Understanding Anxiety and Congruence

ve to know what your core beliefs are if you want to understand why you make the decisions you make. But what happens in our hearts and minds when what we believe seems to be in constant conflict with what we do? In these seasons, it can feel like the ground is splitting right between your feet and pulling away in either direction. You have one foot planted on either side, but the chasm is getting wider and wider, and you need to make a choice on either end or fall into the abyss. You believe that one side leads to safety and the other side leads to destruction, so the choice should be simple, but then why are you still paralyzed with fear and unable to make a decision? Why do so many wait so long that they end up falling into the pit rather than choosing a side? When what we believe conflicts with reality, it can produce in us feelings of stress, anxiety and discomfort which we then will try to justify to keep our world making sense. The psychological term for this is known as cognitive dissonance and I believe this is a huge factor at the heart of many of our anxieties today. Stick around to find out why and what you need to overcome it in your lives.

So, what is cognitive dissonance? Psychology Today defines it as “the state of discomfort felt when two or more modes of thought contradict each other.” It is often conflated with another related concept coined by author George Orwell in his book 1984 as Doublethink. While cognitive dissonance is the feeling created by the conflict of our thoughts and beliefs with the opposing reality, doublethink could be understood as one of the ways we try to reconcile that conflict by choosing to accept the contradictions as the same thing. Think of the meme with the smiling cartoon dog in the hat, sitting in the chair and while the house around him is burning he simply says, “This is fine.”

Cognitive dissonance would happen if the dog had always believed that his house was completely fireproof and safe because he had designed and built it to be that way, but now that his house is on fire, his confidence in his own ability to build a fireproof home is burning down as well. The bigger the fire gets, the greater his own mental and emotional discomfort at apparently being wrong grows. Doublethink would happen when the dog chooses to embrace both contradictory claims by saying “this is fine,” as in “my fireproof designs are working.” A real world example would be the first class passengers on the Titanic who expected tea to be waiting for them when they boarded again after all the unnecessary precautions were done with. Dissonance would have begun to set in more and more as they saw the water continuing to cover the porthole windows of one deck after another. Now, the common response to dissonance – the healthy response – is allowing the new information to push out the false beliefs previously held, but when we give into doublethink as a means of preserving our worldview at the cost of reality, we are heading for disaster.

So, ask yourself how many of your anxieties that you are wrestling with today might be rooted in cognitive dissonance. This is why it’s important to know what it is that you truly believe and how many of those beliefs are in conflict with one another? As human beings, our brains our capable of amazing things. We are also capable of entertaining and even believing contradicting views. For example, as a Christian, I believe that sin – all sin – leads to death in one way or another and yet, as a Christian, I still sin. Now, before we go justifying and hand waving with, “only Jesus is perfect” and “everyone sins,” those reactions miss the point entirely. Again, we’re talking about belief. If I believed that jumping into a fiery pit would burn me to death, it doesn’t matter how much money you could pay me to do it, I'm not going in. The only thing that could make me go is if, somewhere down inside, I had an opposing belief that even though that is probably true for everyone else, I could probably find a way out and still be able to enjoy all of that promised money. Temptation is only tempting if I believe that it has something of value to offer me, especially if I don’t think I'm getting that through the avenues that obeying God has laid out. This is why there were layers to the lie that led Adam and Eve to sin in the garden. Not only did the serpent tell them that they would not surely die – removing the fear of consequence – but he also told them that the fruit would give them the ability to be like God. In essence, they chose to believe that God was holding a truly good thing back from them, but they could have it for free with no penalty by believing the lies of the serpent. As many of us as have looked back on that fateful bite and thought, “You blew it for all of us!” we need to recognize that each of us has taken that same bargain countless times in our lives for every time we chose to sin and the reason that sin still has the power to tempt us, even now, is that we have underlying beliefs that contradict what we know to be true from God. The process of sanctification is God, in His goodness, walking us through our lives and revealing the false beliefs hiding under every rock in our hearts so that we can repent of them and bring them into alignment with Him. After you know what you believe, the 2nd and more important question is, “Are those beliefs true?”

This is where congruence comes into play. Congruence means agreement, harmony and conformity. It is the opposite of dissonance and discord, but there are levels to it, as well. As a worship musician and band leader, I can tell you that it is incredibly important for the whole band to be in tune with one another. In any musical group, having just one person, one instrument or even one string out of tune can disrupt the harmony of the whole group. Before we had all of the tools and instruments we use now to help us tune our instruments quickly, or even digital instruments like keyboards that never go out of tune, all of this was done by ear. One of the band members would tune their instrument to itself and then the rest of the band would tune themselves to that instrument. Sometimes, many times actually, that initial instrument would be slightly off from the exact right pitch, but as long as everyone was tuned to that instrument, they would still sound cohesive. Now that we have the ability to tune digitally, down to the cent, our pitches can match exactly with each other and with the true tuning of the original song. Congruence works in the same way. We experience dissonance first when our lives are not internally congruent – that’s the individual instrument being out of tune with itself and the rest of the band. We can begin to reconcile our dissonance by choosing to live our lives in a way that is more in-line with what we believe to be true about the world around us and allow that to direct how we engage in relationship with other people. This level of congruence alone would alleviate so much of the anxieties we experience from the dissonance in our lives and relationships with others, but there is a deeper level.

Just like the old bands and orchestras, we can get ourselves in tune with ourselvses and even with one another, but if we don’t have an objective standard to weigh ourselves against, then all we’re left with is subjective harmony but not really playing the piece correctly. On a piano, there is an objective middle C. Whether you’re playing a 49, a 61, a 76 or an 88 key piano, there will always be a middle C and this is the not they’ll start with when tuning a piano. If you can tune your middle C perfectly, then every other note can be tuned from there. That means, if you’re tuning a piano by ear, you don’t need to know what every note on the scale sounds like perfectly, you only need to know middle C perfectly and then you can work your way through. When all of the instruments are tuned and played perfectly, that is when we can hear the song the way that it was meant to be played. The objective standard we have to tune ourselves to is God and His word. We can experience a level of peace and decreased anxiety by living in tune with our core beliefs and the world around us, but if those beliefs aren’t true and the world around us is filled with deception, then we’ll never find true and lasting peace with the one our souls are desperate for. This has become such a prevalent issue in the world today that many have convinced themselves that their lack of internal peace is due to the people around them not affirming their dissonance. That is a heavy statement, apply it where you will. But, if the cause of unrest in our souls is because we have dissonance with our Creator, then no amount of doublethink and doubletalk from the people around us will alleviate our misery. On the contrary, when we allow the transcendent reality to confront and correct own subjective and wrong beliefs, when we repent of those beliefs and instead choose to believe and behave in accordance with the transcendent truth of Christ and who we are in Him, we tune ourselves to the perfect harmony of His creation. This is the peace that surpasses understanding. This is the peace from which Paul could write, “For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” This is the peace that carried the martyrs over the centuries all the way to their deaths boldly proclaiming the Gospel of Christ because they knew that this life is the temporal reality but their claim was to life everlasting. This is the peace that allows us, today, to truly believe the words of 1 Cor. Chapter 4:

But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you.

Jesus did not promise us comfort, riches, prosperity or even good health. In fact, He told us that in this life we will have trouble but to fear not, for He has overcome the world. With so much anxiety, depression, death and fear in the world today, do you think that maybe now could be the time for you to recognize the false beliefs you have been believing, repent of those and start believing the One who created you? Salvation is secured in a moment, but sanctification is a process which happens as we allow the Holy Spirit to tune our spirits to Himself.