Gaslighting

When Your Partner’s ‘Insecurity’ Is Actually a Control Strategy

February 10, 2026 by Todd Creager Leave a Comment

A partner who seems insecure—who needs constant reassurance, who gets jealous, who reacts strongly when you spend time with other people—and on the surface, it looks like vulnerability.

It looks like someone who cares deeply and is afraid of losing you. And sometimes, that’s exactly what it is.

But sometimes it’s not.

Sometimes what looks like insecurity is actually manipulation. And the difference between those two things is enormous—not just in how it affects the relationship, but in how it affects you.

Your sense of self, your mental health, your ability to trust your own perceptions. I’ve spent decades working with people who have slowly lost their sense of who they are because they were living with a partner whose “insecurity” was really about power and control. My work with them is about helping them reclaim that sense of self, whether they choose to stay or leave.

The Short Version

Insecurity and manipulation can look remarkably similar in the early stages of a relationship. Both involve neediness, reassurance-seeking, and emotional reactivity.

The critical distinction comes down to one question: Is this person driven by fear of losing you, or by a need to control you?

That sounds simple. In real life, it’s anything but. So here’s what most people don’t realize until they’re deep into it:

With genuine insecurity, reassurance actually works—at least temporarily. With manipulation, nothing you do is ever enough because the goalpost keeps moving.

→ Insecure partners can still apologize and take responsibility. Manipulative partners turn every conflict back on you.

→ The most adaptive, kind, good-hearted people are often the most vulnerable to this dynamic—not because they’re weak, but because they genuinely want to see the best in their partner.

Why This Is So Hard to See When You’re In It

Let me be honest with you. The people I work with who are being manipulated—they’re not foolish. They’re usually incredibly thoughtful, empathetic people. That’s part of why this works on them. They have a real capacity to see their partner’s pain, and they want to help. When their partner says, “I’m just scared of losing you,” they believe it, because they themselves would be sincere if they said something like that.

Here’s the thing. In many of these relationships, the manipulation doesn’t show up on day one. The early stages might feel wonderful—attentive, connected, maybe even a little intense. It’s only over time, sometimes years, that the pattern reveals itself. And by then, you’ve already adjusted your behavior so many times that you can’t remember what normal felt like.

I’ve worked with people who tell me, “I used to have so many friends. I used to be confident. I don’t know what happened.” What happened was gradual. And it was designed to be gradual, so you wouldn’t notice.

Six Patterns That Separate Insecurity From Manipulation

In my clinical experience with hundreds of couples over more than 30 years, I’ve identified a handful of patterns that reliably distinguish genuine insecurity from manipulative control. None of these is a diagnosis on its own. But if you recognize several of them happening together, it’s worth paying very close attention.

1. The Goalpost That Never Stops Moving

When someone is genuinely insecure, they need reassurance—and when they get it, there’s usually some relief. It might not last forever, but there’s a moment of, “Okay, I feel better.”

With a manipulative partner, you can change your behavior, give up things that matter to you, reorganize your entire life around their comfort—and it’s never enough. A behavior that was perfectly fine yesterday suddenly becomes a crisis today. You find yourself thinking, “I did exactly what they asked, so why are they still upset?”

The answer is that the upset was never about what they said it was about. It was about keeping you off-balance. Because a person who is constantly trying to figure out what they did wrong is a person who is easy to control.

2. Apologies That Only Go One Direction

This one is subtle but very telling. In a healthy relationship—even one where one partner struggles with insecurity—apologies go both ways. Your partner might overreact, and then later say, “I’m sorry. I know I was being unreasonable. I’m working on it.”

In a manipulative dynamic, you do the apologizing. You apologize because something you said or did made them upset. But when you bring up your pain, the conversation pivots. Suddenly it’s about how your reaction was the problem. They don’t take responsibility. They redirect. Over time, you start to accept that your feelings are less important—that your job is to manage their emotions, not the other way around.

I want to be direct about this: if you’re always the one apologizing and your partner rarely or never takes genuine accountability, that’s a pattern worth examining. An insecure person can still own their behavior. A manipulator almost never does.

3. Your Reality Starts to Feel Unstable

Does an insecure partner sometimes see things differently than you? Of course. Two people can witness the same event and have genuinely different experiences of it. That’s normal.

What is not normal is when you start to doubt your own memory. When you clearly remember something happening and your partner tells you it didn’t. When you’re told you’re “too sensitive” or “imagining things” so many times that you begin to wonder if maybe they’re right.

This is gaslighting, and it serves a very specific purpose. If you can’t trust your own perceptions, you become dependent on someone else to define reality for you. And guess who steps into that role?

I spend a lot of time with clients helping them reconnect with their own internal compass. I ask them: “If your partner hadn’t said those things, what would you believe? What do you think happened?” That simple question can be surprisingly powerful for someone who hasn’t been asked what they think in a very long time.

4. Isolation Dressed Up as Protection

A certain amount of jealousy in a relationship isn’t always destructive. Sometimes it’s a sign that someone values you and the relationship. An insecure partner might feel uncomfortable when you go out with friends, and they’ll tell you that—but they won’t try to stop you.

A manipulative partner will. And they’ll frame it as love.

I worked with a couple where the husband had effectively cut off his wife’s relationship with her own father. He presented it as protecting her boundaries—her family was “dysfunctional,” he said, and she didn’t need the stress. The mother, who stayed quiet, was tolerated. But the father, who pushed back against the son-in-law’s behavior, was shut out entirely. By the time I saw them, this woman’s father hadn’t seen his grandchild for over a year.

That wasn’t protection. That was isolation. And the real reason was that people who love you—friends, family—are voices of reason. They see what’s happening. A controlling partner doesn’t want you hearing those voices, because if you did, you might set boundaries. You might get healthier. And that threatens their control.

If you used to have a full social life and you don’t anymore, and you can’t quite explain what happened—take a careful look at who benefited from that change.

