[kirklancaster]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

Hold on a second. That's a completely inaccurate description of cognitive dissonance! He describes it as;

"When there's something that they were sure was true about the world or themselves that was shown to be completely not true."

The rewriting the narrative part is fine, and it happens THEN, too, but he's talking about something closer to straightforward denial.

Cognitive Dissonance is when a person in themself holds separate views (NEITHER need be objective fact, all that matters is that they are contradictory beliefs) that directly contradict each other, and needs to perform mental gymnastics to hold onto both beliefs without ending up in an existential spiral (where one of the beliefs will inevitably need to be abandonned). It's not necessarily about new or external information.

He's talking about people holding irrational beliefs and being confronted with objective facts that disprove those beliefs. That isn't the same thing.

I was just going to say the same thing, T.S. only with more use of psychological terminology.