On cognitive dissonance: Cognitive dissonance is a scary thing. When I realised how I was manipulated it made me so angry. And it still makes me angry to think about the fact that this kind of manipulation is done. And unbelievable. It's against my nature, and I don't understand how it is done.
I had a "quick cure" through an accident and the aftermath. But it is so painful for me to watch people wrestling with this, or reading about it.
On experiences told on the stage in general: I always thought that the experience sounded scripted, as if they couldn't remember how to say it, because they would have said it in a different way. For example, since I live in Germany, they would normaly have told it in dialect, but of course on the stage it was high German. But I thought this was done, because they would get so nervous on the stage in front of all these people that it needed to be scripted. I never thought about the fact, that there could have been experiences that didn't exactly happen as it was told.
On this particular experience: As some have already said, I have the impression that they took advantage of her. It seems tasteless to me. I don't know what a psychologist would say to this.