Gaslighting

Gaslighting is how abusers change your sense of reality to keep control of you and your actions. When you tell them something happened, they use several tactics to try to force you to believe reality is different. Enough times, and this causes mental health issues due to you not trusting yourself.

The last time I suffered from gaslighting was so awful. The pain of it stretched years and I’ve never told the complete tale. Everyone was reported to the correct authorities, though I admit it did take some time due to lifelong abusive programming.

This was 4 years ago. I was told a secret: someone close to my family had been raped as a child and then raped another child when they grew older. Out of fear of consequences for that individual, I sought support from someone I mistakenly trusted & felt held authority in my family.

For 6 months, I fought with them to report it. They eventually commanded me to speak with the secret teller to confirm. I wasn’t given next steps, but this felt like a step forward so I complied happily. The secret teller and the individual who did the assaulting intimidated me, trying to scare me into silence. It was one of the most awful experiences of my life, so traumatizing that I needed many sessions of specialized EMDR therapy to even process it years later.

I ran straight from being intimidated in a panic to the “trusted” family member. They finally helped me report it, but sugar coated it to the hotline and continued acting like it was no big deal.

For the next 3 months, everytime I interacted with this “trusted” family member, they made me recount in detail the intimidation. It was roughly 5 times I retold the story, each time experiencing panic and mental anguish, only to finally be told that I was absolutely wrong. The encounter did not happen that way. That the person that had raped a child was “too nice” to have treated me in such a scary fashion. That I didn’t understand sexual abuse because I never experienced it—my experiences with this were none of their business. I withstood this gaslighting out of fear of losing familial relationships.

THEN, this “authority figure” tried to strong arm me for years into apologizing for saying what I said about the intimidation! For being traumatized by the whole thing! I withstood these years of shaming and blame, being a victim of the gaslighting and desperately trying to hold this toxic relationship.

I was labeled “mean” and a “liar”. I was ostracized from my family. I was slandered, labeled unstable and without proper interpersonal skills, even though it was said I had a robust support network of friends. I suffered severe depression and isolation, culminating in a mental health crisis this year.

I now take responsibility for putting myself in this situation. I regret not making better choices, reporting the assault immediately myself, refusing to recount my trauma, continuing with the toxic relationships. This is what abuse and lifelong gaslighting does to you, though. You give control to other people. Your decision making is impacted. Only through distance, time and healing can you recover and regain autonomy and clarity.

I cannot express enough how gaslighting can make someone suffer immensely. It’s imperative you trust yourself. You must protect yourself. When people who call themselves “powerful” work against you, you need to stay strong in your own sense of reality. Do not accept gaslighting from ANYBODY. Reality is how you experience it, not what someone else wishes it to be. If only I had cut off these relationships decades ago. But that’s what gaslighting does—it keeps you trapped in a vicious cycle and deteriorates your sanity. Please heed my warning and remove people from your life who treat you this way. Healing is possible, but you must be able to break the cycle and learn to trust yourself. If I did it after 41 years, you can do it too.