There’s a particular moment that men describe in my office, sometimes years after a relationship has ended. Something small triggers it. A song. A smell. A conversation with a friend who says something offhand about their own relationship, something that sounds completely normal, and the man sitting across from me goes quiet.

That’s when it hits them.

Not in the relationship. Not during. Not even immediately after. But sometime later, when the nervous system has calmed down enough and the distance is sufficient that the picture finally comes into focus.

What they are usually recognizing, for the first time, is that what happened to them had a name.

Why It Takes So Long

The delay is not a character flaw. It is a predictable consequence of how psychological abuse works.

Unlike physical violence, which leaves marks that are harder to deny, emotional and psychological abuse operates through the gradual erosion of a person’s internal reference points. By the time a man begins to question whether something was wrong, he has often spent months or years being told that his perceptions were off, his reactions were overblown, and his instincts were not to be trusted.

This is what gaslighting does. It doesn’t just distort individual incidents. It distorts the instrument a person uses to evaluate their experience: their own mind. Research on gaslighting within intimate relationships confirms that it produces significant drops in self-esteem and a reorganized self-concept that conforms to the abuser’s distorted framing of reality (Silva, 2023). Put simply, the man has been trained to stop trusting himself.

When the self-perception the abuser constructed crumbles after the relationship ends, it can take considerable time before a man feels confident enough in his own perception to call what happened what it was.

The Masculinity Layer

There is a second factor that makes recognition harder for men, and it has nothing to do with the individual abuser. It is the cultural framework many men carry into relationships in the first place.

Research consistently finds that men who experience intimate partner violence face powerful internal barriers to acknowledging their experience. These include shame, fear of not being believed, concerns about appearing weak, and a deep reluctance to identify as a victim (Taylor et al., 2022). Many men do not even apply the word “abuse” to what they experienced because the word does not fit the picture they carry in their minds of who victims are.

Internalized masculinity norms actively discourage acknowledgment and help-seeking, leading men to minimize or rationalize experiences that, in another context, they would readily recognize as harmful (Hogan et al., 2024). This is not weakness. It is the logical output of being raised in a culture that tells men their job is to handle things, not report them.

The result is a particular kind of silence. Not the silence of someone who doesn’t know something happened, but the silence of someone who can feel that something happened and has been convinced he has no right to name it.

What the Fog Actually Is

In clinical terms, what men often describe as “the fog” is a combination of cognitive dissonance and trauma bonding.

Cognitive dissonance in the context of an abusive relationship occurs when the loving, attentive version of a partner (typically experienced early in the relationship and during intermittent repair cycles) cannot be reconciled with the controlling, demeaning, or manipulative version. The brain resolves this dissonance not by naming abuse, but by generating explanations: he’s stressed, she’s working through something, this is just how relationships are, I’m being too sensitive.

Trauma bonding deepens the problem. The cycle of tension, rupture, and reconciliation that characterizes many abusive relationships produces a neurochemical pattern that resembles addiction. The intermittent reinforcement of warmth and connection following periods of coldness or cruelty keeps a person emotionally anchored to the relationship in ways that can persist long after it ends. As one framework puts it, victims often struggle to reconcile the abuser’s kindness and apologies with their abusive actions, and this leads to uncertainty about the reality of their situation and their perceptions (CPTSD Foundation, 2024).

This is not confusion born of stupidity. It is confusion deliberately cultivated by an abusive dynamic. And it does not simply disappear the moment a relationship ends.

What Finally Cuts Through

In my experience working with men, clarity rarely arrives all at once. It tends to accumulate.

Sometimes the first crack comes from an outside source: a therapist, a podcast, a book, a friend who uses a word or describes a dynamic that makes something click into place. Sometimes it comes from observing a healthy relationship and realizing, almost with physical force, that what they experienced was not simply a difficult partnership. It was something else.

For other men, the recognition comes from the body. Sleep starts improving. Anxiety they had carried for years begins to lift. Sexual function, which had been affected in ways they couldn’t explain (and which they had blamed entirely on themselves), starts to return. The body, it turns out, was keeping score all along.

The research on men’s intimate partner violence experiences notes that many men do not identify their experiences as abuse or deny being a victim even when the clinical picture is clear (Landa-Blanco & Mejia Sanchez, 2025). The gap between what happened and what a man calls it can be enormous, and bridging that gap is part of what recovery actually requires.

Naming It Does Something

There is a reason that the moment of recognition is often described as a physical sensation: a lightening, a clarity, a sudden ability to breathe differently. It is not just an intellectual update. It reorganizes the story a man has been telling himself about who he is and what he went through.

When a man can accurately name what happened to him, several things shift. The self-blame that has been living in his nervous system as ambient shame begins to find a more accurate address. The confusion that masqueraded as personal failure starts to resolve into something that happened to him rather than something he caused. And the isolation that kept him silent begins to feel less total, because naming a thing is also the first step toward finding that others have experienced it too.

Cognitive dissonance resolves when the survivor of narcissistic abuse receives validation and confirmation of the reality of their circumstances (GoodTherapy, 2024). Narrating the experience in a safe environment, whether in therapy or in an honest conversation with someone who understands, is often where that resolution begins.

This is why the work of naming matters. Not to assign blame, not to fuel anger, and not to build an identity around what was done. But because accurate language is one of the primary tools a person has for rebuilding accurate perception.

If You’re Still in the Fog

If you are reading this and something is stirring but not yet settled, that is normal. The fog does not lift on a schedule.

What I can tell you from clinical experience is that the fog does lift, and that the process usually accelerates when a man stops trying to figure out whether what happened was bad enough to qualify, and starts paying attention to what his nervous system has been trying to communicate for a long time.

Your uncertainty is not evidence that nothing happened. It may be evidence that what happened was significant enough to make certainty feel dangerous.

If any of this resonates, the next step is simple: find someone to talk to who understands this territory. The moment you name it, even tentatively, in a room where it is taken seriously, is usually the moment the fog begins to clear.

About the Author

Gregory Harmeling, Psy.D., LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in men’s sexual health, narcissistic abuse recovery, and travel therapy. He works with men who are done being confused about why they feel the way they do — and are ready to do something about it. Learn more at fenixtherapeuticservices.com.

Follow Dr. Gregory Harmeling on Substack

References

CPTSD Foundation. (2024). Trauma bonding: Exploring the psychological effects of abuse. https://cptsdfoundation.org/2024/08/14/trauma-bonding-exploring-the-psychological-effects-of-abuse/

GoodTherapy. (2024). Unreality check: Cognitive dissonance in narcissistic abuse. https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/unreality-check-cognitive-dissonance-in-narcissistic-abuse-1007144

Hogan, K. F., Clarke, V., & Ward, T. (2024). The impact of masculine ideologies on heterosexual men’s experiences of intimate partner violence: A qualitative exploration. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 33, 123-142. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926771.2022.2061881

Landa-Blanco, M., & Mejia Sanchez, R. (2025). Breaking the cycle: Addressing barriers to help-seeking and mental health impacts for male victims of intimate partner violence in low-and middle-income countries. Frontiers in Public Health, 13, Article 1565284. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2025.1565284

Silva, C. (2023). Gas lighting in intimate relationships and its impact on self. Indian Journal of Integrative Psychiatry. https://ijip.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/18.01.095.20251302.pdf

Taylor, J. C., Bates, E. A., Colosi, A., & Creer, A. J. (2022). Barriers to men’s help seeking for intimate partner violence. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 37, NP21209-NP21232. https://doi.org/10.1177/08862605211035870

Text © Gregory Harmeling