I had been married for six years when I found drugs in my house. While my twin babies were sleeping, I decided to hang a tiny canvas painting celebrating coffee on the wall above my kitchen cabinets.

While up there, I glanced along the dirty, dusty line at the top of my kitchen cabinets and there, in the back right corner, I saw an empty prescription bottle. I reached down and picked him up. There was no dust.

He hadn’t been there for a very long time. The label was mostly peeled off, and inside was a Ziploc bag containing nothing but pot crumbs.

Pot isn’t that big of a deal for most people. It was in the present legal for medicinal purposes in neighboring states. CBD retailers were just starting to pop up and it was only a matter of time before our state started selling pot too.

But we weren’t “most” people. At the time of this discovery, I had been clean of drugs and alcohol for over nine years. The only other person living with me—my husband at the time, whom I met in a 12-step fellowship—should also have been nine years clean. For there to be drugs in the home of two recovering drug addicts was a big deal.

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“We found pot in our house,” I texted my husband. “What?” he replied.

I took a picture of it and sent it to him. “Whose is it?” I asked. “I have no idea,” he said.

“Is it yours?” “Not.”

“Whose could it be?” “I don’t know.”

No one had been in our house recently long enough to think it might have been stored, so I let it go as if I’d never found it. The “mysterious” owner of the pot was not officially traced for another month.

It was—you guessed it—my husband’s. Also, it wasn’t just pot we found later. It should have occurred to me that if I hadn’t brought the drugs into my house, then the next logical choice would have been the other drug addict who lived there.

It never even crossed my mind that I shouldn’t trust my husband.

“When we find that someone we’ve trusted can no longer be trusted, it forces us to reexamine the universe, to question our entire instincts and the concept of trust. For a time, we are pushed back on a bleak, protruding edge into a darkness. pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before there was kinship, name, or tenderness, we are brought close to formlessness.” —Adrienne Rich

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I later found out that he had been secretly using drugs almost the whole time we were together.

I was so puzzled and so confused when I found out. I am a smart woman. Not only that, I’m a recovering drug addict myself. Shouldn’t I, of all people, have known that the man I was living with was using drugs? I should have, but I didn’t.

What I know now is that I experienced “cognitive dissonance” as a result of my husband gaslighting me. cognitive dissonance, according to psychologyis defined as “mental discomfort resulting from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes.”

Part of cognitive dissonance is trying to cope with difficult situations through “positive illusions.” To avoid facing uncomfortable realities, we try to convince ourselves that everything is better than it is.

Let’s say you’ve been diagnosed with diabetes and your doctor has told you that you need to make dramatic changes in your lifestyle. While of course you believe your doctor, you may not want to accept how serious your diagnosis is.

You don’t want to go through the upheaval of making major changes to your diet and exercise habits, so you’re wrong to think that it will be okay to carry on as you were. Then, as expected, you get seriously ill and you have to finally make those changes.

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It’s not that you’re an idiot or a fool for not following your doctor’s advice. It is, instead, what the political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan calls a “basic human survival skill.” There are simply more important things than the truth.

Suppose you hear a growl in the bushes behind you. The safest thing to do is to run, even if it turns out that someone is just messing with you. Survival is more important than the truth.

Just as we apply fight or flight to dangerous situations, we also apply it to threatening information. people, the scientists concludedhave a tendency toward “motivated reasoning,” meaning a subconscious negative response to new information that contradicts our prior beliefs.

Our reasoning is full of emotion. Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas emerge much more quickly than our conscious thoughts. Our feelings arrive before our reasoning can.

It’s not that I didn’t want to see my husband’s behavior as it was. It’s that my response to receiving information that conflicted with my own belief system caused me to focus on information that supported my beliefs.

RDNE Project Stock / Pexels

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So I did my best to explain my husband’s problematic behavior, which would probably have seemed obvious to anyone else.

So, my husband had red eyes a lot due to “allergies”. He craved sweets because he had a “ruthless sweet tooth”. He couldn’t keep money because he “liked to collect very much”. He rushed me to bed night after night “because he needed time to himself.”

“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he backs down. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to get your point “. — Festinger, Riecken and Schacter, When prophecy fails

It’s so hard to admit when we’re wrong, that reality doesn’t match our beliefs. I’ve given this a lot of thought to myself. How, even when I held the drugs in my hands—not just once, but three separate times—I still wanted to believe that my husband never had betrayed me.

I wanted to accept the drugs I had discovered. But eventually, I had to let go of the theory that my husband was a good guy, or at least a guy I needed to stay married to. Admitting I was wrong about him, wrong about our marriage, was hard, but sometimes the best thing to get out of admitting a mistake is that we can build something better on top of it.

If you or someone you know is suffering from addiction, there are resources to get help.

The recovery process is not linear, but the first step to getting better is asking for help. For more information, referrals to local treatment facilities and support groups, and relevant links, visit SAMHSA’s website. If you want to join a recovery support group, you can locate the nearest Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings near you. Or you can call the SAMHSA National Helpline at 1-800-799-7233, which is a toll-free 24/7 confidential information service in both English and Spanish. For TTY or if you cannot speak safely, call 1-800-487-4889.

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Country Blair Ball is a certified relationship coach and podcast co-host for Breaking Free from Narcissistic Abuse. She is also the author of three books: Grateful in love, A couple’s goal journaland Recovery and recovery: Heal from toxic relationships.