5. The Silent Treatment as a Weapon

There’s a difference between someone who needs space to calm down after a disagreement and someone who withdraws affection as punishment.

The manipulative version sounds like: “If you set that boundary, I’m leaving.” Or it’s just silence. Cold silence, designed to make you panic and give in. It’s not, “I need time to process.” It’s, “You will comply, or you will suffer.”

This is a calculated move to force submission. It’s not fear. It’s not insecurity. It’s power.

6. Boundaries Are Treated as an Attack

People who struggle with insecurity might initially resist a boundary—but with some patience and communication, they can come to respect it. They might not like it, but they can sit with the discomfort.

For a manipulative partner, your boundaries are the enemy. Every boundary you set becomes a battle. They’ll question your motives, accuse you of not loving them, or escalate the situation until you back down.

Why? Because boundaries limit their control. And control is what this is about. Not love. Not vulnerability. Control.

The Distinction That Changes Everything: Fear vs. Power

If I could leave you with one thing from this article, it’s this: Insecurity is fear-based. Manipulation is power-based.

The insecure partner is afraid of losing you. The manipulative partner is afraid of losing control over you. Those are two very different fears that produce two very different behaviors.

Now, I’ll be honest—underneath the need for power, there is often fear. Maybe this person grew up in a chaotic household where they had no control, and now they feel safe only when they’re running the show. Understanding that doesn’t excuse the behavior. But it does help explain it. And it helps you see that this isn’t something you caused and it’s not something you can fix by being more accommodating. The accommodation is the trap.

Side-by-Side: Insecurity vs. Manipulation

I’ve put together this comparison from patterns I’ve observed over decades of clinical work. No single item is definitive on its own, but clusters of these behaviors are very meaningful.What to Do If You Recognize These Patterns

I want to be careful here, because every situation is different, and I don’t believe in one-size-fits-all advice. But I can share what I’ve seen work in my practice.

Start by Trusting Yourself Again

If you’ve been in a manipulative dynamic for a while, your own internal compass may feel broken. It’s not. It’s been suppressed. The work starts with asking yourself what you think, what you feel, and what you would believe if no one else was telling you what to believe.

This sounds simple. For someone who has been gaslighted for years, it can be one of the hardest things they’ve ever done.

Get Outside Perspective

There’s a reason manipulative partners cut off your support system. Those people see what you can’t see when you’re in the middle of it. Reconnecting with trusted friends, family, or a therapist who understands these dynamics is not weakness. It’s one of the bravest things you can do.

Understand Your Own Patterns

Many people who end up in manipulative relationships are highly adaptive. They learned early in life to read other people’s moods and adjust accordingly. That skill, which was probably a survival strategy at some point, makes them especially susceptible to a partner who uses emotional volatility as a control mechanism.

Understanding this about yourself isn’t about self-blame. It’s about knowing what to watch for—in this relationship and in future ones.

Professional Support Matters

I’ll say this plainly: these dynamics are complex, and trying to sort through them alone is extraordinarily difficult. A therapist who specializes in relational dynamics, gaslighting, or emotional abuse can help you see patterns you’ve been too close to recognize. This is true whether you decide to stay in the relationship or leave.

If you stay, certain things absolutely have to change. If you leave, you’ll need support to rebuild your sense of self. Either way, you don’t have to do this alone.

The Hardest Part: Cognitive Dissonance

Here’s something I don’t hear people talk about enough. When you start to realize that your partner’s behavior might be manipulation rather than insecurity, you’re going to experience a painful internal conflict.

Because you want to see your partner as a good person. Maybe in the beginning of the relationship, they were wonderful—or they seemed to be. You’re holding onto that version of them. The idea that the person you love might be deliberately controlling you creates a kind of cognitive dissonance that is genuinely agonizing.

This is normal. And it’s exactly why people stay in these relationships long after they’ve sensed something was off. The dissonance itself becomes another barrier to clarity.

The only way through it is to face what’s true—not all at once, but gradually, with support. It takes real courage. And the people who do this work, who sit with the discomfort and come out the other side, are some of the strongest people I know.

Questions I Hear Often

Can a manipulative partner change?

It’s possible, but it requires them to genuinely recognize and take responsibility for the behavior—not just apologize when caught. In my experience, meaningful change only happens when the manipulative partner does their own deep personal work, usually with a therapist, over an extended period. It’s not your job to make that happen or wait for it.

What if my partner has some of these traits but not all of them?

Human behavior doesn’t fit neatly into categories. Some people have genuine insecurity and controlling tendencies. The question isn’t whether to label your partner but whether the overall pattern is eroding your sense of self. If you’re constantly walking on eggshells, if you feel smaller and more confused over time, that’s worth addressing regardless of the label.

Is it possible I’m the manipulative one?

The fact that you’re asking that question is actually a meaningful data point. People who are genuinely manipulative rarely wonder about it. They’re defensive, not self-reflective. If you’re worried about your own behavior, that concern itself suggests you have the self-awareness and empathy that characterize an insecure partner, not a controlling one. That said, a good therapist can help you examine your patterns honestly.

Moving Forward

If anything in this article resonated with you—or if you recognized these patterns in someone you care about—I want you to know something.

This experience is demoralizing.

It can take your mental health and even your physical health down many notches. But you are not broken, and you are not crazy. What you’re experiencing is real.

The path forward starts with acknowledging what’s true, dealing with the confusion and cognitive dissonance, and coming out the other side with a stronger sense of who you are.

You deserve a relationship where reassurance actually reassures. Where your boundaries are respected. Where your reality is honored. That’s not too much to ask. It’s the bare minimum.

This is Todd Creager, making the world safe for love.

