Have you ever felt like this is not how life was meant to be lived?
STOP!!
We often think of beliefs as only relating to religion, but beliefs actually form the basis of your value system, which drives every single decision you make; from what brand of toilet paper to buy to whether or not to get married. Our beliefs are not always what we think they are, or even what we want them to be. We also hold beliefs about every aspect of our person and appearance, such as if we believe ourselves to be fat, ugly, beautiful or handsome. What we tell others our beliefs are is not always what we genuinely believe.
Many of our beliefs have actually been handed to us (taught to us) fully formed by parents, clergy, teachers, other adults and even our peers. Unfortunately, sometimes these beliefs and values conflict with each other and/ or with our own innate internal values, such as when a parent tells us to lie even when we’ve been taught that lying is wrong or “bad”. When we try to hold disparate beliefs equally, it creates something called cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is what happens when we hold two disparate ideas or competing belief systems to be equally true.
To avoid cognitive dissonance, we generally choose to accept one belief system over another, or receive information from one source but not another. One example of this is that most people either watch Fox News or MSNBC, but not both. Watching both can feel as if you were watching news from two completely different but parallel universes. Sometimes we can’t do this, however, such as when children receive two different messages from two parents who each hold equal authority.
Cognitive dissonance only occurs when we encounter a conflict between two deeply held, or core beliefs. The less deeply we hold a certain belief – like one sports team being superior to another – the less likely we are to experience cognitive dissonance. The more loosely we hold certain beliefs, the easier we may find it to switch between belief systems depending on who we are around. This is called code switching.
Every one of us was born to be a certain way, but then we were also taught how to be. The ways we were taught to be may not feel natural to us and may create both psychic and physical discomfort. Deconstruction is the dissection of your belief system, which includes how you believe you are supposed to be in this world. Deconstrucion can help you find your authentic self in order to become the person you were meant to be and live the way you were meant to live.
Here are some examples of how we might receive different messages from various sources.
