Recently I’ve been reading “The Diary of a CEO” by Stephen Bartlett and he wrote “an ostrich with its head in the sand is at great risk of being eaten”.
He was talking about cognitive dissonance – the mind games we play with ourselves to avoid admitting what we already know. 🫣
Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort we go through when we hold conflicting beliefs, values or attitudes; or when your actions go against your beliefs/values, creating tension.
People often reduce this psychological conflict for themselves by changing their beliefs or by rationalising and justifying their actions, minimising the conflict or avoiding new information altogether.
I see this show up A LOT in unhealthy relationships, whether it’s with your partner, family or the people around you.
It’s when your intuition is literally screaming at you, but you keep ignoring what it’s saying.
It’s when you see the red flags so blatantly waving in your face, and you ignore them, minimise them or justify them to yourself instead of confronting the behaviour/words directly. 🚩
It’s when you feel the anxiety so profoundly in your body, but end up gaslighting yourself because the truth is harder to face head on. You just tell yourself you’re tired/hormonal/mercury is in retrograde or [insert shitty excuse here]….
We do this when the truth threatens our sense of safety, our sense of what is known and comfortable. 🫠
When accepting the truth also means accepting that things have to change (usually meaning we need to actively make a change).
People don’t usually like change. It means dealing with discomfort… which also involves trusting yourself, trusting that everything will work out how it should.
Self-trust may not come easily to you anymore after you’ve endured a fair bit of gaslighting. 💨 💡
Self-trust feels really risky when you’ve been burned before.
So instead, your brain convinces you to not look where you need to look…. “look over there instead”. 👀
But the soothing is very temporary and very expensive in the long term; expensive sometimes financially but more often mentally and emotionally. You also can’t get those years back that have been swallowed up by a toxic relationship.
It costs you your self-worth, self-trust and self-respect, the longer you keep abandoning yourself by looking in the wrong direction. 🥺
It slowly eats away at you, turning you into a shell of yourself until one day you wake up thinking “how the hell did I end up here?!”
It’s not really that you don’t know how… you just didn’t want to be honest with yourself before now.
Facing the truth feels fucking awful when you do it in the short term – but it’ll save you years in the long term.
Years of unhappiness, discomfort, self-abandonment and masking.
When I finally faced the hard truths I’d been avoiding, I felt like some magical force totally stepped in to take care of all the shit I’d been stressing about – where would I live? How would I pay off all that debt? How long would it take to get my shit together? How would I ever trust myself or someone else again? 🤷🏼♀️
When I finally accepted change needed to happen, yes it was massively uncomfortable – AND I was also able to figure everything out along the way, with support of all kinds popping up in random places to help me with whatever I needed help with at the time.
So here’s your uncomfortable question: what truth are you currently pretending not to see? 🫣
If you’re not sure where to start, but know you need to start somewhere – start with a conversation with someone you trust.
Reach out to me if you’re unsure, and let’s chat.
And grab my freebie “10 Signs Your Relationship is Actually Toxic“ before it disappears (link in bio).
Sending you big hugs and so much love, because you’re not alone.
Catcha on the flip side,
