That’s Not How You Say Your Name: What Happens When A Firmly Held Belief Gets Shattered

Like millions of other acolytes, I was among the literary lovers who began reading the Harry Potter series prior to them being brought to cinematic life. In my mind, Hermione was pronounced, “Her-Mee-Oh-Ne.” Not being English (at least by birth), I had never heard the name before and only had my (lack of) wits to go on. So you can imagine my dismay when Emma Watson introduced herself as “Her-My-Oh-Nee.” Wait, what? Having only read the name without hearing it spoken created its own reality in my head. That was her name. “Her-Mee-Oh-Ne.” 

It wasn’t until the third movie installment that I finally accepted that it was, indeed, my misinterpretation, and not J.K. Rowling’s.

While that is a trivial example, the same principle applies when a deeper “truth” is unveiled and found to be false. 

After my father died, my siblings and I were faced with the daunting task of clearing out his office. When the time came to crack his safe (meaning, we opened it with the combo he had left for us), if there had been a soundtrack playing it would have been Mission Impossible-esque. I don’t know what we expected to find, but the only thing waiting for us was a stack of documents. Not raw, uncut diamonds or false passports. As we riffled through each page, our eyes landed on an adoption certificate. We had always known that when my dad was a baby, he and my grandmother moved from Boston to Santa Monica and that when he was very young, she remarried, and her husband adopted my dad – in turn becoming the only father my dad ever knew. But this adoption certificate showed my dad’s age as 14 when the adoption occurred. 14? Not a baby at all. While it didn’t really matter, it was just odd. Why did all three of us grow up thinking he was adopted as a baby? I know that back then there was a certain amount of shame and stigma around divorce and even the idea of being adopted, but this was just…unsettling. Something each of us had believed for 40-50 years was suddenly not true. Just like that.

When a long-held belief is shattered, it can throw you off your axis for a bit, depending on how large a reveal it is. I needed to know more about what this was called. Being a big fan of research, I got to work. 

It isn’t an actual delusion, it turns out, nor is it a fallacy – because these aren’t based on “unsound logic” or the so-called Mandela effect in which many people have a false memory in common (for instance, when everyone remembers the Wicked Queen from Cinderella saying, “Mirror, Mirror on the wall…” when she really said, “Magic Mirror on the wall…”). 

In psychology, the sudden disorientation one feels when faced with a jarring and counterintuitive discovery is known as “cognitive dissonance”. This phenomenon occurs either when you simultaneously hold two conflicting beliefs, or when new information is gleaned that challenges the old. 

According to Psychology Today, “When one learns new information that challenges a deeply held belief, for example, or acts in a way that seems to undercut a favorable self-image, that person may feel motivated to somehow resolve the negative feeling that results – to restore cognitive consonance. Though a person may not always resolve cognitive dissonance, the response to it may range from ignoring the source of it to changing one’s beliefs or behavior to eliminate the conflict.” I.e., by accepting that Harry and Ron’s bestie is saying her own name correctly, and you, my friend, have been saying it wrong.

While cognitive dissonance rings true, I also think that disillusionment deserves a nod. Like finding out there is no Easter Bunny (oops, sorry). This was a long-held belief, something you banked on. You put your basket out, at some point the Easter Bunny came, and the rest of the day you laid the groundwork for your sugar crash. When you discover that it was not in fact a very tall, and somewhat imbalanced furry friend leaving you a giant chocolate egg, but it was your parents? That feels a lot like betrayal. Even if it was for a good cause. And it is also sad because it was a fun thing to believe in.

But as adults finding out that something you unthinkingly held as true is in fact the opposite – that can be an even greater dislocation from which to bounce back. We aren’t as malleable as children, we are more rigid and have a strong sense of who we are, what we consider right and wrong. When something challenges that, it can create a deeper sense of mistrust-even of our own instincts.

The level of these misconceptions can vary greatly; a mispronounced name may cause embarrassment, but the discovery that a close friend or partner isn’t who you thought they were will have deeper emotional repercussions. 

So, what do we do in the face of these new realities? I remember learning in graduate school that when we are faced with a rip-the-Band Aid-off kind of reveal, the most important thing to do is to acknowledge your feelings about this new truth. You can ask yourself what about it bothers you the most and even make a list. And allow yourself to grieve the loss of your truth. It was yours for a long time. If you trusted someone and that trust was broken, grieve the loss of trust. 

Until then, keep the faith. What you believe is still true. Until it isn’t, of course.