When Love and Pain Live in the Same House: My Family and the Truth About Cognitive Dissonance

by Jessica Anne Pressler, LCSW

My mother changed the world for girls.

In 1973, when the legal profession was still overwhelmingly male, Sylvia Pressler — a hearing examiner with New Jersey’s Division on Civil Rights and later one of the first women appointed to the state’s Appellate Division — ruled that a twelve-year-old girl named Maria Pepe had every right to play on her Little League team. Little League’s national office called the decision “vindictive and prejudicial.” My mother didn’t flinch. The ruling held. New Jersey became the first state in the country to bar sex discrimination in Little League, and within a year, the organization had changed its national charter to welcome girls everywhere. She went on to become the first woman ever named Presiding Judge of New Jersey’s Appellate Division. She wrote the book on New Jersey court rules — literally — authoring and updating it every single year. She later gave gay couples the right to adopt and imposed a moratorium on the death penalty that ultimately led to its abolition in New Jersey. She was brilliant, principled, tireless, and brave.

She was also my mother. And inside our home, I never once felt like I was enough.

That contradiction — the pride and the pain living side by side, refusing to cancel each other out — is one of the most quietly devastating experiences a child can have. And it has a name: cognitive dissonance.

So, What Exactly Is Cognitive Dissonance?

At its most basic, cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we feel when we hold two conflicting beliefs, feelings, or realities at the same time. The term was coined by psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1950s, but you don’t need a degree to recognize it. You’ve probably felt it. Many of us.

It’s the moment you catch yourself defending someone who just hurt you. It’s the loyalty you feel toward a person whose behavior confuses you. It’s the way your heart and your head seem to be reading from completely different scripts — and the exhausting mental gymnastics you perform trying to make them match.

Our minds don’t tolerate contradiction well. We are, at our core, meaning-making creatures. When two truths collide and refuse to coexist neatly, we don’t just sit with the tension — we reach for a resolution. And the resolution we choose, especially when we’re young and have no other frame of reference, can shape everything.

We Talk About It in Relationships — But What About Families?

Most conversations about cognitive dissonance in the context of trauma focus on romantic relationships — the push and pull of trauma bonding, the way we minimize red flags in the people we love, the cycle of hurt and hope that keeps us tethered to someone who isn’t safe for us. That’s real, and it matters. But I want to go somewhere we talk about far less.

I want to talk about families.

Because the family is where cognitive dissonance is born. It’s the original laboratory. Before we ever fall in love with the wrong person, before we ever stay somewhere we shouldn’t, we learn — in our earliest years, in the home we grew up in — how to hold irreconcilable things together without breaking apart. We learn to make sense of people who are both wonderful and wounding. We learn to love people who don’t always make us feel loved. And we learn, often without anyone ever saying a word, whose fault it must be when trying to make sense and many times, we believe the fault is ours and it’s up to us to make our world feel safe.

Proud and Hurt at the Same Time

My mother was extraordinary. I have always known that, and I have always been proud of it. She was generous to me monetarily — my education, my children, my husbands, so much that I never wanted for. She was intelligent, principled, and deeply good in many ways. She believed in equality. She had no prejudice. She fought for what was right when it was unpopular to do so. She was kind to her friends and devoted to the common good.

And inside our family, I never felt emotionally safe around her. I carried a feeling — unnamed for most of my life — that she found me stupid. That word, stupid, was one I couldn’t say out loud or allow my children to do so. I felt, in some deep and wordless place, that she didn’t really want to be around me. She never made me feel proud of who I was or what I had become. When I built a career as a psychotherapist — a life dedicated to helping people heal — she made clear she had no use for it. She didn’t believe in therapy. My life’s work was, to her, something to dismiss. And while the world saw a woman of towering moral conviction, what she modeled inside our home was abandonment — of me. Not the kind anyone could easily see, because her public persona made it almost impossible to believe. But it was real. We lived it.

My father was a different kind of contradiction — and in some ways, the more confusing one.

When he wasn’t drinking, he was my dad. Truly my dad. I was his little girl, and I felt it. He was kind to me, gentle with me, proud of me. In those moments, I existed to him in the way every child needs to exist to a parent — fully, warmly, without condition. That version of him was real. I want to be clear about that, because it matters. It is part of what made everything else so disorienting.

Because when he drank, he became someone else entirely. And the little girl who had just been daddy’s pride had to figure out what happened — and why.

His alcoholism was, in some ways, more visible than my mother’s emotional distance. He drank publicly. People saw it. But I don’t think the world around us understood the full reach of the dysfunction inside our home, because from the outside, we were a remarkable family. And we were. That was also true.

What the world didn’t see was my brother. He struggled with addiction and carried the traits of a sociopath and a narcissist — a combination that created chaos and real danger for me and my family, repeatedly and them as well. And both of my parents, in their own ways, chose him. His dysfunction was the organizing force of our family in ways that left the rest of us exposed. My mother effectively abandoned me and my children to it. My father, for most of my adult life, sided with my brother’s chaos over the safety and wellbeing of me and my family — even when it put us at risk. After my mother died, my father told me my mother never wanted me, but wanted me, not sure why he told me that... I guess it was validating but quite hurtful as well. But wanting someone and choosing them are two very different things. For years, he didn’t choose me. And I had to find somewhere to put that truth.

This is the cruelty of cognitive dissonance within families: both things can be completely real. My parents were genuinely good people in so many ways — intelligent, moral, generous, full of heart. And there was also dysfunction, painful messaging, and real harm that ran alongside all of that goodness. Not instead of it. Alongside it. The world got one version. I lived inside another. And I needed to make those two versions make sense.

When the Resolution Becomes the Wound

A child cannot conclude that her parents — the people she depends on for survival, the people she loves, the people the whole world seems to admire — are the source of her pain. That conclusion is too dangerous. Too destabilizing. So the child’s mind does what minds do: it resolves the contradiction in the only way that feels survivable.

It must be me.

If they are good, and I am hurting, then I must be the problem. I must be too much, or not enough, or fundamentally flawed in some way I can’t quite name. I must have caused this. I must deserve it.

I was a little girl when I decided that. And then I grew up — and I kept deciding it, over and over, in ways I didn’t even recognize as decisions. That belief became the foundation of what I call the “Traitor Within”: the part of us formed in childhood, out of pain and necessity, that once protected us but quietly became the mechanism of our own self-betrayal.

The cognitive dissonance didn’t stay in my childhood home. It moved with me. It shaped the way I saw myself in every relationship that followed. Because if the narrative is I am the problem, then you carry that narrative everywhere you go. You look for evidence that confirms it. You find it. You call it truth.

What Healing Looks Like

Healing from family cognitive dissonance isn’t about rewriting history or deciding your parents were monsters. Most of them weren’t. Mine certainly weren’t. My mother genuinely changed the world. My father had a good heart underneath his illness and was generous, charitable, funny, lacked prejudice, and wanted the world to be a better place and was willing to help it make it better. Both things are true, and I hold them both.

But healing does require something harder than choosing one story over the other. It requires learning to hold the complexity — to say, they were good AND they hurt me, and I am not the explanation for either. It requires going back to that child who decided the dissonance was her fault, and gently, firmly, telling her she was wrong.

She did the best she could with what she had. She was trying to survive. And now, we get to do something different.

If you grew up in a family where love and pain lived in the same house, your “Traitor Within” may still be whispering that you were the reason. You weren’t. That’s the work — and you don’t have to do it alone.

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