During our time together, I was in school for another one and even I had never heard gaslighting discussed in-depth. And if anyone perhaps should have known about gaslighting, it was me — the therapist-in-training who lived in the throes of it.
These are not faults of my education or myself for that matter but a lack of awareness about this issue among the general public. Gaslighting is an emotional abuse tactic designed to get you to question the integrity of your reality.
And the goal of the person doing it is to control you mentally and emotionally by overriding your perceptions of events.
With gaslighting, your grievances are never validated. They will block, distract, undermine, divert and blame you for their behavior — anything at all to keep them off the hook from admitting one ounce of fault. One night, my boyfriend and I were asleep in bed when he woke me up asking if he could borrow my car to help out his friend. I said yes, and woke up again when he came back home after helping said friend.
While choosing a Netflix show through his phone the next day, I learned that the friend in need was actually another woman — he had cheated on me with the night before. We went back and forth some more, and do you know how that conversation ended?
