Refusing to be gaslit any longer

We are learning to trust what we have always known

I started this post intending to write about why we can’t see: what are the mental barriers or cognitive biases that prevent us from reckoning with what is plainly obvious. (E.g. why can’t white people see police brutality targeting people of color? Why can’t economic elites see that our capitalist economic growth model is incompatible with a healthy planet? Why are people not wearing masks when confronted with an airborne virus?)

But I think there’s something deeper going on. It’s not that we can’t see, or that we don’t know. To the contrary: I think we do see, and what we see clashes with something else we want to believe — or have been taught to believe — is true. It is this dissonance that holds the potential for transformation… if we can learn to pay attention.

I want to use this post to explore the concept of dissonance, and to push that concept beyond the narrow bounds of what we call “cognitive dissonance” to a more embodied form of dissonance.

TL;DR: Our experience of dissonance is both the primary obstacle and portal to transformation. Dissonance is painful, and we seek to avoid it: if we can’t find a way out, we sever the connection, and look away. The antidote is learning to stay curious, to sit with the tension, and to stay connected: turning from apathy to empathy. We can learn to see what we cannot currently see, in part by allowing ourselves to feel what we already know. But we can’t do it alone: understanding that we have been gaslit requires community… and community is the basis for co-creating the new worlds we long for.

Cognitive biases… and cognitive dissonance

I recently enjoyed a six-part podcast series called Learning How to See, featuring Brian McLaren in dialogue with Richard Rohr and Jacqui Lewis. It’s a fascinating exploration of 13 cognitive biases that McLaren identifies (which are themselves a subset/typology of a more comprehensive set of biases identified in this neat graphic).

I found the series a fascinating and engaging listen; to some extent all the biases McLaren identifies are subsumed under the most basic of all: confirmation bias (also known as motivated reasoning: we tend to see what we want to see). There are a few I want to highlight here to hold in mind as we proceed through this post (he uses the alliterative appeal of the letter “C” as a heuristic):

• Complexity Bias: Our brains prefer a simple falsehood to a complex truth.

• Community Bias: It’s almost impossible to see what our community doesn’t see.

• Centering Bias: Under stress or shame, our brains are attracted to stories that paint us as either hero or victim… never villain (McLaren calls this “conspiracy bias,” saying our brains seek stories that “relieve us, exonerate us, or present us as innocent victims of malicious conspirators”… but I think there’s something more profound going on; I’ll unpack the “ideology of sacrifice” in a future post ).

What’s fascinating about these biases is that they tend to operate at the level of the subconscious: the ‘motivated’ part of the ‘reasoning’ that occurs in our ‘cognitive’ process actually helps keep unpleasant truths in our blind spot. It’s true that we don’t “see” them, in a meaningful sense. But as with a blind spot in a car… at some level, we know they’re there. It is this knowledge that gives rise to cognitive dissonance.

Beyond cognitive: embodied dissonance

Adding to my growing list of the limitations of language, I couldn’t find a word for this: what is a feeling of dissonance that is pre-, sub-, or beyond cognitive? We all experience it: our body/intuition/gut is telling us one thing, and the world we interact with is telling us something else. It’s hard to overstate how foundational this is… and how deeply damaging. It forces us to choose between trusting ourselves and trusting others — often those with more cultural authority/power — in interpreting reality. This is the phenomenon of gaslighting, discussed so brilliantly by Naava Smolash (under her nom de plume Nora Samaran). She explains:

It’s when someone undermines your trust in your own perceptions and you feel crazy because your instincts and intuition and sometimes even plain old perceptions are telling you one thing, and words from someone you trust are telling you something different.

I want to propose a couple additions to McLaren’s list of biases, in that spirit:

• Certainty Bias: This is the devil you know: it’s the power of inertia, stasis, the status quo over ambiguity and uncertainty. Think capitalism bias. “There is no alternative.”

• Conceptual Bias: This is about mental models and narratives. It’s our brain’s embrace of stories we don’t realize are stories: nation-states, money, race… the biggest paradigms are hardest to see (forest for the trees). “This is water.”

These ones feel categorically different from the “cognitive biases” named above; they’re perhaps more unconscious than subconscious. They’re much deeper, tracing back to earliest childhood. As such, they still cause some dissonance: a part of us “knows,” even on a non-cognitive level, that our economic system is at odds with planetary thriving… but we rarely give ourselves permission to pay attention to that feeling, to that knowing… because our dominant culture gaslights us from the moment of birth into believing that this system is normal, natural, inalterable, and just.

In our blind spot metaphor, these aren’t things you know might be lurking there; they’re things you don’t think to look for because you’ve been socially conditioned to believe that they aren’t there… even though they’re all around you.

