Did anyone ever make you think you were crazy, that everything you say never happened?When someone makes you doubt your judgment, what you think really happened, you may feel confused and even fall into depression. It’s a very effective management strategy that many people use to make others suffer and enjoy others. We are talking about gas lighting, also known as light gas manufacturing, the most subtle and corrosive form of abuse.
The term “gas lighting” was not chosen by chance, was it taken from a movie called?Gas light, where the protagonist makes his wife believe that he is daydreaming and that he should consult a psychologist. Everything has a purpose, to steal your fortune. True torture for anyone who becomes the victim of this brutal distortion.
Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse
Although this term is not entirely familiar, the truth is that gas lighting is used more than we think, it is one of the weapons of manipulators, one with which they can drive the victim crazy and end up submitting to what they want. Want to see some examples? They may be familiar to you.
Imagine that there is a couple where one member tells the other that when they had a certain conversation they felt hurt, the other says that he does not remember that, that he invents and that he would never have said it, although this may be questioned. , the manipulator has just sown something very important: the seed of doubt.
From then on, there will be a number of circumstances that will remind the victim of that moment when her partner told her that things had not been as she had imagined. In any similar situation, the manipulator will tell her that she exaggerates, that he lies, that her extreme sensitivity betrays her. The seed will germinate and, little by little, the other person may come to think that he is actually inventing things.
If you start lying to prevent reality from changing, or if your ideas and attitudes are constantly challenged, you may be a victim of manipulation.
In the most extreme cases, the person who commits this type of abuse hides objects and constantly makes the other one think that he has a bad perception and that his memories are unreliable, the reason why this happens is only to dominate the other, to feel empowered, to harm the other or to achieve a certain goal, such as that of the film “Gas Light”. What is obvious is that it is a toxic relationship in which one of the members acquires a great deal of insecurity, constant doubts about what he believes to be truthful and absolute dependence on the opinions of others.
Is it hard to get out of a situation like this?Of course, as well as anyone where there is a person willing to drive, but this is not impossible. That’s why it’s important to consider some of the tips that will allow us to open our eyes and get out of a situation like the one we describe, if at some point someone is trying to apply gas lighting to us.
The first of these tips is to trust your intuition, when we feel that there is something strange, that something is wrong, we cannot give any reason to the other person, our instincts speak and we need to hear it. Do you usually have at least that many? Like the ones the other person might have.
The second advice is not to seek the approval of the other, this is something that we usually do because of low self-esteem or because we depend on that acceptance, but if our own instinct already says that something smells bad, we should not give as much importance to those who tell us that a certain conversation never took place.
We need to expose that person to how we feel and how we experience it. Point out that there is also a possibility that the other may have forgotten what happened and that it is not an offense to question their memories, just as the other does not offend us when you question our own memories.
The third advice is to stand firm within your limits, if the other person shouts, uses offensive words with us or we notice that they are trying to use us to do what they want, we must show it and not let it go. We must not allow anyone to go over our limits, nor reinforce the idea that they can do so with impunity, because they are second to none, once you have given up it is difficult to go back and a person who is psychologically abused will take advantage of this opportunity.
Gaslighting can destroy self-esteem, cause a person to lose total self-confidence, cause anxiety disorders, and even cause depression.
We may doubt ourselves, but in this case it is best to look for evidence independently, remember that gas lighting is a strategy that fuels the belief that we are living a very different reality than a target narrator would detail. they themselves begin to become obsessive, giving even more strength to this idea.
Staying away from the person who makes you feel so bad is important to create distance and analyze the situation from a perspective where manipulation cannot happen, to give reason to the other, when it makes us doubt ourselves, will give you all the power to destroy us.