Cognitive Dissonance Makes you Feel Crazy
Cognitive dissonance feels like living with two conflicting realities that switch back and forth. “He’s an abuser, no he’s not,”
“I’m right about this, no I’m not,”
“I should leave, no I should stay,”
Even, “I trust God, no I don’t.”
This causes intense confusion and stress.
Cognitive Dissonance is often described as “reality switching,” “ping-ponging” or what George Orwell called “doublethink,” where conflicting thoughts and contradictory realities pop up but you’re plagued with such intense self-doubt, confusion, and fog from the abuse that you’re not able resolve anything.
Remember, confusion is a SYMPTOM of covert abuse!
Cognitive Dissonance Examples
While you’re being abused it can show up in your thoughts like:
“He’s a nice guy who means well,”
“Why is he acting that way, is it me or is it him?”
“He’s so nice, why did I doubt him,”
“Oh no, what if he’s really an abuser?”
“I must be wrong about that,”
“Maybe I should try again.”
Or one day you know you want to leave, but the next you are unsure of yourself. And even after you leave, you find yourself confused again and wondering if you made a mistake.
We can also have cognitive dissonance about God because of spiritual abuse. This often sounds like “He’s loving and I trust Him,” and “He doesn’t love me and I can’t trust Him,” or
about church “I’m supposed to go to church and I like it,” and “I don’t feel safe there and I hate it,” or about ourselves like “I’m a decent person,” “I’m a horrible person.”
You may have noticed that one of these sets of thoughts is true (he IS an abuser, You CAN trust God, Your church may well be unsafe, You ARE a decent person) but we just can’t grasp it because of all the doubt.
We can struggle with these thoughts without it being cognitive dissonance, the difference is that cognitive dissonance feels like emotional torture.
While I was struggling with all this, I would journal the truth that he was abusing me, and then when my reality switched, I would read it and not believe it. Then I would think I was either deluded when I wrote it, or deluded for not believing it. It was absolute torment and back then I had no idea what was going on. I had never heard of cognitive dissonance and thought I was going crazy.
How Cognitive Dissonance is Created
Research shows that abused women have higher levels of cognitive dissonance than other traumatized populations. It’s because of the merry go round effect of psychological abuse that leaves our head spinning in confusion, and its effect on our brain.
As we all know, abusers aren’t awful people all the time. They sprinkle their abusive times with “good times” (love bombing and regrooming).
We were in a relationship with a Jekyll/Hyde type person and the entire relationship was based on his dual and contradictory behavior, so we actually had two different relationships with him.
We had to develop a coping strategy for dealing with the two sides of him and there was no other way for us to react and to stay except to split our thinking into two different realities and belief systems.
And this is not our fault!
This creates intense inner conflict so our mind tries to reason it out. And we naturally turn to rationalizing their behavior, projecting our good traits and motives on to them, forgetting the experience all together, denial, and justifying and rationalizing our decision to stay.
We cast about for who to blame and, rather than blame the one we love, we blame ourselves, or if he had affairs, we blame the other woman.
Psychological abuse creates a dual reality:
Gaslighting causes us to doubt our own thoughts, perceptions, memories, and reality and believe his. He tells us that our unreasonableness is causing problems so we blame ourselves when it’s actually him. We are trusting this person who claims to love us but he’s undermining us horribly in covert ways.
Because of self-doubt caused by the abuse, we lose the ability to trust and listen to ourselves and so we shut off that part of ourselves. Our beautiful “supertraits” (term coined by researcher Sandra L. Brown and discussed in her book) are used against us and we end up feeling bad for someone who is hurting us.
We forget who we are and think we are weak and stupid instead of strong and smart.
Over time, as we begin to have glimpses of what’s really going on, the internal battle and cognitive dissonance rages which brings confusion about the truth about him, who he is, what he’s doing and what that means for our marriage.
The emotional and mental suffering is agonizing.
Even when we leave, we have to go against our beautiful “supertraits” of loyalty and conscientiousness and we feel we are out of our integrity and are in conflict with ourselves.
There are many more examples of things that create the cognitive dissonance, but ultimately we are surrounded by smoke and mirrors and looking inside for the problem which is the wrong place to look.
In a normal situation or relationship, conflicting realities and the undermining of our self and our values would motivate us to make a change, but because of the gaslighting and self-doubt, we’re thwarted from acting and the cognitive dissonance gets engrained in our neural pathways.
