What is Your “Planet of Beliefs?”

Are your beliefs both reliable and consistent with your experience as lived?

When two dramatically incompatible beliefs come into direct contact, how do you resolve the dichotomy? You cannot have two disparate beliefs and be on solid ground. You have to be able to reassess and make choices to align your beliefs both with each other and also with reality. Failure to do that means that your view of reality is skewed.

When you cannot align your beliefs, you are experiencing cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance has a twin sister, called confirmation bias. When confronted with facts about a false belief that is held, the believer will disregard the truth and instead, buy into their false belief with more intensity.

Why does this matter? In a relationship, there is an important consideration for the health of the relationship, which is the degree to which the two of you agree on the nature of things (the truth). If I hold a planet of beliefs that every time I turn my back on a chair, it turns into a table, there is probaly nothing you can tell me to disregard that belief. That is what confirmation bias is. If anything, I would likely hold ono my irrational belief with even greater ferver. If I held onto this planet of beliefs, I am sure my wife and I would find a lot of space between us. There is a brilliant illustration of this playing out in the TV drama “Breaking Bad” where the two lead characters, Walter and Skyler, husband and wife, experience a breakdown over their two different planets of belief. In the show, the result is the total breakdown of their once loving relationship.

The challenge when you hold incompatible beliefs, is that in order to bring your beliefs into alignment with reality and each other, you have to actually revisit your planet of beliefs and make an active choice to change your mind.

In a relationship, when there is a reality break, it becomes important to bring your view of reality into alignment with that of your partner. This can be difficult since as humans, we are quite committed to the planet of beliefs you hold. This is why in a breakdown, the first question to ask yourself is, “What are you committed to?” If the answer is your partner and your relationship, then you may very well have to sacrifice your beliefs that do not comport with reality. You cannot afford either cognitive dissonance or confirmation bias.