About the Author

Todd Creager, LCSW, LMFT, is a licensed couples therapist and infidelity recovery specialist with over 30 years of clinical experience. He has worked with hundreds of couples dealing with trust violations, emotional manipulation, and the complicated work of rebuilding relationships. Todd specializes in helping individuals who have lost their sense of self through prolonged manipulation to regain their internal compass and emotional stability. He is the author of multiple books on relationships and intimacy, and his approach combines clinical expertise with genuine compassion for the people sitting in his office.

Limitations: This article provides general educational information, not clinical diagnosis. Every relationship is unique, and the patterns described here exist on a spectrum.

If you’re concerned about manipulation in your relationship, professional assessment is recommended.

Feeling like you might be the victim of verbal abuse and/or gaslighting?

Why You Cannot Move On After Being Lied To: Cognitive Dissonance Explained

January 11, 2026 by Todd Creager Leave a Comment

Cognitive Dissonance: Loving Someone Who Lies

Hi everybody, this is something I see in my office almost every week. A client sits across from me and says, “I found out he’s been lying to me for years. About so many things. But I still love him. What’s wrong with me?”

Nothing is wrong with you. You’re experiencing what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, and when it comes to loving someone who has lied to you, it’s one of the most confusing and painful experiences you’ll go through.

Here’s the short version: Cognitive dissonance happens when you’re holding two conflicting truths at the same time. You loved someone deeply AND they’ve been lying to you. Both things are real. Your brain is trying to reconcile something that doesn’t reconcile easily, and that creates tremendous internal conflict.

But here’s what most people miss about this experience:

→ The confusion you feel isn’t weakness or gullibility. It’s actually evidence of your capacity to trust and form genuine connections.

→ This isn’t just an emotional struggle. Your nervous system and attachment patterns from childhood are involved, which is why you can’t just “logic your way out” of it.

→ The presence of cognitive dissonance doesn’t mean you should leave OR that you should stay. It means you need time and information before your heart and mind can align again.

The Three Core Conflicts I See When Lies Are Discovered

When someone discovers their partner has been lying to them—whether it’s lies about infidelity (sexual, emotional, or financial), addiction, money, online activities, or other deceptions—they typically face three overlapping conflicts. I’m going to walk you through each one because understanding them helps you be kinder to yourself during this confusing time.

Love vs. Reality

I’m thinking right now of a woman I’ve been working with. She was married for 25 years. Twenty-five years of what she experienced as a committed, loving partnership. She gave herself fully to this marriage and their family. She was loyal. She loved him deeply.

When she discovered the multiple infidelities and saw just how good he was at covering them up—the sophistication of his lies, how he did it, the systems he had in place—it devastated her. Why? Because the lies meant she hadn’t been living in reality at all.

Here’s what makes this so painful: He was living a completely different marriage than she was. She was experiencing a reality of mutual love, loyalty, family building, giving of herself. He was having a fantasy life with secret activities, all while love-bombing her and making her feel wonderful. That was part of how he manipulated her through lies. But he had a very different internal experience of their relationship.

Two people can be married and not be living in the same marriage. Nobody experiences marriage identically, but when one partner is lying and living a secret life, the gap becomes extreme.

And here’s the thing that creates cognitive dissonance: There were genuinely good moments. The lies don’t erase those moments. Even with people who are abusive, there are good moments, and that creates its own cognitive dissonance. But right now I’m talking about lies specifically.

Those good experiences you had? They were real for you. Your good feelings, your loving emotions, the oxytocin and dopamine responses in your brain, those were genuine. Some people tell me, “I never felt so loved and so loving with anyone else.” And then they find out this person has been lying to them, keeping massive secrets from them.

You’re facing your reality of love against the reality of lies you’re confronting right now. When people lie like this, it doesn’t always mean they don’t love you. But there were parts of them that were not capable of the kind of honest love you were giving. There were parts of them living in secrecy and deception. You had very different capacities to give and receive love, and you thought it was one thing when it was actually something else.

That reality is difficult to accept when you know you felt real love, real connection, real purpose. So if you’re hearing this and it relates to your situation, please understand: your confusion is normal. It’s completely understandable to feel this conflicted.

I’ve had people ask me, “What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I just move on?” It’s because there’s a part of you that doesn’t want to move on. A part that doesn’t want to give up the reality you were living all those years. That’s not so easy to just give up.

Attachment vs. Evidence

Related to this love-versus-reality conflict is the attachment-versus-evidence dynamic.

When you’re in an attachment relationship, especially if you’ve developed what psychologists call a “secure attachment,” you feel safe. You’re able to depend on your partner to some degree while also regulating your own emotions. The woman I mentioned earlier? She had formed a secure attachment. She felt genuinely secure in her marriage. Her partner was more avoidant and didn’t have the full investment she did, but she was deeply attached.

When that attachment gets threatened by discovering lies, it doesn’t just hurt in the present moment. It triggers early abandonment wounds from your past. Maybe you had parents who let you down or past relationships where people disappointed you. Your nervous system remembers all of that, and on some level, you’re protecting yourself from not only the pain of the current lies but the echo of past pain.

This is why it’s easy to stay in denial. Part of you wants to hold onto the belief that “this can’t be true” because accepting it means facing all that pain.

But then there’s the other side: the evidence. In my client’s case, the texts, the media she found, the phone calls she saw, the credit card records, whatever evidence she discovered. The neurobiological attachment saying “don’t let go” is in direct conflict with the factual evidence of lies.

It’s a difficult thing for your brain to negotiate. You’re attached at a deep, neurobiological level, but the evidence of deception is sitting right in front of you.

Hope vs. Self-Abandonment

The third major conflict I see is between hope and self-abandonment.

Part of you hopes this person will stop lying. Part of you hopes things can get better. And I want you to know: I’m a person who says things can get better. I’ve seen couples where there has been lying, where that person changes. The lying does get better. That happens.

But here’s the complexity: The person who was lied to has got to find that out over time. They need to see if this person is really taking a closer look at themselves and making some changes so that they won’t lie in the future.

