Stages of Personal Development: Part III

Ways People Develop Their Beliefs & Viewpoints

In the previous post, I focused on Erikson, Maslow, and Dąbrowski. In Dąbrowski’s theory of positive disintegration, his theory reframes what seems like negative experiences and circumstances symptoms as positive because they’re indicators of the growth process. The movement goes from unconscious or automatic where less evolved persons simply dismiss or don’t accept what is happening, or they insist it is an exception to what is generally true. For others, it makes them rethink, ponder, and eventually incorporate this new reality into their lives. For a further description and examples of the theory, I recommend Elizabeth Hopper’s online article, Cognitive Dissonance Theory: Definition and Examples [1].

Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance is much like Dąbrowski’s positive disintegration because it can cause great pain and desperation for the individual experiencing this viewpoint conflict. I describe it as “the voice in someone’s head” that asks questions like these: “If I was so wrong about this before, what else have I been wrong about? Am I crazy; is the world crazy? What do I even believe anymore?”

Here are two examples of what cognitive dissonance looks like. One example many of us are familiar with is how some people react to the surprise — the cognitive dissonance — of…