Why It Took So Long To Leave
What took you so long to leave him?
I was asked this by a police investigator. When they’re involved, you know things are not awesome.
In response, I told her the story of the boiling frog:
If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, it recognizes the threat and hops out immediately, because, Damn! That’s HOT!
If you drop a frog into a pot of room temperature water, however, it settles in. As you turn the heat up one or two degrees at a time, the frog is perfectly comfy, thank-you-very-much. It’s very accommodating in its ability to continuously adapt to its changing environment.
By the time the water is boiling and the frog starts to cook, in its endless ability to conform, it doesn’t recognize impending doom.
Occasionally a frog will suddenly realize “home” is a perilous place and jump to safety. The rest simply continue to acclimatize — and become frog soup.
All to say, as lousy as my relationship was, I’d simply grown used to it. I’d lost context. I didn’t leave until the heat hit eleven.
If I’m being totally honest with myself, though, in retrospect I totally knew what was happening. As red flags hit me in the face, instead of changing tacks, I rationalized and justified my partner’s behaviour instead.
So, what’s that about?
Yes, there are a bunch of things I could say about childhood trauma, mental health, addictions and that whole bit. But these days I appreciate that cognitive dissonance explains a lot.
Cognitive dissonance is a concept from social psychology to describe the feeling you get when reality smashes up against what you think or expect is true. If you believe your husband is a good person and your relationship is solid, say, that sense of helplessness and internal alarm when he unexpectedly humiliates you in public, throws a plate at your head or hisses in your ear at a party, “shut your mouth you stupid c*unt, because nobody cares what you think”…?
That’s cognitive dissonance.
When the expectation of “my husband is a good guy who loves me” comes up against the reality of “my husband is abusive and this doesn’t feel like love,” things are patently not harmonious within.
Except we’re predisposed to seek inner harmony. Our nervous system is constantly seeking to restore balance; the drive to reduce dissonance is physiological. To accommodate this need, we justify and minimize to help the bad behaviour make sense.
He’s having a bad day, he didn’t mean it, it’s a one-time thing, but he’s so smart/successful/ charming, etc. An act of delusional self-preservation, we create excuses to keep our beliefs alive — and deny reality.
We work to minimize the intensity of dissonance, not just because it feels better to not be in it, but because we also don’t like being wrong. We find reasons to support the belief that we’re making good choices, despite clear evidence to the contrary. We’ll go a long way, in fact, to disprove dissonance that threatens our self-image: I would never stay with a man who disrespected and mistreated me.
Typical ways we do that?
· Flat-out denial: Simply ignore the facts and make decisions that are objectively irrational
· Rationalizing: A good sign rationalization is at play: You make a decision, then spend a lot of time convincing yourself it was the right one
· Shame or embarrassment: When your beliefs and actions are not in alignment, you feel shame. If you believe you’d never stay in a damaging relationship, for example, it’s embarrassing when you do.
If that’s not enough, cognitive dissonance is compounded by our tendency to value most, those things we’ve made the biggest sacrifices for or investment in: someone who’s saved for 5 years to buy a car will value it more than the guy who’s dad bought him one for the hard work of turning 16.
Or, it’s harder to leave a relationship you’ve been in for 10 years than one that’s only a few months old. I really wanted to be right about having invested all that time.
Except life is often unfair. Like, sometimes we put in a lot of effort, only to get a dismal outcome in return.
There came a time where I simply couldn’t live inside the lie for one more minute. I was able to see the 10 years we’d spent together as a sunk cost, and as the proverbial scales fell from my eyes, I could do for my children what I couldn’t do for myself. My cognitive dissonance cup runneth over — and I jumped from the boiling pot.