In the meantime, you’re going through this internal battle between wanting hope and not wanting to abandon yourself. You don’t want to treat yourself like everything was okay when it wasn’t. You don’t want to act like the lies didn’t happen. You don’t want to treat yourself like you don’t matter.

This is incredibly difficult for many people, even in the face of their partner making some real good changes. They feel like, “I’m abandoning myself. I’m treating myself like everything was okay and it wasn’t. I’m treating myself like it didn’t happen. I’m treating myself like I don’t matter.”

When someone lies to us, even if they start to get better, it’s really hard to trust it because you feel like you’re abandoning yourself. You feel like you’re letting them get away with it. It makes you feel like if you treat things like it’s all okay, you’re abandoning yourself.

So you’ve got love versus reality, attachment versus evidence, and hope versus self-abandonment, all happening simultaneously. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance in loving someone who lies to you and trying to recover from all that.

What This Looks Like in Real Time

Let me give you a sense of what I hear in my office when someone is experiencing this cognitive dissonance after discovering lies:

“I know what he did was terrible. I saw the texts. But I still love him.”

“She says she’s done lying, and I see some differences, but how do I know this is real?”

“Some days I’m so angry about the lies I can barely look at him. Other days I remember why I fell in love with him.”

“I feel crazy. How can I still love someone who lied to me for so long?”

“My friends think I’m stupid for staying with someone who lied, but they don’t understand how good it was before.”

“I want to believe the lies are over, but every time I start to trust, I feel like I’m being naive again.”

Do any of these sound familiar? If so, you’re right in the middle of cognitive dissonance.

The Path Through Cognitive Dissonance

The good news, and there is good news here, is that there are ways to navigate this. First of all, be kind to yourself. There’s a practice here.

When you’re feeling that cognitive dissonance, you want to be kind to yourself. If you want to think about it as a silver lining, it’s your opportunity to treat yourself very well no matter what happens with your relationship. Your confusion doesn’t make you weak or gullible. It makes you human. It makes you someone who trusted deeply and is now trying to integrate a painful reality.

The second thing is to be patient with yourself. You have that cognitive dissonance. Be patient. Your brain needs time to process two conflicting truths. Some days you’ll feel clear. Other days you’ll feel confused again. That’s normal.

Third, do your research with your partner. See if they’re making real changes or just superficial changes. Are they just in crisis and trying to hold onto what they had before with you? Or are they really trying to shift and change from the inside out?

What were the underlying factors that led to his or her lying? Are those dissolving? That does happen. Like I said, I’m hopeful because I’ve seen this happen, but it doesn’t always happen.

When I work with couples dealing with this, I’m looking for evidence of real change: Are they showing evidence of healing? Is there transparency now where there were secrets before? Is there consistency over time? Are they willing to be uncomfortable and vulnerable? Are they really atoning for what they did?

Fourth, face reality while keeping hope alive when it’s appropriate. Whether it’s love versus reality, yeah, ultimately you need to face reality. But part of the reality is to check out: is this partner who lied to me getting better? Are they showing evidence of that?

So there’s the evidence of what the person did and how they lied, but is there also the evidence of them healing?

Hope versus self-abandonment. There’s nothing wrong with hope, as long as you’re not in denial and it’s not self-abandonment. When you see some real changes from the inside out, where behavior’s changing, the person’s really atoning for what they did, and you’re starting to see some real shifts—these are some of the things I look at when I’m working with people and their cognitive dissonance.

Self-abandonment is when you’re not conscious and you’re clinging to a partner who lied to you without seeing if anything has changed. But it isn’t self-abandonment when you’re really taking a step back, when you’re doing the work, but you’re seeing that your partner’s doing the work, and that you hope again and you let hope rule based on evidence.

It’s all important to take your time. See what’s really going on. But throughout the whole process, be kind to yourself.

The Role of Attachment Patterns

I mentioned earlier that attachment patterns play a role in cognitive dissonance. Let me expand on that because it’s important for understanding yourself.

If you formed a secure attachment in your relationship, you felt safe depending on your partner. You could regulate your emotions relatively well. When that gets shattered by discovering lies, it’s not just the deception you’re grieving. You’re grieving the sense of safety you had.

Your partner’s lies trigger early abandonment wounds. Who wants to have that? So it’s easy to stay in denial and hold onto the belief this can’t be true because on some level, you’re protecting yourself from not only the pain of the current lies but the pain of past disappointments with other people who let you down.

If you came into the relationship with anxious attachment patterns (maybe from childhood experiences), the lies confirm your worst fears about not being able to trust or not being enough. That makes the cognitive dissonance even more intense because you’re fighting against old wounds being ripped open again.

Understanding your attachment pattern doesn’t solve the problem, but it helps you understand why you’re responding the way you are. It helps you recognize: I’m attached. I don’t want to give up that attachment. It’s not just about not wanting to give up the idea—there’s also attachment at a neurobiological level.

What About When The Lying Continues?

I want to be realistic with you. Sometimes the person who lied doesn’t change. Sometimes they make superficial adjustments but continue lying in other ways. Sometimes they’re just scared of losing what they had, but they’re not actually doing the internal work required to become an honest person.

If that’s what you’re seeing after giving it time, then your cognitive dissonance is trying to tell you something: The love you felt was real, but this relationship can’t continue if the lies continue.

That doesn’t make your love invalid. It doesn’t mean the good moments weren’t real. It means you’re facing an incredibly painful truth: Sometimes love isn’t enough if the other person isn’t capable of or willing to stop lying.

Your job isn’t to force yourself to stop loving someone. Your job is to take care of yourself, even if that means leaving a relationship where you still have loving feelings but where lies continue.

Moving Forward With Yourself

Whether you stay in your relationship or leave, whether your partner stops lying or doesn’t, you’re going to need to work through this cognitive dissonance.

That means:

Allowing yourself to hold both truths. You loved them deeply. They lied to you. Both are true.

