Expanding Awareness Means Wrestling with Cognitive Dissonance
The utility of the "Dropping Anchor" exercise from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Consistency, in practice and thought, guides the creation of our projective stories and narratives. Selecting from the potentially overwhelming data of the world, our stories provide the structure for what we believe, creating the justification for ourselves and the groups we identify with for our behavior. Further, each story is itself an active form of confirmation bias, ignoring or actively dismissing that which doesn't fit the world of experience being created. "New" information is not something we become aware of. Data is co-created by our brains projectively deciding the structure of reality and seeking, albeit in limited ways, to self-correct by interacting with the so-called external world. Information, like experience, is not something that happens to us; it is a stand-in word for what has already been decided by mechanisms largely opaque to our conscious perusal.
This process of reality-shaping can be as banal and inconsequential as what we don't pay attention to, like every shift in clouds above us, or the potentially disastrous lack of awareness of not seeing oncoming cars in traffic. The reverse is also the case, where what is added can be as mostly inconsequential as applying agency to inanimate objects and building relationships with them to the imaginative impetus for creating art and engineering marvels.
As in the case of hallucinations of an oasis in a desert or the experiences of pathological psychosis, the ability, through story or perspective, to maintain an internal sense of rightness and consistency is not always in our best interests.
Gilovich found that when gamblers were right, they tended to offer bolstering comments about just how right they were—“I knew it would happen,” or words to that effect. But when they were wrong, they tended to minimize their error by offering “undoing” comments about how the game should have turned out differently. In these cases, the gamblers would often blame the outcome on a fluke event, like a fumble in the fourth quarter. To them, a loss wasn't really a loss; it was a near win. In either case, the effect of the bolstering and undoing comments was largely the same: foresight became better in hindsight. (Halinan)
The experiences of the gamblers described is not solely belonging to them. The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAB), where behaviors deemed a problem in others are attributed to characterological deficits and to circumstantial reasons when judging our own. In the above example, a loss wasn’t really their fault, it was “the cards” or something else they had no control over. Incredibly, beyond finding ways to dismiss what doesn’t help one’s sense of agentic superiority, we have here a rewrite of the past. Our deepest desire for consistency and maintaining a sense of rightness in our perspective is not only a projection of the future we desire to step into, but provides the means and incentive to rewrite the past. This brings to mind the old adage of “history is written by the victor.” Turns out we’re all the victors, at least in our own minds.
Anxiety - Don’t Fall Into the Ocean
Faced with this innate need for consistency, leading as it does to the active shaping of our futures and past, it is little wonder that when things don’t go the way we imagine, the felt experience we call anxiety is the result. With this in mind, it can be helpful to consider anxiety as the emotional judgment associated with the identification of the limits of our personal stories. Being wrong isn’t just a factual notification, as if some pop-up in our consciousness, it is an error of reality formation. Hence why we have so many cognitive biases for avoiding being wrong, it’s terrifying.
However, being wrong is not only an existential reality we all live with, even when we ignore it, it is a means of behavioral correction, and, when embraced, provides the seed for psychological health and flexibility. An intervention strategy within ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) is referred to as "Dropping Anchor." The idea is to take the experience of fusion (an unhealthy preoccupation with a thought/emotion) that is often the behavioral response to anxiety, and mindfully reflect on it while expanding one's awareness of the physical reality around and within oneself.
This can be experienced by taking the steps:
Bring to mind the thought/emotion that is inspiring anxiety.
Be present with the selected thought/emotion by not actively pursuing it’s expansion.
Slowly acknowledge various pieces of one’s experience in body and external environment, for example the way your clothes feel to the various colors and shapes of the environmental space you’re in.
The purpose is not to avoid the feeling/thought or even to necessarily change the feeling/thought but to defuse, broaden awareness to how much more is going on beyond the preoccupation. We are so very much more than any single thought, emotion, or even behavior. Acceptance is about dwelling in this larger reality, not necessarily being okay with any particular thought, emotion, or behavior.
Fusion is inevitable due to the ignorance/dismissal/rewrite processes described above. It is one potential result of our base desire for consistency even in the face of competing data points. Selecting pieces to create experience as a self-serving Narrative requires putting oneself contrary to the rest of reality pinging on your mind. Cognitive dissonance isn’t a negative, it’s a constant state of being for which we wrestle with all the time. The world doesn't go away simply because we don't want to see it. The continual avoidance requires a constant doubling-down on one or more pieces of the Narrative, building mental walls that become increasingly isolating.
Importantly, here, the personal gain accomplished is not necessarily about feeling better but having the world make sense.
We will put ourselves through a great deal of pain and suffering to avoid having to doubt the way we think of the world and ourselves. That we do this to ourselves is because the alternative, doubt, and uncertainty, is considered, sometimes rightly, to be a generator of anxiety and thus greater pain and suffering. Better the devil you know, as the saying goes.
As helpful as the Dropping Anchor activity can be, here is where it can run afoul. To continue the metaphor, an anchor only works well when there's a ground/bottom to settle on and catch you. In the ocean, an anchor may not be all that helpful and perhaps even cause further problems as it selects something that won't keep you stable. If you’re in a situation that is not potentially calming, or only practice the exercise when already overwhelmed, you may very well finding yourself selecting pieces of your experience that only further the anxiety.
As with any therapeutic technique that helps with emotional resiliency, it is best to practice when already calm and supported, or at least more so. This sets you up for succcess later, rather than being overwhelmed in a particularly difficult experience and coming to the false but understandable conclusion that the exercise is useless.
Dropping Anchor can be highly effective therapeutically and as a technique within a broader meditative practice. Doing so healthily means remembering why fusion is inevitable and therefore have a greater appreciation for how our minds are actively creating the reality we call expereince. Broadening one's awareness can bring a level of self-reflective skepticism that can be disconcerting, especially if one thinks of cognitive dissonance as a negative or if one's sense of self or Identity is tied strongly to the fused content.
Healthy, defused living means slipping into that more bottomless ocean of human potential, and seeking calm by riding out the waves.