I also want to complicate the metaphor of blindness here, for two reasons. First, I am explicitly trying to make a point that is about other ways of knowing: it’s deeper than “seeing.” Second, dominant culture metaphorical use of sight and blindness figuratively privileges the former over the latter. Yet sight is but one “lens” on reality, and not always the best one. I’m deploying the metaphor here because I think there’s something useful about the idea that certain lenses make things easier/more difficult to perceive… though I also want to extend the metaphor beyond the narrow realm of sight (here equated with conscious mental processes) to a deeper and more comprehensive form of perception that incorporates our embodied senses (tellingly, people who are actually blind are no doubt more attuned to other senses and thus more likely to “see” something). I’m indebted to my sister Trina for questioning the able-ism implicit in this metaphor, and to this provocative article from jo livingstone for challenging my use of language here.

From a-pathy to em-pathy

Dissonance is profoundly uncomfortable: it causes psychological stress that we register as pain. Elliot Aronson explains:

Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don't rest easy until they find a way to reduce it. 

This can be healthy and adaptive: like a burn from a stove that causes us to rapidly remove our hand, it can prevent worse harm. But it also requires action to resolve the dissonance, to address the discomfort.

I was listening to a podcast interview with Joanna Macy the other day, and she offered this beautiful reframe of how we understand the term apathy. She traced its etymology to the Greek pathos, variously defined as ‘feeling’ and/or ‘suffering,’ and the prefix ‘a’ meaning ‘without.’ So instead of understanding apathy as indifference (we don’t care), she suggested it might actually connote the opposite: we are choosing not to feel suffering… precisely because we do care. This resonates with my own experience, and illuminates one major strategy for dealing with dissonance: we turn away from the pain. Audre Lorde, confronting her cancer diagnosis, spoke to this challenge:

It is so hard not to counter this despair with a refusal to see.

Empathy, of course, is the opposite: the prefix “em” meaning “in” — it is staying with the feeling (or the suffering). Lorde again:

I have to stay open and filtering no matter what’s coming at me.

Empathy is the choice to stay in relationship, to stay connected to the feeling… or the suffering. As Brene Brown said:

Empathy fuels connection… What makes something better is connection.

But of course, none of us can stay connected to pain indefinitely; we need to transmute it. That is the process of healing, or making meaning (in previous posts, I’ve explored this through the lens of grief, or trauma). I suspect that much of our blindness — in both the cognitive and embodied senses above — stems from this desire to avoid unnecessary suffering. We don’t see a way through, so we dare not look. Carol Gilligan’s foundational work on patriarchy, following John Bowlby’s work on attachment in early childhood, reached this profound — and eminently logical — conclusion: if repairing the harm isn’t possible, we despair, and move to detachment. In other words, if we believe we can’t fix it, we sever the connection: we move from empathy to apathy.

To re-connect requires hope; as Brown notes, “it’s a vulnerable choice.”

“Where there is dissonance, there is hope”

I take this line from Dan Savage, the sex columnist. He reminds us: dissonance means that we already know something. It means that at some level, we already “see” it… and that we feel stuck. No one likes the feeling of dissonance. So we all seek to resolve the tension, to assuage the feeling. There are generally three strategies: look away (willful blindness), rationalize (this is my best option) or turn toward (the only way out is through).

I feel this right now in many domains of my life: take veganism as one example. I am persuaded that our current system of industrial meat production is both unsustainable and unethical… AND the idea of trying to shift my practices and behaviors feels too daunting to take on given my existing mental load. It’s not that I don’t know: the antidote is not another documentary film. It’s that I don’t see a navigable way out that I can handle with my available bandwidth. So: I sit with the dissonance, and I don’t like it.

This point has important implications for those of us seeking transformation: we must start by naming the barriers, and trusting that in general people want to do the right thing. In an earlier post I cited Stephanie Lepp’s powerful conclusion that the most powerful motivator for individual transformation is becoming aware of (allowing ourselves to “see”) a gap between our aspirations for our behavior and the reality. In other words, turning toward dissonance IS the key pivot toward transformation. It’s also the most painful. Aronson again:

Dissonance is most painful when evidence strikes at the heart of how we see ourselves—when it threatens our belief that we are kind, ethical, competent, or smart. 

I wrote last post that people always act in their best interests: if we don’t understand that, it means we don’t actually understand their interests. When I joined the People’s Action deep canvassing calls in the run-up to the election, we were taught to probe for dissonance: if you’re planning to vote for Trump, do you have any misgivings? Of course people do: how could you not?

So then we try to invite them to look into that dissonance, and to name more explicitly the values/interests that are at odds. For one 70+ year old gentleman I talked to in Michigan: a good stock market is important in retirement… but COVID is also a direct threat to his compromised immune system. As with most binaries: both contain an element of truth…. which is what makes it hard to choose. And once we do, cognitive biases kick in (choice-supportive bias, or effort justification bias, both of which lead us to defend something we’ve chosen with more vigor and certainty than we felt at the moment of choice).

The ubiquity of this dissonance struck me listening to a podcast interview with Frederic Laloux, where he described talking with CEOs about the tensions they hold but tend not to acknowledge consciously in their work (e.g. a fashion brand CEO with a 10-year-old daughter, whose company advertisements hypersexualize young girls… like her daughter). Laloux names the question:

Where are you participating in a system where you're actually out of integrity?

