Finding Harmony After Cognitive Dissonance
Root 4 - Where I attempt to explain how confusing it is to realize you're being emotionally abused and to leave.
I try to dole out my posts in short, poignant bites, easy to digest. This one is longer. I think, given the thesis, this is appropriate. Finding yourself, healing, gaining clarity: these are long roads that take time to travel. I hope this post is worth some extra time, too.
It's extremely confusing to leave an abuser.
Even after I realized my ex (then husband) was manipulating me, it continued to happen. I continued to find him convincing. I tried to leave him multiple times, and he talked me out of it. He caused me to fear that I was simply a miserable person, and that I wouldn't be happier without him. That if I did leave him, all I’d accomplish is making everyone else in the family unhappy with me. I spent hours, days, weeks agonizing between two desires: the desire to end it and be free, and the desire to preserve my children’s happiness. As if any mother has the power to control whether or not her children are happy. As if my all-consuming shame and depression wouldn’t have spoiled it at some point anyway. I couldn’t see these flaws in the logic while he still twisted and directed my thoughts.
While I was in the middle of it, I needed to talk to other people about it. And I don’t mean “wanted very strongly.” I mean it was absolutely vital, while trying to make the hardest decision of my life, to have touchstones outside myself, outside the influence of the manipulation in which I was steeped, to know what I should do. I knew I was spun around, too dizzy, to see straight myself. I knew that everything I believed might be wrong.
This must be why isolation is such a huge part of an abuser’s tactics. On some level, they know that anyone too far outside their web of control could influence the person they’re keeping caught in the middle of it, and they could lose their prey.
He isolated me. Convinced me to cut ties with my biological family. Moved me away from everyone I knew. Complained about most friends I tried to make, until I gave up on the acquaintance. There was one friend he must have found particularly dangerous for me to keep, because he issued an ultimatum. It was her or him: choose. Of course I chose him, despite my distaste for ultimatums. He was the bedrock of my life. The only piece that had been there for so long.
The vast majority of the people in my life were his. His family and his friends, who supported and reaffirmed him and his message. When I started to admit the unhappiness of my marriage to myself, I had only three people that I felt able to reach out to. Two of these were friends of mine that he had coopted, and one was a new acquaintance. I did reach out—timidly at first, afraid to expose my misery and shame to the light. Afraid, too, that the two who knew him would instantly take his side. Soon these three people became more intimately acquainted with the details of my life than anyone else had ever been before. I learned how to be deeply, completely vulnerable.
One of my friends provided sympathy, but extended the same excuses for my then-husband that I myself had been giving him all those years. The new acquaintance told me to seek marriage counseling (something my then-husband had already said no to, and mocked me for suggesting) before doing anything drastic. The third friend said what I was experiencing was wrong, that I didn’t deserve to keep living that way, and that I deserved happiness.
The three different counsels proved to further my uncertainty, but in seeking them I did find a way forward. I started seeing a marriage counselor alone, letting my then-husband know he was welcome to join me. He did join me, but used the sessions to tell the therapist about what kind of person I was. In his descriptions were little splotches of truth, composed in such disjointed ways as to paint a person I did not recognize. In listening to his descriptions of me, I learned that he did not know me or love me. In the second session with him, I became certain: I did not want to be with someone who so clearly misunderstood me. Someone with so wholly uncharitable an attitude toward me.
Something shifted in him, too, that second session. On the drive home he announced that we weren’t getting anywhere, that the therapist didn’t know what he was talking about (despite having been in practice as long as I’d been alive), and that if we were to continue marriage counseling, it would have to be with someone else. He was asking me to cut off yet another relationship I could use as a touchstone. This time, I didn’t comply. I said I could still do personal counseling with the therapist. He picked this up and used it, saying that was actually good. It was clear that I needed help more than we needed help.
