The Duality of Being Human

Cognitive Dissonance: Holding two conflicting beliefs at the same time, this often causes an uncomfortable tension.

Eleven years of therapy on and off taught me a lot of things. Eleven years of learning about how the world inside me works. Eleven years of learning new coping strategies. Eleven years of dealing with all the cracks that life pushed into me. Eleven years of learning to deal with crazy with out needing to fall back on medications.

One of the things about eleven years of therapy is that it makes phrases like cognitive dissonance simply part of your language. It becomes a natural phrase like how's it going. The words of psychology just creep into your base language like a little leech preparing to suck the life from normal conversation.

Cognitive dissonance became and continues to be one of my favorite phrases from this world. The reason isn't some magic deep and involved reasoning. I find the phrase appealing because I live with it and exist in it so frequently it feels like home.

It feels like home to an extent that I no longer have the nervous feeling when it happens. I no longer feel the need to reconcile those conflicting thoughts. Maybe the comfort of those moments has to do with mixed moods. Maybe existing internally with the idea of feeling two conflicting emotions at the exact same time makes it easier to accept when two thoughts don't reconcile.

I wonder how often most people experience sad and happy at the same time, how many times you want to hug and choke someone at the same time. The pattern of thought that once seemed so fluid to me with regards to all of this is since lost and perhaps that means it is simply time to share and let go moving on to something a bit more lucid for me.