It’s actually a profoundly hopeful listen. He speaks to the liberatory power of just naming and acknowledging the dissonance we feel (where we know ourselves to be “out of integrity”). He explains:

There is an aliveness that comes from saying “I don’t know the answer, but this is really important to me, and I’m no longer willing to be out of integrity any longer.”

Vaclav Havel called this a “refusal to live within the lie.” It is a pivotal act of reclaiming our power… and taking a step toward the liberatory world we yearn for.

“We can learn to see what we cannot see”

I take this line from Thomas Hübl’s masterclass on collective trauma healing. Here’s James Baldwin, on why this matters:

The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.

Per my earlier caveat, I’m using sight figuratively here, as a proxy for “knowing” — perhaps it’s better said “we can learn to feel what we don’t currently let ourselves feel.” Consistent with this understanding, I think there are two different interventions that are called for here.

For cognitive dissonance, the ask is to turn toward the blind spot: to look at what we already know is there. This is what’s happening with race in the United States: of course White people know racism exists, and of course we recognize that police brutality disproportionately targets people of color. Not “seeing” is a choice; it’s a deliberate act to look away. Not because we don’t care, but because it’s painful: no human can watch eight minutes and forty-six seconds of George Floyd’s life being extinguished without experiencing pain. Yet: the Black Lives Matter movement is demanding that we look. That we stay with the pain. This is not awareness-raising per se, or at least not how we traditionally think about it. This is not asking us to “see”: it’s asking us to feel. This is dissonance-exposing: it’s a demand to move from apathy to empathy.

Embodied dissonance is a different matter. Here the ask is for us to trust and feel what we have spent most of our lives distrusting and not feeling: our own deep inner knowing. To continue with race as a prism here, this is not about acknowledging police brutality targeting people of color. This is about acknowledging the very construct of whiteness. Most White Americans grow up not knowing they’re White. They (we) know that other people have race, but race is defined by deviation from the “norm”: in the United States, we (White people) are the norm. We are un-raced. Baldwin bursts the bubble:

White people are imagined. White people are white only because they want to be white, and they want to be white only because they don't want to be black… it is a moral choice.

This was the theme so beautifully explored in John Biewen and Chenjerai Kumanyika’s “Seeing White.” And here too there is hope: as Hübl notes, we can learn to “see.” This is the process of decolonization: of shedding the mindsets that we never consciously chose to adopt, but rather were forced on us. In this I would add some nuance to Baldwin: it’s not quite a choice, at least at the level of consciousness such a moral choice requires. It’s a default position. Once confronted with our whiteness, we then face the choice, and the dissonance: to stick with our social conditioning, or to seek a new way of being. We just can’t do it alone. Hübl elaborates:

When we are walking into the collective unconscious, we need many eyes to see.

“Hope is not something you have, it’s something you do”

I want to close by offering three antidotes to the colonization of our minds and bodies (gaslighting).

1) Feel what you know. This is first the invitation to move from apathy to empathy, to allow ourselves to feel. To sit with the tension, to acknowledge the dissonance. And then to turn toward curiosity, to trust our deepest knowing. As Paul Tillich put it:

We know that we are estranged from something to which we really belong, and with which we should be united.

2) Connect with others. Individual effort isn’t enough. This work must be done in community. To understand that we are being gaslit requires that someone else validate our experience of reality: to prove to ourselves that we are not actually crazy. I love this line from the movie that gave us the term “gaslight,” when the protagonist (played by Ingrid Bergman) finally sees her truth reflected back to her by another character:

You are not going out of your mind; you are slowly and systematically being driven out of your mind.

Our act of reunification then is not only within ourselves, reconnecting to what we know; it’s also inextricably bound up with reconnecting with each other, to the larger community of which we are a part. Jacqui Alexander explains the source of this desire:

A yearning for wholeness, often expressed as a yearning to belong… a deep knowing that we are in fact interdependent – neither separate, nor autonomous.

This is the beauty: our knowing actually points us in the direction we need to go: toward reconnection.

3) Practice. Allowing ourselves to feel what we know, together in community, is essential. But the third step is action, to act on our knowing, our feeling, our connectedness. Joanna Macy says “hope is not something you have, it’s something you do.” This is the value of shared practice, of trying to exercise an atrophied muscle. Where apathy means without feeling, atrophy means without food, without nourishment. We need to feed our feeling, to nourish our bodies and our knowing. We do this through collective action.

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A parting thought. I’ve been sitting with this provocative line from Melissa Harris-Perry. Responding to the slogan “you can’t be what you can’t see,” she offers this reframe:

If you can only be what you see, that's not worth believing in. The power of women, especially Black women, is in being things they've never been shown before, creating themselves in their own image. You don't need to see it. You just need to create it.

Mmm. This feels right to me, difficult though it is. It’s hard to blaze a new trail; yet blaze a new trail we must. We know the path we’re on is a dead-end. It’s channeling our own inner wisdom to re-make the world in our image. Not the colonized hierarchical image we’ve been taught to aspire to by a supremacist society determined to rank and divide us; but rather one emerging from our deepest longings, our “yearning for wholeness.” It feels really good to turn toward that longing, together with others. That act is itself a source of hope.