Intrusive Thoughts
One hallmark of both cognitive dissonance and trauma bonding is intrusive thoughts. You’ve probably heard of ‘highway hypnosis’. This occurs when you are so concentrated on driving or, when you are getting sleepy while driving, and all of a sudden you realize that you’re almost at your destination. Highway hypnosis is a kind of trance state.
There are other things that put us into a trance state like being fatigued and even our blood sugar levels. Trance states happen to every person every day. Just look around at 2 PM when everyone is so sleepy!
Abusive relationships are exhausting and when you’re worn down, fatigued, and confused, you’re close to a trance state and more suggestible to what he says to you.
He’s telling you that you are oversensitive, he’s gaslighting you by telling you that you didn’t see him do what he did, and he’s determined to convince you that the problems of the relationship are because of you.
When those things are said to you when you are suggestible, they end up being replayed over and over again, creating intrusive thoughts and obsessive thinking.
If he tells you positive things when you are in trance states, such as “I need you,” and “Please don’t ever leave me,” these messages can keep activating our thoughts, feelings and cognitive dissonance.
And the kicker is that many intrusive thoughts are positive ones that bring us back to the dream, the illusion, the sentiment, the good times. Since they make us feel better, they are especially hard to stop. So we keep ping-ponging between these two realities.
So often, new beliefs that contradict what we think is true can be perceived by us as a threat.
The religious leaders of Jesus’ day perceived his message as a threat. When Galileo observed that the earth revolves around the sun—rather than the other way around—the church leadership of his day was threatened. (The church is easily threatened it seems…:) And these people weren’t being psychologically tortured like abused wives are.
I think it’s miracle when we see the truth!
Cognitive Dissonance is in Our Brain, Not Just Our Thoughts
We experience intense stress when battling two contradictory beliefs and realities.
When we think he’s a nice guy, then we get a glimpse of the truth, it causes overwhelm, anxiety, a sense of threat and confusion, and overloads our brain. I’m surprised smoke doesn’t come out of our ears.
And this affects our body: our thinking brain shuts down and the emotional brain takes over, the adrenaline pumps out, and now we’re in Fight/Flight/Freeze and PTSD symptoms.
It’s overwhelming to handle, so the positive intrusive thoughts come in or our mind kicks into the coping mechanism of denial and rationalizing to reduce overwhelm.
This is a neurological mechanism in the brain and not your fault. Often, we don’t even know we are doing it. But it causes us to go back and forth and creates neural pathways of those thoughts.
Any stress or anxiety can cause a neurological reaction making you suddenly craving him again or facing cognitive dissonance. When that happens it’s because of our body and brain’s response to stress.
It’s not your fault you feel this way, and the brain has to go through this until it can reorganize itself.
Trauma Bonds and Cognitive Dissonance
Trauma bonds and cognitive dissonance work together. Here’s an example from my life.
In the early days of my separation, I was doing somewhat OK and able to remember that he was an abuser, even though I was in a lot of emotional pain. My soon-to-be-ex deposited some money in my account. I immediately perceived that as him caring about me, the illusion returned and my happy hormones were triggered.
I started hoping things could be good again and we could reconcile. But this also triggered my cognitive dissonance and I spiraled into confusion and doubt and feeling crazy. I spent several torturous days in this state.
Then I discovered that he had opened a secret bank account, and cut me off financially. My cognitive dissonance calmed down temporarily because that confirmed he was an abuser, but then the fear of what that meant raged as I realized I really did have to divorce. Then the trauma bond kicked in as I craved the comfort I wanted from him.
Can you see how confusing this is!!??
Healing Cognitive Dissonance
The beauty is that when your trauma bonds and cognitive dissonance are broken:
• you’ll stop getting trapped in hoping he‘ll change
• you’ll be able to let go of thinking there’s anything you can do to help him
• you’ll stop defending him in your head or to others and
• you’ll know there’s no acceptable reason or excuse for him to abuse you.
To heal from cognitive dissonance, there’s cognitive work to do, specific self-care to learn to help your body react less, and tools to rewire the neurology and body reactions.
You really can heal from this!
In the Arise Healing Community you’ll be given a step-by-step process and the tools to get free from cognitive dissonance.
Then you’ll take a giant leap forward into acceptance of the truth that you were never at fault.
Healing cognitive dissonance is included in the 6 pillars of the Arise Healing Journey. If you’d like to join other women of faith on a journey of healing from the trauma of spiritual abuse and emotional and psychological spousal abuse, and learn practical tools for healing, you can read about the Arise Healing Community here.