Competing Values As a Form of Cognitive Dissonance
Competing Values As a Form of Cognitive Dissonance
"Two may enter, but only one may leave." Cage match of values. The image of a battle between two adversaries is older even than the post-apocalyptic landscape that line comes from, stemming perhaps back to the myth of Cain and Abel, the first murder. There's something intrinsically seductive about a simplistic binary choice. It speaks to our need for quick answers. Unfortunately, like any siren song, the binary quality hides an ocean of possibilities.
How often have you felt caught between two different choices? Ever been confronted with the desire to support one Value (say 'career success') and feel doing so would get in the way of supporting another Value (say 'family')? Life is often about choices, sometimes difficult ones, but the struggle here is made all the more difficult precisely because the Values are considered within an adversarial framework.
Multiple Ways of Support
This happens primarily due to what I'll call 'the tyranny of outcome.' When meeting someone new, the first question is often, "What do you do?" When judging someone, it is the immediate behavior we look at, often without concern for context or intent (unless it's about judging our own behavior, then suddenly and often self-serving, context matters, but that's another point altogether). That process of judgment is at the heart of our experience of being overwhelmed and/or trapped in a spiral of self-doubt, depression, and anxiety. It is based on the false notion that in any given situation, there was or is only one behavior that supports what we care about. This limited vision of behavior, as if thoughts and emotions aren't actions as well, blinds us to how often similar intent and shared Values get supported in many different ways.
The adversarial framing points to a fundamental aspect of our pre-conscious and conscious experiences, the navigation of how to use present resources to address the multiplicity of perceived futures that the brain is guessing at happening. This form of cognitive dissonance, the competing of seemingly disparate and contradictory ways of viewing the world, is the ocean we constantly swim in cognitively. Life is, at bedrock, an unstable ground for moving forward, and much of what we do, behaviorally, emotionally, cognitively, is an attempt at mitigating the emerging uncertainty we feel as anxiety.
How do you express yourself to 'family,' 'intimate partner,' and 'co-worker'? Is it always the same way? I certainly hope not, as such would be rather dull and not support how relationships grow and change with time. Ever notice how different people in relationships of 'family,' 'intimacy,' and 'work' show their care/concern in different ways than you? Who hasn't heard some version of the phrase "I could never express myself that way"? Values are what we care about, but they need not be supported in exactly the same way all the time. We do this automatically anyway, it is only when we get flustered and overwhelmed with a seeming impossible social hurdle that we forget our lives are full of behavioral variations.
Values: More than One
Once space is made to slow down and appreciate our ability to support our Values in many different ways, the metaphor of a cage match starts to seem less of a problem and more a way of recognizing and accepting the environment that our decision-making resides in. To reduce the adversarial piece a little though, it helps to recognize how we care about more than one Value at any given time.
We constantly have to choose what Value to support over another. We do this nearly effortlessly precisely because we intuitively know three things:
Our behavior quite often supports more than one Value at any given time, and it is only our immediate awareness that makes it appear as if there's only one in mind.
Choosing to support one Value does not mean we no longer care about another.
The choice does not remove our ability to shift our priorities at another day and time, or even in the very next moment given to us.
Cognitive dissonance does not mean we don’t know what matters to us. It’s instead a recognition that the affirmative freedom that our conscious lives give to us comes with responsibilities and struggles. We do ourselves an injustice when we artificially limit how we’re going to show up and support the Values of our lives. 'Honor' without 'camaraderie' forgets 'team.' 'Truth' without 'humility' leads to fundamentalism. 'Self-care' without 'social awareness' leads to pathological narcissism.
When confronted with a simple dualistic choice it is best, if possible in the moment, to pause and reflect on what else you care about in the current situation. We are simply not creatures constrained to a singular way of living our lives and our ability/struggle to do so is found in the many Values at the heart of of who we are.