Recognizing that your confusion makes sense given the circumstances. You experienced one reality while they were living another.

Taking all the time you need to process this. There’s no timeline for reconciling conflicting realities.

Finding support, whether that’s through therapy, support groups, or trusted friends who won’t pressure you to make decisions before you’re ready.

Practicing self-compassion when you feel stupid or naive. You’re none of those things. You trusted someone you loved. That’s what we’re supposed to do in relationships.

Remember what I said at the beginning: The confusion you feel isn’t weakness. It’s evidence of your capacity to trust and love. The fact that you’re struggling to reconcile these conflicting truths means you’re someone who formed a real attachment, who gave yourself authentically to a relationship.

That’s not something to be ashamed of. That’s something that speaks to your humanity and your heart.

Understanding Why You Have Cognitive Dissonance

Let me bring this together. Understand why you have cognitive dissonance for the reasons I’ve been talking about here today.

You have cognitive dissonance because:

You experienced real love while being lied to. Both happened simultaneously, even though they seem incompatible.

You formed a real attachment while the other person was keeping secrets. Your nervous system bonded with someone who wasn’t showing you their full reality.

You have hope for a relationship without lies while also not wanting to abandon yourself by pretending the lies didn’t matter.

These are completely normal, human responses to discovering that someone you love has been lying to you. The cognitive dissonance shows you’re grappling with a genuinely complex situation, not that there’s something wrong with you.

A Note on Time and Healing

I’ve been working with couples dealing with lies and infidelity for many years now. One thing I’ve learned: Cognitive dissonance doesn’t resolve quickly. It takes months, sometimes longer, for your heart and mind to align again after discovering significant lies.

During that time, you’ll have moments of clarity followed by moments of confusion. You’ll have days where you feel strong and days where you doubt everything. You’ll go back and forth between anger and love, between wanting to fix things and wanting to leave.

That’s all part of the process. Be patient with yourself as you move through it.

And know this: On the other side of cognitive dissonance, whether you stay or go, is a clearer sense of reality. You’ll eventually integrate these conflicting truths into a more complete picture. It won’t be the picture you had before, but it will be one you can stand on solidly because it’s based on truth rather than lies.

About Working Through This:

I’ve been helping couples and individuals work through the aftermath of lies and deception for over three decades. What I’ve seen repeatedly is that people are stronger and more resilient than they think.

The cognitive dissonance you’re experiencing is painful, but it’s also a sign that you’re not willing to ignore reality or abandon yourself.

If you’re going through this right now, please be gentle with yourself. Take your time. Do the research on whether your partner has genuinely stopped lying. Face reality while maintaining hope based on evidence, not denial.

And remember: Whatever you’re feeling makes sense. You’re not crazy. You’re not weak. You’re someone who loved deeply and trusted fully and is now trying to navigate one of the most painful experiences a person can have—discovering that the person you loved has been lying to you.

That takes courage.

Feeling like you might be the victim of verbal abuse and/or gaslighting?

Trust Your Gut Recognizing Gaslighting in Your Relationship

January 2, 2026 by Todd Creager Leave a Comment

When Your Gut Knows the Truth But Your Partner Says You’re Wrong

Understanding Gaslighting, Reclaiming Your Intuition, and Finding Your Way Back to Yourself

You know something is wrong. Your body tells you. That tight feeling in your chest, the knot in your stomach, that voice in the back of your head saying this isn’t right.

But every time you try to bring it up, your partner turns it around. Suddenly you’re the problem. You’re “too sensitive” or “overreacting” or “imagining things.”

And here’s the thing that breaks my heart: after enough of this, you start to believe them.

The Quick Version

Gaslighting is when your partner consistently makes you doubt your own perceptions, memories, and gut instincts. It’s a form of emotional abuse—sometimes conscious and strategic, sometimes unconscious and self-protective. Either way, the damage is the same: you lose trust in yourself, which is the foundation of self-esteem and healthy relationships.

What Most People Don’t Realize

First, people who want relationships to work are more vulnerable to gaslighting. If you deeply value family, commitment, and connection, you’re more likely to question yourself rather than question your partner. That’s not weakness—it’s a strength being exploited.

Second, the person gaslighting often doesn’t see what they’re doing. In many cases, it’s an automatic defense mechanism rooted in their own unprocessed pain, shame, or trauma. They genuinely believe their version of events because facing the truth would be too painful.

Third, and this is the part that matters most: recovery means learning to trust your gut again. Not just leaving a bad situation, but actually rebuilding that relationship with your own intuition that got damaged along the way.

How Gaslighting Actually Works

Let me be clear about what gaslighting looks like in real life, because sometimes people think it has to be dramatic or obvious. It usually isn’t.

Your partner comes home late. You feel something’s off. When you ask about it, they don’t just explain—they attack. “Why are you always so suspicious? You’re so controlling. No wonder I don’t want to come home.” Now you’re apologizing for asking a simple question.

Or maybe you’re upset about something they said. Instead of hearing you out, they rewrite history: “I never said that. You’re making things up again.” And you start wondering if maybe you did misremember, even though you know you didn’t.

Over time, you learn to walk on eggshells. You describe it to me like walking through a minefield—one wrong step and everything blows up. You become invisible, making yourself smaller and smaller, just trying to avoid the next explosion.

Projective Identification: The Psychology Behind the Pattern

There’s a concept in psychology called projective identification, and understanding it can be really helpful. Here’s how it works: when someone can’t tolerate certain feelings in themselves—shame, inadequacy, fear—they project those feelings onto you. But it goes further than that. You actually start feeling what they can’t feel. You take on their emotional baggage.

So if your partner feels deep down that they’re not good enough, but they can’t face that, they might make you feel not good enough. Their shame becomes your shame. Their inadequacy becomes your inadequacy. It’s like an emotional transfer they don’t even know they’re doing.

This is why victims of gaslighting so often say, “I don’t even know what’s mine and what’s theirs anymore.” That confusion is the projective identification at work.

