Personal relationships are always a bi-directional process: we do not limit ourselves to interacting with other people starting from a situation of neutrality in which we emit information and adopt an attitude depending on what they send us back, but our ways of thinking and the previous learning we have done influence us from the first moment.
That is why when we socialize, in addition to establishing communication, we also It is very common for us to project our insecurities onto others Even if the person in front of us has not given us reasons to do so, we can start from prejudices or somewhat arbitrary beliefs that lead us to think that, more than interacting with someone, we are interacting with something that we carry inside. Perhaps, even, that “something” has been inside us for many years. What is this phenomenon due to?
People have a tendency to seek internal coherence between our beliefs, thoughts, attitudes and the behaviors we carry out in our daily lives; That is the most common way of functioning on a daily basis and relating to our environment.
The moment there is an incoherence or contradiction between our beliefs or between the ways of thinking to which we usually cling, a state of discomfort is generated in us, a kind of psychological tension. This is partly because These “clashes” of ideas have implications for how we perceive ourselves and how we perceive what is around us and therefore we feel obliged to resolve that conflict.
Sometimes, to solve this problem we can go so far as to deceive ourselves or look for mechanisms to solve this internal incoherence by manipulating the premises from which we start, the meanings of the words, etc.
How does cognitive dissonance affect self-esteem?
The inconsistency between different cognitive processes or between what one thinks and what one ends up doing is a phenomenon associated with cognitive dissonance. And this can also be defined as the tension that a person experiences when his actions do not coincide with her thoughts, attitudes or beliefs; or when it perceives that it harbors two simultaneous thoughts or cognitions in its mind that are mutually exclusive, so that they cannot serve as a guide to know what to do until we manage to properly position ourselves in that “conflict.”
This is a highly studied phenomenon in the field of psychology since the 1950s, when psychologist Leon Festinger first coined the term “cognitive dissonance.” In his case, he described it in cases as striking as that of a sect that was forced to generate explanations for why the apocalypse had not occurred on the dates its leader anticipated; However, cognitive dissonance also occurs in much more everyday situations, such as what we do when we compare ourselves to others.
Cognitive dissonance can greatly influence our self-esteem, especially when the contradictory cognitions or thoughts we may have are related to our self-concept, that is, the set of beliefs and ideas that orbit around our concept of “I.”
For example, this is noted in the way in which many people develop a tendency to constantly compare themselves to influencers and celebrities These are public figures whose reason for being is precisely to offer their best side, to make it very easy to idealize them, by very carefully filtering the image they transmit to their followers. This is a reality that, from an intellectual point of view, is known by most people.
However, from an emotional point of view, it is very common to not be able to avoid comparing oneself with these celebrities, which can even facilitate the appearance of psychopathologies such as depression, body dysmorphic disorder, anorexia, etc.
People whose self-esteem suffers from these unrealistic comparisons usually recognize that the people they admire hide many imperfections, but at the same time they cannot get out of their heads that their ideal, what they want to become, is made up of those images and impressions associated with people that do not actually exist beyond marketing. And in a situation like this, the cognitive dissonance is resolved (at least apparently) by generating the illusion that to feel better about ourselves we have to emulate the behavior of those famous people, even if we are not famous people, to end up frustrating us by not being famous. achieve self-acceptance.
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Projecting our insecurities on others
As we have seen, The path to self-acceptance can put us on the path of projects that actually lead us towards self-sabotage That is to say, when what we believe to be personal development and self-improvement is actually the tendency to project our insecurities onto others, everything we do works against us.
That is why there are not rare occasions in which, without realizing it, we use other people as battlefields in which fights are fought between parts of our mind that have been in conflict for some time. That harms these people, yes, but it also harms us, keeping us anchored to problems and insecurities that we cannot overcome, because we allow our interactions with others to perpetuate them, making that struggle between conflicting beliefs or desires become increasingly more fierce.
We have an example of this in the love-hate relationships of people who generate envy Those who suffer from self-esteem problems easily develop envy, and this leads them to adopt a hostile attitude towards those they admire. This, in turn, is not an effective source of motivation to improve oneself, because the need to leave the other in a bad place (even if only in our mind) outweighs the need to reconcile with our “I”.
In cases like this, cognitive dissonance is managed by making our low self-esteem become an excuse to belittle that person, giving us relief that in the medium and long term is unsatisfactory and forces us to start over.
To do?
Psychotherapy is the most effective means to achieve balanced self-esteem and to incorporate good ways of socializing and communicating with others into our lives. If you are interested in having professional help in this regard, contact me.
