Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [87]
If you are the one who is leaving, you also have dissonance to reduce, to justify the pain you are inflicting on someone you once loved. Because you are a good person, and a good person doesn’t hurt another, your partner must have deserved your rejection, perhaps even more than you realized. Observers of divorcing couples are often baffled by what seems like unreasonable vindictiveness on the part of the person who initiated the separation; what they are observing is dissonance reduction in action. A friend of ours, lamenting her son’s divorce, said: “I don’t understand my daughter-in-law. She left my son for another man who adores her, but she won’t marry him or work full-time just so that my son has to keep paying her alimony. My son has had to take a job he doesn’t like to afford her demands. Given that she’s the one who left, and that she has another relationship, the way she treats my son seems inexplicably cruel and vengeful.” From the daughter-in-law’s standpoint, however, her behavior toward her ex is perfectly justifiable. If he were such a good guy, she’d still be with him, wouldn’t she?
Divorce mediators, and anyone else who has tried to be helpful to warring friends in the throes of divorce, have seen this process up close. Mediators Donald Saposnek and Chip Rose describe the “tendency of one spouse to cast the other in a vilified image, for example, ‘He’s a weak, violent drunk,’ or, ‘She’s a two-faced, selfish, pathological liar who can’t ever be trusted.’ These intensely negative, polarized characterizations that high conflict divorcing couples make of each other become reified and immutable over time.”13 The reason they do is that once a couple starts reducing dissonance by taking the ego-preserving route of vilifying the former partner, they need to keep justifying their position. Thus they fight over every nickel and dime that one party is “entitled to” and the other “doesn’t deserve,” furiously denying or controlling custody matters and the ex’s visitation rights because, look, the ex is a terrible person. Neither party pauses in mid-rant to consider that the terribleness might be a result of the terrible situation, let alone a response to their own behavior. Each action that one partner takes evokes a self-justified retaliation from the other, and voilà, they are on a course of reciprocal, escalating animosity. Each partner, having induced the other to behave badly, uses that bad behavior both to justify his or her own retaliation and to marshal support for the ex’s inherently “evil” qualities.
By the time these couples seek mediation, they have slid pretty far down the pyramid. Don Saposnek told us that in the more than 4,000 custody mediations he has done, “I have never had one in which a parent has said, ‘You know, I really think that she should get custody, since she really is the better parent and the kids are closer to her.’ It is virtually always a bilateral stand-off of ‘why I am the better and more deserving parent.’ Not a single point of acknowledgment is ever given to the other parent, and even when they freely admit their own acts of retaliation, they always justify it: ‘He deserved it, after what he’s done—breaking up our family!’ The agreements they reach are invariably some kind of compromise which each experiences as ‘giving up my position because I felt coerced, I’m exhausted fighting, or I ran out of money for mediation … even though I know that I’m the better parent.’”
Dissonance theory would lead us to predict that it is the very people with the greatest initial ambivalence about their decision to divorce, or who feel the greatest guilt over their unilateral decision, who have the greatest urgency to