The Weaponization of Dissonance

I just watched a video that stopped me cold.

The speaker said:

“Ninety percent of influence is weaponizing cognitive dissonance. I get you to agree to a little piece of identity, and I guarantee your behavior in the future.”

It struck a deep chord because I’ve spent the past year learning just how powerful cognitive dissonance can be—and how devastating it is when it’s weaponized in love.

Cognitive dissonance is the psychological tension that happens when two conflicting beliefs exist at once. To resolve that discomfort, the mind bends toward whichever story feels safer, more familiar, or more emotionally rewarding. In healthy relationships, it might be fleeting: “They didn’t mean to snap at me.”

But in abusive relationships—whether physical, emotional, or psychological—it becomes a survival strategy.

He says he loves me… he hurt me, again. But he loves me and I love him.

The mind scrambles to reconcile those two truths, and in doing so, begins to rewrite reality. The abuse becomes minimized, rationalized, or reinterpreted as love, while the body quietly bears the truth the mind can’t yet face.

And sometimes, that dissonance doesn’t disappear the moment the truth is known.

It lingers—in memories, in muscle, in language.

Even in my own writing, I see traces of it.

Lines like “I still wish he had chosen me.”

And “Maybe I’m not ready for it to fade.”

They’re echoes of the old confusion—proof that healing isn’t about deleting the dissonance, but learning to hold it without losing myself inside it.

For me, it was the dissonance between the man and the truth.

The man who said he loved me, wanted me safe, cherished, warm—

and the reality that the relationship was built on calculated control, image management, and emotional, physical, and psychological predation.

He whispered love into my heart while acting in ways that directly contradicted his words.

The version he showed the world—good, thoughtful, helpful—was different from the often cold, callous, selfish experience I had with him once I was in his inner world.

And long before I knew the full truth, I could feel it—my body registered the contradiction even when my mind couldn’t name it. I lived in the space between:

“He says he loves me, he’s caring, we have something special,”

and

“Then why did he leave me at the airport? Why am I so anxious, confused, and insecure all the time?”

Inside that tension, I made excuses.

I empathized my way into making sense of the confusion.

I told myself stories to close the gap between who he seemed to be and what he was showing me.

After everything came out, I wrestled with this haunting question:

Did he know what he was doing?

Was it conscious? Calculated? Or just past trauma acting through him?

That line in the video—about weaponizing cognitive dissonance—reignited that question, but this time, it brought clarity.

Because now I see that what happened wasn’t random or accidental.

It couldn’t be.

Not for someone sustaining that level of deceit for so fucking long.

I can admit I was naïve—hungry for safety, ready to build a home in someone I thought I could finally trust.

But I wasn’t blind.

I had years of experience understanding people, behavior, and motive. I could sense energy shift before a single word was spoken. I read subtleties for a living, and still, he fooled me.

Because this wasn’t a novice at love or deception. This was a man who had rehearsed this role for years.

He didn’t just happen to be hard to read.

He curated the atmosphere—lighting candles, lowering his voice, crafting warmth in the room until I felt safe enough to believe the story.

He told a story of himself—and of his intentions—through his words, his gestures, his silences.

He used tenderness as a stage light, music as an emotional cue, intimacy as a prop, and his belief that he was hard to love as the tension that kept the story alive.

He was the director, and I was the actress—cast perfectly for the part he’d already written.

I can't believe I was his first performance.

Or the first actress to get caught up in the role—just happy to be cast.

I don’t know how long his show has been running, but my gut tells me it’s been decades.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

And I know exactly what it was now.

It was never love.

It was predation—dressed as connection, built on the weaponization of dissonance.