Cognitive dissonance is where overcontrol is literally out of control

https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2020/10/26/how-dangerous-is-covid19/#comment-193557

The idea is to steer INTO the skid so as to regain traction.
Cognitive dissonance is where overcontrol is literally out of control - but CANNOT stop trying to regain it.
If you have ever experienced ANY kind of negative self reinforcing loop or vicious circle - and then received the grace of noticing, you have that release of the 'fear-mind' to a restored and felt sense of presence, connection, and direction - that opens this step now as an expression of  a practical and integrated response - or even release of a presumed need to 'respond'.

Those who initially become aware of such dissonance find it intolerable and have to shut it down - or lid back over, so as to get back to 'normal'. You never shall and the attempt will only seem to work by denying consciousness under systemic 'protections.
But to stop fighting it is to allow a true order to rise from chaos - rather than a thought disorder to mask as domination overt it.
A fundamental quality of intelligence is the arising or pattern recognition, such as to formulate a question or rouse a curiosity, through which what was unable to be recognised comes into a field of relational awareness and appreciation. This is how consciousness expands as the expression of the desire to know. At root, we cannot know what we have no experience of, and so have to find in ourselves a way to be with what is - as is now expressing itself.
The attempt to fit the new into the old when it simply does not and can not, is a learning failure. Past ideas and experience are not to be demonised, denied or erased, to make way for a 'new order' That is NOT how transformation occurs - but we can perceive life as destructive from invested self-illusion, and mimic such themes in our own attempt to 'make life go the way we think we want it to - which leads to the conflicted reality of a split mind that loses connection and seeks control from a chaos of disconnection or broken life, as a mental dissociation, running as the full belief in its own necessity in self reinforcing futility.

The grace of noticing cannot be earned, taught or willed, for it is the mystery and nature of the true or free will - which is never coercive upon its own.
Those who need to mask over, will find ways to NOT see, and those who have awakened in questions that rise from the heart to realign the mind to inspired purpose, shall see. These two 'minds' are not at war - excepting we try to have both and mask their contradictions so as to defer choosing one and letting the other go.
Nothing is so dangerous as the illusion of safety, and nothing so safe as a danger clearly held in awareness. No one can choose for another, and yet no one can choose alone.