The Story You Tell Yourself to Avoid Changing

Originally shared in Tuesday Notes on June 9, 2026.

For a long time I genuinely believed I was non-conflictual. Easy. Calm. The kind of person who doesn't make things difficult. I held that belief about myself quite proudly, if I'm honest. It felt like a virtue.

It took me a while to see that it was not a positive personality trait. It was a coping mechanism I had never questioned.

I didn't think of myself as someone whose behaviour and self-image were out of sync. And that, it turns out, is exactly the point.

Cognitive dissonance is what happens when two things you believe, or a belief and a behaviour, don't match.

The discomfort that creates is very real (psychologists call it psychological tension) and your brain will do almost anything to resolve it. The issue is that "anything" rarely means actually changing the behaviour. It usually means rewriting the story until the contradiction disappears.

You're not avoiding the conversation. You're just waiting for the right moment.

You're not abandoning your needs. You're keeping the peace.

You're not passive aggressive. You're just tired of explaining yourself.

The story in your brain adjusts. The behaviour you portray stays the same.

And because it happens sub-consciously, you also don't notice you're doing it until something, or in my case someone, forces that gap into view.

Nobody had taught me how to handle conflict correctly. And then I spent years in a relationship where voicing an opinion, any opinion, had consequences. So I learned, very efficiently, to say nothing. To go quiet. To find other ways to express what I couldn't say directly. I told myself I was being easy. My therapist called it abandoning my own needs, and pointed out, gently but clearly, that what I was doing wasn't keeping the peace at all. It was just conflict with a different disguise.

I (obviously) didn't love hearing that.

This particular dissonance, the belief that being non-conflictual makes you easy, good, worthy, is not accidental. Women specifically are conditioned to see keeping the peace as a virtue. Speaking up about ones needs gets reframed as demanding. Setting boundaries gets reframed as difficult. And so the story "I don't do conflict" feels less like avoidance and more like identity.

Until someone names it for what it is.

So with her guidance and advice, I started practising. Small things at first. Saying what I actually thought in a conversation where the stakes were small. Naming something that bothered me before it had time to fester. It didn't feel natural, it felt exposing and slightly terrifying, but I kept going. And at some point, something shifted permanently. Now I can't not voice my needs anymore. I can't swallow an opinion that matters to me. I can't unknow what I know.

Which has introduced an entirely new question (and potentially a new dissonance).

Because here is what nobody tells you about doing the work. You don't land somewhere comfortable and stay there. You overcorrect. You go from someone who swallowed everything to someone who can't not voice her needs, her opinions, her limits. And then you start to wonder: is this too much?

That question, am I too much, is not coincidentally exactly the one women get asked when they start taking up the space they were always entitled to. The discomfort of asking it is still the signal. It's just pointing somewhere new now.

Most of us have at least one area where the version of ourselves we present to the world and the version quietly running in the background don't quite match. It's not weakness. It's one of the most well-documented features of how the human mind manages discomfort.

The question worth sitting with isn't why did I lie to myself. It's what was I protecting myself from having to change.

Let me know: is there a story you've been telling yourself that you suspect is working a little too hard? You don't have to share what it is, just whether you recognise the feeling.

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Tuesday Brain Snack

In 1959 psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleague James Carlsmith ran one of the most revealing studies in social psychology. Participants were asked to perform an extremely boring, repetitive task, and then they were paid either $1 or $20 to tell the next person waiting that the task had actually been enjoyable.

The result was counterintuitive. The people who had been paid $20 had a logical explanation for the lie, they were well compensated, so their beliefs stayed intact. The people who had been paid $1 had no such justification. To resolve the discomfort of having lied for almost nothing, their minds did something surprising: they actually convinced themselves the task had been interesting.

They didn't decide to believe it. They just gradually did.

Festinger called this cognitive dissonance, the mental tension that arises when our actions and beliefs conflict, and the lengths our brain will go to in order to resolve it. What the study showed is that we are not passive observers of our own beliefs. We construct them, quietly and continuously, to make peace with what we've already done.

Until next Tuesday,

much love, Claudia ✨