Practical Steps to Stopping the Crazy Confusion: Answering Your Fan Mail

What do you do when you can’t just cut off a toxic person?

This week’s Fan Mail question comes from a YouTube listener who asks: “How do I stop the cognitive dissonance and self-doubt when I can’t go no-contact with a toxic person?”

In this episode, Dr. Kerry explains why cognitive dissonance is such a powerful trap in emotionally abusive relationships—especially when you’re forced to maintain contact.

Submit Your Question

If you would like your question addressed on air, please respond here!

****************************************

Stay in Touch Dr. Kerry!

• Youtube
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Facebook

More About Dr. Kerry

Kerry Kerr McAvoy, Ph.D, a retired psychologist and author, is an expert on cultivating healthy relationships and deconstructing narcissism. Her blogs have been featured in Mamami, YourTango, Scary Mommy, and The Good Men Project. In Love You More, Dr. McAvoy gives an uncensored glimpse into her survival of narcissistic abuse, and her workbook, First Steps to Leaving a Narcissist, helps victims break free from the confusion common in abusive relationships. She hosts the Breaking Free from Narcissistic Abuse podcast and offers trauma-related advice on social media.

Transcript

Kerry: Welcome to fan mail, A space where I answer your real questions about toxic relationships, narcissistic abuse, and the long road to healing.

I got this question on YouTube this week, and thank you so much for your guys' responses of things that you wanna hear, things you'd like me to answer. The question goes like this, cognitive dissonance is a big problem for me. How to stop it, how to stop the doubt, what to do when you can't go no contact. I'm running in circles and I'm wondering if it's me after all.

So this is a common piece. The wondering if it's you feeling like you're, the problem is very, unique and suggests strongly that you're right. You're, you are struggling with cognitive dissonance.

What is cognitive dissonance? Normally that means when we have a behavior that we really wanna be doing, but we also are resisting the behavior and we're having an internal debate. So we find a way to justify what we're not doing, what we should do. For example, say you've made a New Year's resolution to start a healthier lifestyle, but then you realize two weeks in, you're back to your old habits.

Well, we often will say, well, I'm not ready, or It wasn't that important, or, my health isn't that bad. We'll find some way to sort of excuse the behaviors, a way to solve the tension that we're feeling inside. When cognitive dissonance shows up in a toxic relationship, though, what the question becomes is what's real?

What's true about my relationship? Is the relationship troubled or is it really that I'm the one who's troubled? So we struggle to know what is true, and often our partners misbehave or do things that's really harmful, hurtful, but then they have good behaviors, which then makes us feel unsure where the issue really lies.

Is it really in the relationship? Is it with the other person, or is it in ourselves? Now interesting in this situation, the person asking the question isn't able to go no contact. So obviously they're still in a relationship or still having contact with this individual, and they describe it as feeling like they're in a mental loops, like they're running in circles.

So they're really looking for a way to stop the distress. So here are some tips that will help this individual and anyone like them struggling to really manage cognitive dissonance in a relationship. First, you need to recognize the pattern. Notice what's happening between you and the other person. You might find it helpful to create a journal of incidences where you, almost like a playwright list, what happens.

I said this, they said, that I said this. They did that to recreate the scene so that you can look at it as from an outside objective perspective. That will really help you know what's happening. It'll slow the process down. It'll also give you the clues to the things that you're missing. When those bad moments happen.

So consider starting to keep a journal so that you can keep a running record to clarify the pattern. The second thing is to name the confusion that you're experiencing. Notice if they're creating the confusion, like maybe you're getting passive aggressive messages where they give you both messages at the same time.

Like, don't get prideful, but I'm really proud of you, or I love you but they cheat on you. So identify where you're getting paradoxical or inconsistent messages to help you break it down so that you can spot why there is the confusion that actually the confusion's being created outside of you, not within you.

And then start to recognize that truths, multiple truths can exist at the same time. You can have somebody that you care deeply about, that you love, and they also can be harming you at the same time. Just because you love someone doesn't negate the harm and. Because they're harming you, doesn't mean that you don't love them.

That we can have multiple hard truths occur at the same time. So you might, for example, say, I really care about a person, but I don't wanna have contact with them. Your care doesn't make the desire of contact a problem. You can have both co-occur at the same time and you are going to feel, now, I know in this case, you've decided not to.

So you can say, I wanna be in a relationship with somebody that I care about, have a lot of feelings about, even though they're harming me, and yes, they're harming me. So both of those can occur at the same time. When you start to feel doubt, after the good moment, know that's normal. That to question whether or not this is really a good or bad, but recognize it's the relationship in its entirety, it's whole. So just because someone's good to you doesn't mean that the harm is erased. It hasn't been erased. It's still a problem in this relationship. And consider starting to emotionally detached where you look to that person less often to supply what you're needing, like validation, support, concern, care, start to broaden where you're getting support outside of this relationship so that you're putting less weight on it and looking to it as a way to meet all your needs of belonging and consider starting to practice little small boundaries within yourself, like maybe it is that you let arguments go faster. Maybe you stop overexplaining yourself. Maybe you stop trying to make them change or convincing them of why what they're doing is hurting you.

But you start to let go. But instead, focus more on yourself. You detach and focus more on yourself and start adding more self compassionate practices in your life that acknowledge that you are important as well. That shows you your feelings of respect for yourself, but it's also a really great way to take back control in your life in the areas that you can.

It's really hard to shift our focus from these relationships where we get all our needs met to away from that to ourselves, to seeking to get our needs more met from within ourselves instead of from the other person. So cognitive dissonance isn't so much about the distance between us and the other person, but rather the internal detachment from this other person while we also ground ourself in truth.

Let me know if this is helpful for you, and thank you so much for that question. I deeply appreciate it.

You'd like to have me answer your top question. I'd love to hear from you. Click on the link in each of that podcast show notes because the bottom line is, your feelings and what's happening to you really matters, and chances are if it's happening to you, it's happening to someone else. And this is something we all need to be talking about.