I was just beginning to recognize the depths of his ability to use little bits of truth and weave them into an absurdist narrative. It terrified me. I knew, deep in my bones, that if I told him the real reasons I wanted to leave, he would talk them out of being legitimate reasons. He would twist here, pull there, until the whole thing looked like an elaborate fiction I had created to explain my mysterious, constant misery. He would make himself guiltless, and me depraved. I feared that if I were faced with his arguments, I would cave yet again and remain trapped.
But I couldn’t tell him nothing. I couldn’t say I was done and not say anything of why. I selected one tiny reason, the least of my reasons, and gave him that. It was the only reason I thought he wouldn’t be able to talk his way out of. It had nothing to do with his behavior (on first glance), and so he couldn’t say I’d misconstrued. I told him I wasn’t attracted to him. That was a simple fact I thought couldn’t be argued away.
I continued to be naïve.
I was right that he wasn’t able to argue me into finding him attractive. However, he did argue that using that as a reason to want to part made me all kinds of horrible. He called me so many names less polite than slut. Clearly sex was all I thought of, and I was letting my base, unchaste urges rip our wholesome family apart. His arguments tore at my psyche and caused me to doubt myself. This time, though, there was one key difference. I had anticipated it. I had known he would say whatever he had to in order to spin me around and confuse me into paralysis. Expecting it, and then watching it happen, was one more piece of proof. In a way it ended up strengthening my resolve. I held the real, deeper reasons I wanted to leave inside me, protected from tampering, and let them take root.
There was no clear point at which I went from being manipulated by him to being clear-sighted. Getting free of manipulation happens in layers, peeled back one at a time. As the separation progressed, every few weeks I thought, “Ah, now I see clearly,” only to have the same thought again later. The best simile I can think of: it was like slowly coming out of a fog. What was once completely obscured became vague outlines became a hazy but recognizable shape became something almost clear became crystal clear. I kept being surprised at the change.
It’s hard to pinpoint when I started making up my own mind about my values, about my perception of the world. I decided I never again wanted to change myself to be with someone else. Having been so thoroughly trained to do so, though, I immediately compromised myself in multiple ways in order to gain some badly-needed intimacy and comradery. I entered into a disappointing romantic relationship and told myself it was the love of my life. I entered into friendship with a minor cult leader and her cult. I realized the second one, and tested her. I said something reasonable which did not line up with her ideology. She reacted strongly, arguing, unable to countenance that there could exist an opinion other than hers. I chose to leave her cult. To my shame, I did not have the clarity needed on my romantic relationship to leave it. He made the decision for me, and after much time I came to be thankful that at least one of us had ended it so soon.
For a long time I doubted my ability to ever make my own decisions. I had failed so many times before. I had lied to myself, changed myself, hurt myself. How could I trust my decisions?
I made new connections, and reestablished old ones. I told more and more people my story, releasing my shame as I did so, and gaining numerous viewpoints through which to see myself. I forgave myself. I wanted to be with someone who had a charitable attitude toward me, and I was my most constant companion. Self-compassion, self-forgiveness, self-love—again and again I chose to offer myself these things, and they proved pivotal.
I developed a habit of questioning my beliefs. I would ask myself, “Why do I think that?” Over time, I less and less often traced the belief back to an argument made by someone else. Over time, I less and less often found my desire to be openminded equating to me having no will of my own. Over time, I grew confident in myself, my beliefs, my decisions. I no longer feel the need to twist myself into knots in order to please someone else. I couldn’t tell you when that change happened, because it happened in so many tiny stages.
Now I have a village of touchstones, rather than a single bedrock. In being more truly anchored, I am also more truly free. No one will has an inordinate amount of influence over mine. Seeing from so many different perspectives has broadened my view, so that I can’t be led around like a horse wearing blinkers. I can see clearly with my own eyes.
Do you have people in your life who can act as touchstones? Who you could tell anything, no matter how shameful? I hope you could name at least half a dozen people with whom you can be truly vulnerable.
I'm glad you found your touchstones.