.com\/blog\/?p=11780"},"modified":"2024-09-18T06:08:28","modified_gmt":"2024-09-18T12:08:28","slug":"unravelling-cognitive-dissonance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unk.com\/blog\/unravelling-cognitive-dissonance\/","title":{"rendered":"4 Ways to Deal with Client Denial"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”<\/em><\/p>\n

– From ‘The Cloths of Heaven’ by W. B. Yeats<\/p>\n

What do you do when a client seems to deny there’s a problem but you can see it as clearly as the nose on their face?<\/p>\n

Sometimes a client or someone you know (not you of course!) seems to be ‘in denial’.<\/p>\n

Denial is a kind of emotional defence mechanism in which conscious recognition of a personal issue is avoided and the existence of the problem is denied and therefore ignored.<\/p>\n

Depending on what the problem is, denial of a problem may make it worse.<\/p>\n

How complicated we human beings can be.<\/p>\n

Human nature \u2013 who needs it?<\/h3>\n

And now you,<\/em> the practitioner, have a problem. You suspect that, deep down, they<\/em> suspect that there really is<\/em> a problem. The elephant has rung the doorbell, entered the house, and is sitting squarely in the room. At least our huge but seemingly unnoticed house guest is visible to you if not to your client.<\/p>\n

To get all Donald Rumsfeld<\/a> about it, they know, but they don’t know<\/em> that they know.<\/p>\n

How to hide from uncomfortable truths<\/h3>\n

We can deny something not because we are lying (although we can do that too!) but because we shift our beliefs to fit whatever worldview suits us.<\/p>\n

I have sat in front of hollowed out, wheezing and prematurely aged smokers<\/a> assuring me between harsh coughs that smoking doesn’t impact their health. They just want to quit to please the wife, or to spend less cash.<\/p>\n

Fair enough, we might say. It can be hard to admit to chipping away at your own mortality, especially if you view yourself as someone who ‘values life’.<\/p>\n

A part<\/em> of them knows, but it is staying hidden, protecting the conscious part that needs to hold fast to that belief or face major discomfort, embarrassment or even terror.<\/p>\n

This is why denial has been called a ‘defence mechanism’. It can maintain the illusion<\/em> of emotional equilibrium. But the discomfort is still there. The knowledge of the real situation is in there somewhere, no matter how deeply shrouded in rationalizations \u2013 and it gnaws away at you.<\/p>\n

The elephant in the room may be invisible, but the furniture is still getting trashed.<\/p>\n

Denial is used when cognitive dissonance gets too close for comfort, when each time you blink and open your eyes again that pesky elephant has gotten closer.<\/p>\n

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So what is cognitive dissonance, and why does it matter?<\/p>\n

Flying saucers to the rescue (or not)<\/h3>\n

Psychologist Leon Festinger, who coined the term, described it as:<\/p>\n

“… a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions that are psychologically inconsistent.”<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1957 Festinger infiltrated a Chicago-based flying-saucer cult<\/a> run by ex-scientologist Dorothy Martin, who had apparently been receiving warning messages from aliens from the Planet Clarion (as you do).<\/p>\n

Apparently humanity was going to be flushed from existence by a Genesis-like flood at precisely midnight on 21 December 1957. But the ‘Seekers’, as the cultists called themselves, would be whisked away by a flying saucer from the planet Clarion while everyone else drowned or at least got inconveniently wet.<\/p>\n

Many of the cultists had given up money, homes, familial and other relationships to join the doomsday cult.<\/p>\n

They were invested<\/em> in their belief.<\/p>\n

Festinger, pretending to be one of them, wanted to see how they’d react when this didn’t happen, which of course he assumed it wouldn’t. Well, here’s some news for you.<\/p>\n

The world didn’t end at midnight on 21 December 1957!<\/p>\n

So what happened next? How did the Seekers react?<\/p>\n

Clarion call blues<\/h3>\n

Midnight on 21 December 1957 rolled around and… nothing. No flood. No end of the world. No spinning, selective flying saucer from Planet Clarion to the rescue. Nothing.<\/p>\n

Festinger waited. Just how would the Seekers explain such clattering, disconfirming feedback? How would the disappointed cultists react to the failure of their prophecy? Would they be embarrassed and humiliated? They would at least admit they were wrong, right?<\/p>\n

What happened next amazed him.<\/p>\n

Now the cultists, who had until now been avoiding publicity, actively sought it. They wanted<\/em> to tell the world what a near miss it had been. How their faith and the power of their true belief had saved<\/em> the world from catastrophic flood!<\/p>\n

They had actually managed to rationalize this glaring belief\/reality clash. Wow! All that horrible conflictual discomfort evaporated (for the time being).<\/p>\n

Festinger was flabbergasted, and absolutely fascinated. Thus his concept of cognitive dissonance was born.<\/p>\n

He observed that the real driving force behind the cultists’ apparently inexplicable response was the need not to face the awkward and uncomfortable truth and ‘change their minds’, but rather to ‘make their minds comfortable’ \u2013 to smoothe<\/em> over the unacceptable inconsistencies.<\/p>\n

We may scoff at the Seekers, but let’s be clear about one thing:<\/p>\n

None of us are immune to cognitive dissonance<\/h3>\n

And we all have a valuable lesson to learn from the Seekers. Festinger found that many of us use this cunning unconscious emotional mechanism in our everyday lives (in less dramatic ways, of course!).<\/p>\n

This kind of denial isn’t lying as such; it’s simply what we humans do when we experience the discomfort of cognitive dissonance. When reality conflicts with our beliefs, we have to either justify or rationalize that reality, or deny it. We try to reduce the ‘dissonance’ between how we think things should<\/em> be and how they actually<\/em> are.<\/p>\n

Self-objectivity, and therefore increased self-knowledge, negates the need for denial. We might have to tough out the discomfort, fear, embarrassment or anger of seeing the elephant in our room that others may well have been aware of from the beginning.<\/p>\n

But once we’ve seen the elephant, at least we have the opportunity to do<\/em> something about it.<\/p>\n

Taming the pesky elephant<\/h3>\n

If I decide not to do something because I’m scared I might fail, I might feel uncomfortable about being such a wuss! But if I create reasons other<\/em> than cowardice for not going to that party or not going for that jog in the park, I can avoid that discomfort.<\/p>\n