Why I Was Still Posting Happy Couple Photos Six Months Before Leaving My Abusive Husband
Understanding Cognitive Dissonance + Reflective Worksheet
What you’ll find in this article
A realistic account of how cognitive dissonance develops inside an abusive relationship.
An explanation of what cognitive dissonance is, and why the mind uses it as a survival tool
My own experience of living inside this in my marriage, and how it kept me stuck
An understanding of why leaving is so much harder than it looks from the outside
What working through cognitive dissonance involves, and what it means for recovery
A downloadable worksheet to help you identify where dissonance has been operating in your own experience
Six months before I left my abusive husband, I made this post on Facebook alongside photos from our wedding day that showed me beaming with happiness:
Ten years ago today I married the love of my life. What a wild ride we’ve been on! We have lived in multiple countries, visited countless others, brought a beautiful child into the world, quit our day jobs and turned our hobby and passion into a business, and so many adventures along the way. Feeling blessed 🥰
I believed most of what I wrote. Those things had all happened. The happy photographs were real and the memories were real.
What nobody reading that post could see was that I was also living with endless rules, verbal attacks, gaslighting, manipulation, monitoring and surveillance, intimidation, threats, and constant fear and confusion. By that point, my life was not really that blessed.
The image I was presenting in that post and the life I was actually living had almost nothing in common by then. And yet I still wrote it, published it, and even believed it because I had worked so hard to convince myself that everything was ok.
That gap between what I was living and what I was telling myself and everyone else has a name. It is called cognitive dissonance, and it is one of the most powerful psychological mechanisms keeping people trapped inside relationships that are harming them.
A Case Example: Sarah and Daniel
Sarah met Daniel at a friend’s birthday party when she was twenty-eight. He was funny and warm, the kind of person who remembered small details, like what coffee you drank and the name of your childhood dog. Within three months, he told her she was the most extraordinary woman he had ever met, and within six, she had moved into his flat.
The first signs were small enough to explain away. He didn’t like her going out without him because, as he explained, he loved her so much it physically hurt to be apart from her. When she mentioned it to her sister, she found herself defending him before her sister had even said anything. “He is just so attentive. I’ve never met someone who loves me so intensely.”
Then the criticism began. He started with her family and friends, at first gently, then with more conviction. He told her that her best friend was “toxic”, her colleague was “clearly flirting with her”, and her mother was “too involved in her life”. He presented each of these assessments as concern and honesty, and as him simply looking out for her.
One by one, her relationships fell away. She stopped making plans that didn’t include him because managing his mood when she came home had become exhausting.
The first time he grabbed her arm hard enough to bruise, he cried for an hour afterwards. He apologised profusely and told her he was terrified of losing her. He said his childhood had been brutal and that she was the only person who truly understood him. She held him while he sobbed and told herself that this was love in its most raw and complicated form.
By year three, Sarah was isolated, financially dependent, and moving through an exhausting cycle of chaos and calm. He would explode, shouting, smashing things, occasionally shoving her against a wall, and then return to being the warm, thoughtful man she had fallen for. He would book surprise weekends away. He would leave handwritten notes. He would be, for stretches of days or weeks, genuinely lovely.
But the lovely parts did not cancel out the abuse, they just made the abuse impossible to hold in her mind as something real and deliberate.
Sarah was not stupid or weak. She was surviving inside a dynamic specifically designed to keep her confused, controlled, and trapped.
When Cognitive Dissonance Takes Hold
Cognitive dissonance is the tension we experience when two conflicting things are true at the same time. The concept was first named by psychologist Leon Festinger in 1957, and while it sounds clinical, it describes something deeply human. People do not sit easily with contradiction, and when they are forced to experience two things that oppose each other, they work hard to reduce the strain.
We experience this in ordinary ways all the time, like justifying an expensive purchase we know we could not really afford or staying in a job we dislike by focusing only on the benefits. But in abusive relationships, cognitive dissonance operates on a far deeper and more painful level because the contradictions involve love, fear, safety, identity, and survival itself.
