How To Know if Someone is Gaslighting You

YOU’RE NOT GOING CRAZY: 15 SIGNS YOU’RE A VICTIM OF GASLIGHTING 
by Aletheia Luna 

The only way you can describe how you feel is that you feel minimized. You feel crushed and smothered. You’re constantly second-guessing yourself; your feelings, your perceptions, your memories, and a small, suffocated part inside of you wonders whether you are actually going crazy.

You feel neurotic, you feel hyper-sensitive and you feel an overwhelming sense of alienation.

What is wrong with you?

If you can identify with what I just wrote, you are most likely experiencing a sophisticated manipulation technique known as Gaslighting. This technique undermines your entire perception of reality and can slowly creep into your relationships, friendships, family life and work life.

Although you might feel crazy, although you might feel imbalanced and irrational, there is still hope.


WHAT IS GASLIGHTING?

Inspired by the 1940 and 1944 films “Gas Light,” where a husband systematically manipulates his wife in order to make her feel crazy, the term “Gaslighting” is now commonly used to describe behavior that is inherently manipulative.

Gaslighting, at its core, is a form of emotional abuse that slowly eats away at your ability to make judgments. Essentially, a Gaslighter spins their negative, harmful or destructive words and actions in their favor, deflecting the blame for their abusive deeds and pointing the finger at you. This is often done by making you feel “overly sensitive,” “paranoid,” “mentally unstable,” “silly,” “unhinged,” and many other sensations which cause you to doubt yourself.

Commonly adopted by psychopathic, sociopathic and narcissistic types of people, Gaslighting tends to eat away at you slowly until you realize that you’re a shell of the former person you were. 

HOW TO KNOW WHETHER SOMEONE IS GASLIGHTING YOU 

Gaslighting is so harmful because it promotes anxiety, depression, and with enough frequency in our lives, can sometimes trigger nervous breakdowns. So the question now is: are you being gaslighted? How can you know whether you’re experiencing this subtle form of manipulation in your life? Review the following tell-tale signs:

1. Something is “off” about your friend, partner, son, daughter, mother, father, sister, brother, colleagues, boss, or other person in your life … but you can’t quite explain or pinpoint what. 
2. You frequently second-guess your ability to remember the details of past events leaving you psychologically powerless. 
3. You feel confused and disorientated. 
4. You feel threatened and on-edge around this person, but you don’t know why. 
5. You feel the need to apologize all the time for what you do or who you are.
6. You never quite feel “good enough” and try to live up to the expectations and demands of others, even if they are unreasonable or harm you in some way. 
7. You feel like there’s something fundamentally wrong with you, e.g. you’re neurotic or are “losing it.” 
8. You feel like you’re constantly overreacting or are “too sensitive.” 
9. You feel isolated, hopeless, misunderstood and depressed. 
10. You find it hard to trust your own judgment, and given a choice, you choose to believe the judgment of the abuser. 
11. You feel scared and as though “something is terribly wrong,” but you don’t know what or why. 
12. You find it hard to make decisions because you distrust yourself. 
13. You feel as though you’re a much weaker version of yourself, and you were much more strong and confident in the past. 
14. You feel guilty for not feeling happy like you used to. 
15. You’ve become afraid of “speaking up” or expressing your emotions, so you stay silent instead.

TACTICS USED BY THE GASLIGHTER

Gaslighters use a variety of subtle techniques to undermine your reality and portray you as the disturbed and messed up one. These include, for example:

• Discrediting you by making other people think that you’re crazy, irrational or unstable. 

• Using a mask of confidence, assertiveness, and/or fake compassion to make you believe that you “have it all wrong.” Therefore, eventually, you begin to doubt yourself and believe their version of past events. 

• Changing the subject. The gaslighter may divert the topic by asking another question, or making a statement usually directed at your thoughts, e.g. “You’re imagining things—that never happened!” “No, you’re wrong, you didn’t remember right.” “Is that another crazy idea you got from your (family member/friend)?”

• Minimizing. By trivializing how you feel and what you think, the gaslighter gains more and more power over you, e.g. “Why are you being so sensitive?” “You don’t need to get angry over a little thing like that!” “I was just joking around, why are you taking things so seriously?” 

• Denial and avoidance. By refusing to acknowledge your feelings and thoughts, the gaslighter causes you to doubt yourself more and more. For example, “I don’t remember that, you must have dreamt it!” “You’re lying, I never said that.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re changing the subject.” 

• Twisting and reframing. When the gaslighter confidently and subtly twists and reframes what was said or done in their favor, they can cause you to second-guess yourself—especially when paired with fake compassion, making you feel as though you are “unstable,” “irrational,” and so forth. For example, “I didn’t say that, I said _____” “I didn’t beat you up Johnny, I just gave you a smack around the head—that’s what all good fathers do.” “If you remember correctly, I was actually trying to help you.”

Full Article: https://lonerwolf.com/gaslighting/