A Story from My Practice

Let me tell you about a couple I worked with many years ago—names changed, of course, but the dynamics were so clear.

The husband comes in for our first session and immediately goes on the attack. I was probably 20 years younger than I am now—he was probably my age at the time. He looks at me and says something along the lines of, “What does some young punk therapist know about marriage? Go to hell.” That was my greeting. First session.

Now, I’m human. I felt intimidated. But something about that intimidation felt off to me—not quite mine. So I said to his wife, “Wow, I feel really intimidated right now. Do you feel this way around him?”

She looked at me and said, “All the time. So do a lot of other people.”

I saw the smirk on his face. He was proud of this. So I turned to him and explained projective identification—that when someone makes everyone around them feel intimidated, often they’re unconsciously passing along a feeling they can’t tolerate in themselves.

He gave me grief about “fancy words” but I pressed on: “Who the hell intimidated you?”

And then, underneath all that aggression, something shifted. “Oh, so this is where I’m supposed to tell you about my father and how he abused me pretty much from the day I was born.”

There it was.

What Happened Next

This man was gaslighting his wife constantly. He made everyone around him feel stupid, inadequate, like they were walking through a minefield. But it wasn’t really about them—it was his own feelings of unworthiness, his own damaged self-esteem from a critical, abusive father. He acted out on other people what he couldn’t face in himself.

I don’t believe, deep down, he was a malicious man. Some people who gaslight are, but he wasn’t. He just had no other way to cope with his pain.

We worked together, and he was willing—with the right help—to see what he was doing. To recognize it as a defense mechanism. To understand how he was impacting the people he loved.

About eight or ten years later, I ran into his wife by chance. She told me, “Todd, what you did was so helpful. He would never admit it or give you credit—you know that—but he’s like a teddy bear now.”

His friendships got better. His marriage got dramatically better. Everything changed when he finally faced what he’d been running from.

Signs You May Be Experiencing Gaslighting

I want to be thoughtful here because every situation is different. But if you’re experiencing several of these patterns, it’s worth paying attention.

You often think “What’s wrong with me?” after conversations with your partner. You regularly wonder if you’re overreacting or being too sensitive. You find yourself apologizing even when you didn’t do anything wrong.

You’ve started covering up for your partner—lying to friends, family, even your children—because you want them to see your partner in a good light. You feel like you’re walking on eggshells, always bracing for the next explosion.

You feel like you need to be invisible to stay safe. When something goes wrong, it somehow always becomes your fault. You’ve become isolated from people who used to be close to you.

And maybe the biggest sign: you’ve stopped trusting your own gut. That inner voice that used to guide you has gotten quieter and quieter.

The Real Cost of Staying in a Gaslighting Relationship

The price you pay for keeping a relationship stabilized in that kind of toxic stability is enormous. I’m talking about your emotional wellbeing, your physical health, and—if you have children—their wellbeing too.

Because here’s what I’ve learned after 35 years of doing this work: the most important thing you can do for yourself and your children is to be a person with self-esteem. And the most essential part of self-esteem is listening to yourself—listening to your own heart and your own gut.

When you’re in a gaslighting relationship, you lose that. You become disconnected from your own intuition. And without that connection, you’re not really you anymore.

I’ve worked with countless people—men, women, all genders—who were victims of gaslighting. When they finally get out, either by leaving or by the relationship healing, they always say the same thing: “My God, it never was me. It never was me.”

They describe what it’s like to finally feel safe. To just express themselves without feeling like they’re in a minefield. To say something without bracing for it to blow up in their face.

The Path Forward: Whether You Stay or Go

Let me be honest with you: some gaslighting relationships can heal, and some can’t. The difference usually comes down to whether the person doing the gaslighting is willing to look at themselves honestly and take responsibility for their behavior.

When Healing Is Possible

In the relationships I’ve seen heal, two things had to happen. First, the victim of the gaslighting had to recognize what was happening and stop trying to make everything nice when it wasn’t nice. They had to disengage from the habit of smoothing things over and keeping the peace at any cost.

Second, the person doing the gaslighting had to face whatever they were running from. Their shame, their childhood wounds, their own feelings of inadequacy—whatever it was driving the behavior. That’s painful work. Not everyone is willing to do it.

But when both partners are willing, real change is possible. The man from my story is proof of that.

When You Need to Leave

Some relationships can’t be healed from the inside. When the gaslighting person refuses to take any responsibility, when they’re not willing to look at themselves, when every attempt to address the problem becomes another attack on you—sometimes leaving is the only way to heal.

And that’s okay. Leaving isn’t failure. Sometimes leaving is the bravest, healthiest thing you can do.

The First Step, No Matter What

Whether you end up staying or leaving, the first step is the same: find someone you can talk to. Even if—especially if—your partner has isolated you, which many people who gaslight do.

It might be a friend, a family member, or a professional therapist like myself. Someone who can help you get perspective and reconnect with your intuition and your gut.

You may have been brainwashed to think you need to keep everything private. That’s not necessarily true. It isn’t true when you’re dealing with someone who’s hurting you.

Reconnecting with Your Gut: The Real Work of Recovery

Recovery from gaslighting isn’t just about changing your circumstances. It’s about rebuilding trust with yourself. That inner compass that got damaged—it can heal.

Start by noticing when you dismiss your own feelings. When you feel something is off but immediately tell yourself you’re probably wrong, pause. Ask yourself: Is this my genuine intuition speaking, or is this the voice of someone who taught me not to trust myself?

Practice giving weight to your own perceptions. If you remember something a certain way, honor that memory. You’re not crazy. You’re not making things up. Your gut knows things before your mind catches up.

And be patient with yourself. This kind of healing takes time. You didn’t lose trust in yourself overnight, and you won’t rebuild it overnight either.

Trust Your Gut

Here’s what I want you to take away from all of this: your gut is not wrong. If something feels wrong, something probably is wrong.

