"Two out of three" wins, but maybe not every time

So my personal expression of cognitive dissonance's role in the relationship between our thoughts/beliefs, feelings, and decisions/behavior comes to the forefront again with Friday's message and yesterday's post. I can see again why every therapist I've worked with put such an emphasis on self-concept. For an abuser, "I'm the scum of the earth" can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, so as we approached the conclusion of our program of therapy there was always an emphasis on getting the client to understand: "You're not that person anymore."

But I am still the same person. I can't not be that person, no matter how many cells in my body die and are replaced, no matter how much I have replaced unhealthy and hurtful thoughts and decisions with healthy and loving ones. I never want to do those sorts of things again, but I can't deny that I am the one who did them. So when someone tries to affirm the person I have become by complimenting the person I am, my mind always pushes back because of what I have done.

I suppose it is probably a form of vanity that none of the things I would say to someone else in my position makes any difference to me.  I should have been a better person than that all along, I think, because I clearly still believe in the concept of good and bad people while I reject such simplistic distinctions from the lips of others. And so I continue to resist the idea that I am, that I could possibly be as I have been told over and again, a good man.

So yet I struggle with the issue that was considered my final stage of successful program of therapy. I wasn't faking it at the time, mind you. Rather, there were specific subsequent occasions on which my friends - people whose opinion I value - made clear that they would never consider someone who had done things like what I did to be a good person. The fact that they had no idea that they were in the presence of someone who had done such things only made their opinions weigh more heavily in my self-judgment.

Still, the element of unconsciousness seems critically important. To speak in extreme terms that don't really apply to me anymore: if I hated myself without being aware of it - or of why - and were instead trying to live as a respectable member of society while unconsciously not believing that I am, then I would be likely to act out in ways that would reinforce my inner judgments about myself. The unrecognized feelings of self-loathing coupled with the buried negative self-beliefs could only be resolved if I were to take actions that confirmed them, and I would be unlikely to fully recognize why I did these things. Something like this was a major part of my cycle as an abuser.

But I am no longer unconscious of the things that make me doubt my overall self-value. And that absence of unconscious dissonance seems to make all the difference in my ability to make the sort of choices that the kind of person that I want to be would make.

Now if only I could believe that someone who makes the sort of choices that the kind of person that I want to be would make is de facto the kind of person that I want to be.

(got that?)