Quotes from Carol Tavris

to resolve the dissonance between "I love this person" and "This person is doing some things that are driving me crazy" will enhance their love story or destroy it.

Scientific reasoning is useful to anyone in any job because it makes us face the possibility, even the dire reality, that we were mistaken. It forces us to confront our self-justifications and put them on public display for others to puncture. At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control.   The

Consider the famous syllogism "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal." So far, so good. But just because all men are mortal, it does not follow that all mortals are men, and it certainly does not follow that all men are Socrates.

No one really knows human nature, men as well as women, who has not lived in the bondage of marriage, that is to say, the enforced study of a fellow creature.

Is the brain designed to make us flare in anger when we think we are being attacked? Fine—but most of us learn to count to ten and find alternatives to beating the other guy with a cudgel. An appreciation of how dissonance works, in ourselves and others, gives us some ways to override our wiring. And protect us from those who can't.

It is a lesson for all ages: the importance of seeing mistakes not as personal failings to be denied or justified but as inevitable aspects of life that help us improve our work, make better decisions, grow, and grow up.

When politicians' backs are against the wall, they may reluctantly acknowledge error but not their responsibility for it. The phrase "mistakes were made" is such a glaring effort to absolve oneself of culpability that it has become a national joke—what the political journalist Bill Schneider called the "past exonerative" tense.

I see no reason why I should be consciously wrong today because I was unconsciously wrong yesterday. —Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, 1948

self-justification momentarily protects us from feeling clumsy, incompetent, or forgetful. The kind that can erode a marriage, however, reflects a more serious effort to protect not what we did but who we are, and it comes in two versions: "I'm right and you're wrong" and "Even if I'm wrong, too bad; that's the way I am.

Time after time, as I and my fellow generals saw that our strategies weren't working, we failed to reconsider our basic assumptions. We failed to question our flawed understanding of our foe or ourselves . . . In the end, all the courage and skill in the world could not overcome ignorance and arrogance. As a general, I got it wrong. And I did so in company with my peers.

It's the people who almost decide to live in glass houses who throw the first stones.

All of us can carry this understanding into our private lives: Something we did can be separated from who we are and who we want to be. Our past selves need not be a blueprint for our future selves. The road to redemption starts with the understanding that who we are includes what we have done but also transcends it, and the vehicle for transcending it is self-compassion.

The brain is designed with blind spots, optical and psychological, and one of its cleverest tricks is to confer on its owner the comforting delusion that he or she does not have any. In a sense, dissonance theory is a theory of blind spots—of how and why people unintentionally blind themselves so that they fail to notice vital events and information that might make them question their behavior or their convictions.

The manual is written in an authoritative tone as if it were the voice of God revealing indisputable truths, but in fact it fails to teach its readers a core principle of scientific thinking: the importance of examining and ruling out other possible explanations for a person's behavior before deciding which one is the most likely.

When affluent people speak of the underprivileged, they rarely thank their lucky stars that they are privileged, let alone consider that they might be overprivileged. Privilege is their blind spot.7 It is invisible and they don't think twice about it; they justify their social position as something they are entitled to. In one way or another, all of us are blind to whatever privileges life has handed us, even if those privileges are temporary.

and thus they selectively remember parts of their life, focusing on those parts that support their own points of view.

between the conscious lie to fool others and unconscious self-justification to fool ourselves, there's a fascinating gray area patrolled by an unreliable, self-serving historian—memory. Memories are often pruned and shaped with an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.

Dissonance is bothersome under any circumstances, but it is most painful to people when an important element of their self-concept is threatened—typically when they do something that is inconsistent with their view of themselves.

great nation is like a great man: When he makes a mistake, he realizes it. Having realized it, he admits it. Having admitted it, he corrects it. He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. —Thomas Carlyle, historian and essayist

In the previous chapter, we saw on a smaller scale how divorcing couples typically justify the hurt they inflict on each other. In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, because our victims deserved what they got, we hate them even more than we did before we harmed them, which in turn makes us inflict even more pain on them.

decades of experimental research have found exactly the opposite: when people vent their feelings aggressively, they often feel worse, pump up their blood pressure, and make themselves even angrier.

When you do anything that harms others—get them in trouble, verbally abuse them, or punch them out—a powerful new factor comes into play: the need to justify what you did.

Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or plan of action but justify it even more tenaciously.