Gaslighting is common. It’s painful. It’s confusing. But you can get free from it—whether that means your relationship heals or you find the strength to leave.

If this resonates with you, or if you know someone going through this, reach out. Talk to someone. Get the support you deserve.

You are not the problem. You never were.

Thanks for reading. This is Todd Creager, making the world safe for love.

Frequently Asked Questions About Gaslighting

What’s the difference between normal disagreements and gaslighting?

In healthy disagreements, both people can acknowledge each other’s perspective even when they don’t agree. With gaslighting, your reality itself gets denied. It’s not “I see it differently”—it’s “That never happened” or “You’re crazy for thinking that.” The pattern over time erodes your confidence in your own perceptions.

Can someone gaslight without meaning to?

Yes, absolutely. Sometimes gaslighting is conscious and strategic—the person knows exactly what they’re doing. But often it’s unconscious and self-protective. The person genuinely can’t face certain truths about themselves, so they rewrite reality in a way that protects their self-image. The impact on you is the same either way, but understanding this can be helpful in deciding whether the relationship can heal.

How long does it take to recover from a gaslighting relationship?

There’s no standard timeline. I’ve seen people make significant progress in months; others take years to fully rebuild trust with themselves. Factors include how long the gaslighting went on, whether you have support, and whether you’re still in the relationship. The key is being patient with yourself and getting professional help if you need it.

What if I’m worried I might be the one gaslighting?

The fact that you’re asking this question is actually a good sign. People who gaslight consistently rarely wonder if they’re the problem—that self-reflection is what they’re avoiding. That said, all of us can have moments of defensiveness where we deny or minimize things. If you’re concerned about this pattern in yourself, working with a therapist can help you develop more self-awareness and healthier ways of handling conflict.

About the Author

Todd Creager, LCSW, LMFT has spent over 35 years helping couples and individuals heal from the pain of betrayal, addiction, trauma, and relationship dysfunction. He specializes in infidelity recovery and helping partners rebuild trust and intimacy. His approach combines clinical expertise with genuine compassion, creating a safe space where people can face difficult truths and do the hard work of healing.

Feeling like you might be the victim of verbal abuse and/or gaslighting?

Why Cheating Partners Use Gaslighting to Hide The Truth

December 18, 2025 by Todd Creager Leave a Comment

When Infidelity Meets Gaslighting: Why Your Gut Keeps Telling You Something’s Wrong (And Why They Keep Saying It’s Not)

Here’s what throws most people: they think the pain of discovering infidelity is the worst part. After 30+ years working with couples, I can tell you that’s rarely true.

The worst part?

It’s usually the months—sometimes years—before discovery, when you knew something was off but kept getting told you were imagining it.

TL;DR: Unfaithful partners often use gaslighting tactics to avoid facing consequences and their own shame. Common strategies include denying obvious behavioral changes, minimizing or rewriting events (the “drip method”), reversing blame onto you, and using anger as a distraction.

If you constantly find yourself asking “Am I overreacting?” or “What’s wrong with me?” around your partner, you may be experiencing gaslighting alongside infidelity.

But here’s what most people miss:

→ Gaslighting during affairs causes its own trauma symptoms before you even discover the betrayal

→ Most unfaithful partners aren’t consciously evil—they’re in self-protective mode (which doesn’t make it less harmful)

→ The manipulation isn’t just about hiding the affair; it’s about avoiding the shame of being caught “like a little kid”

Let me be clear about scope here:

I’m focusing on the more common scenario where gaslighting emerges from self-protection rather than malicious intent.

Yes, sometimes gaslighting is intentional and calculating. But in my practice, I see far more people who are unconsciously employing these tactics because facing reality feels unbearable. That distinction matters for recovery, though both cause real harm to you.

The Mechanics of Denial: When Obvious Changes Become “Your Problem”

Your partner’s behavior has shifted. They’re staying later at work. They’ve suddenly changed their phone password after 15 years together. They’re less interested in sex with you, or weirdly, they’re suddenly more interested. The emotional temperature in your home has changed—you can feel it.

You bring it up. And then you hear: “You’re making this up. You’re overreacting. Why are you always so suspicious? My God, we’ve been married 20 years—don’t you trust me?”

This is denying the obvious, and it’s one of the first tactics unfaithful partners use. Here’s the reality check most therapists won’t tell you: the person doing this has extremely high motivation to keep things exactly as they are. They don’t want their life to blow up. They don’t want to lose their family, their reputation, their comfortable setup. And they definitely don’t want to face the shame that comes with being exposed.

So they deny. Even when the evidence is stacking up. Even when your gut is screaming at you.

What this actually does to you: You start questioning your own perception. You think “Maybe I am being paranoid.” You wonder if you need to work on your trust issues. You might even start researching whether you have an anxiety disorder. Meanwhile, the gaslighting is creating its own trauma symptoms—disorientation, self-doubt, a constant feeling of “what’s wrong with me?”

If you’re asking yourself that question repeatedly around your partner, pay attention. That’s your first warning sign.

In practice: I’ve worked with betrayed partners who sought individual therapy before discovering the affair, convinced they had a mental health problem. Their therapists sometimes reinforced this because the therapist didn’t have the full picture. The betrayed partner did have anxiety and instability—but it was a rational response to being manipulated, not a preexisting condition.

The Drip Method: How Truth Gets Parceled Out to Minimize Damage

Let’s say they’ve been caught, or partially caught. Now comes the minimizing and rewriting of events.

“Look, I didn’t have sex with them, so what’s the big deal? I was just flirting.”

Or maybe they admit to one encounter: “I had a weak night. I drank too much. It happened once. I’m so sorry.”

Then you find the texts. Months of texts. Warming each other up for three months before that “one weak night.” Maybe they only had physical contact once, but there was significant emotional connection and planning. Or maybe—and this is extremely common—there were multiple physical encounters they’re not mentioning.

This is what we call the drip method in couples therapy. They give you just enough truth to seem like they’re being honest, while withholding the parts that make them look worse. Sometimes they’ll reframe their role entirely: “She really came on strong with me. I’m a rescuer—I just couldn’t say no.”

Then you discover texts where they were doing plenty of their own pursuing. They weren’t a passive victim of someone’s aggressive pursuit. They were an active, willing participant.

Why this matters: Each time you discover another piece they withheld, you experience the trauma of discovery again. It’s not one betrayal—it becomes multiple betrayals. The lying about the lying creates its own damage, separate from the affair itself.

The resource reality: If you’re in couples therapy and your partner is drip-feeding information, I tell clients to set a deadline. “You have one week to tell me everything. After that, each new revelation I discover on my own significantly reduces the chance we can recover from this.” Most people need consequences to break through the self-protection.

Reversing Blame: When Your Legitimate Concerns Become Your “Issues”

This one does real psychological damage. Your intuition kicks in—you know something’s wrong. You raise concerns. And suddenly, you’re the problem.

“You’re crazy. You’re insecure. You’re imagining things.”

Or they go deeper into your history: “You grew up with a mother who cheated on your father. Now you think everyone cheats. You grew up in a family where nobody trusted each other, so you can’t trust me.”

I’ve had clients where the unfaithful partner suggested the betrayed partner “get some therapy” for their trust issues. While actively cheating. The audacity is stunning, but remember—this is self-protection at work. They can’t face what they’re doing, so they make it about your supposed deficiencies.

Another version: “You kept pushing me away. You rejected me sexually over and over. What was I supposed to do?”

What they leave out: maybe you were pulling away because they stopped being emotionally present. They stopped listening. They stopped showing up for you in ways that make you feel safe enough to be sexually open. So they created the distance, then used that distance to justify betraying you, then blamed you for the distance.

When this crosses into danger territory: If you find yourself changing your behavior to avoid your partner’s accusations—if you’re walking on eggshells or suppressing valid concerns because you don’t want to seem “paranoid”—that’s a sign the gaslighting is working. Your emotional safety is being compromised.

What recovery requires: The unfaithful partner has to stop making you responsible for their choices. Full stop. They can acknowledge that problems existed in the relationship. They can own that they felt rejected or disconnected. But they have to own that cheating was their choice, made by them, for their own reasons. Until they can do that, recovery isn’t possible.

Anger as Distraction: The Strategic Explosion

Some unfaithful partners have figured out that anger shuts down conversation really effectively—especially if you’re someone who responds to anger with fear or withdrawal.

You bring up your concerns. They explode. “I can’t believe you’re accusing me of this! After everything I do for this family! I work my ass off and this is how you treat me?”

Suddenly you’re backing down, apologizing for bringing it up, just trying to avoid their wrath. The topic gets dropped. Your intuitive accusations get silenced. And they’ve successfully distracted from the real issue.

This isn’t always calculated. Sometimes it’s an automatic defensive response. But calculated or not, it’s still a manipulation that keeps you from getting answers you deserve.

The pattern to watch for: If every time you raise certain topics your partner becomes explosively angry, and you find yourself dropping those topics to keep the peace, that’s a red flag. Healthy relationships can handle difficult conversations without one partner using emotional volatility to control the dialogue.

What You Need to Know About Recovery (The Part Most Articles Skip)

Here’s what I see after working with hundreds of couples dealing with healing from infidelity and gaslighting:

Recovery is possible, but only if the gaslighting stops. And I mean completely stops. The person who betrayed has to move from self-protection mode into full accountability. That’s a painful transition—it means facing their shame, their choices, their role in hurting you. Many people can’t make that shift without professional help.

Your symptoms are real, but they’re rational responses to an irrational situation. You’re not crazy. You’re not overreacting. Your nervous system is responding appropriately to a threat. When someone you love is lying to you and making you doubt your reality, anxiety and instability make perfect sense.

The gaslighting often reveals deeper issues that led to the affair. People who can’t face their shame about cheating usually can’t face other uncomfortable truths about themselves. The inability to be accountable in one area tends to show up in other areas too. That’s what needs addressing in therapy.

You’ll know they’re serious about change when they stop defending and start being curious. When they stop explaining why you’re wrong to be upset and start asking what you need to feel safe again. When they stop minimizing and start being transparent, even when the truth makes them look bad.

If You’re Reading This and Recognizing Your Situation

Step out of the self-blame. If you’ve been asking yourself “What’s wrong with me?” or “Am I overreacting?” repeatedly, the problem isn’t you. Your instincts are working fine—they’re being deliberately or unconsciously undermined.

You’re not paranoid for noticing changes. You’re not insecure for wanting honesty. You’re not demanding for expecting your partner to face reality with you instead of making you question yours.

The path forward requires both people developing what I call emotional muscles—the capacity to stay present with pain, to face uncomfortable truths, to be curious about each other’s experience without immediately defending. The unfaithful partner needs to build the muscle to tolerate their shame without deflecting it onto you. You need support to rebuild trust in your own perceptions.

Professional help matters here. These patterns run deep, and untangling gaslighting from infidelity from legitimate relationship issues requires skilled guidance. You can’t do this alone, and you shouldn’t have to.

This is Todd Creager, making the world safe for love.

About the Author: Todd Creager has worked with couples navigating infidelity recovery for over 30 years. His approach emphasizes creating safety for both partners while maintaining accountability, with particular expertise in helping betrayed partners rebuild trust in their own perceptions after gaslighting. These insights come from direct clinical experience with couples at various stages of recovery, from immediate crisis through long-term rebuilding.

Methodology Note: The examples throughout this article come from composite cases—patterns observed repeatedly across multiple clients with identifying details altered to protect confidentiality. The tactics described represent the most common gaslighting strategies observed in practice when infidelity is present, documented across hundreds of couple sessions.

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