Have you ever been in a situation where you remember something a lot differently than someone else does? Well if you've been involved with a
narcissist that's not just a case of bad memory, narcissists use a tactic called
Gaslighting in order to manipulate us and make us think we're crazy.
But the thing is even when we're out of the relationship with a narcissist, many of us are still left doubting our own
reality and not trusting ourselves.
So
how are you supposed to bring yourself back into reality and clear your head of all of the negativity that the narcissist put in it
once you're out of the relationship or even while you're still in it?
That's what we're going to talk about today at QueenBeing.com. It's a technique called, Anchoring to Reality.
So let's get started. Closed Captioning provided by Athena Moberg and CPTSDfoundation.org
My name is Angie Atkinson and on this channel I offer free daily video coaching to help you discover, understand and overcome
narcissistic abuse and toxic relationships. I like to call it toxic relationship rehab.
So if that sounds good to you, hit that subscribe button and we'll get going. So really quickly, just in case you weren't aware,
Gaslighting is a manipulation tactic that is used by toxic people, anyone in the Dark Triad and of course your everyday average narcissist.
It was coined from the movie made in
1944 called Gaslight and in that movie, a man tries to trick his wife into thinking she's lost it, she's gone nuts.
So he'll do things like, make the gas lights dim and brighten all of a sudden in the house
which is where the gas light term comes from, also things like she'll hear steps in the house or her stuff goes missing
and then reappears the basic mind, of course in modern day, we see it a little differently.
Sometimes we'll see a narcissist deleting phone numbers or emails from your phone or will see them suddenly know something
they should know or they'll secretly learn your password and hack into your iCloud account and know everything about you before you even know it.
The point is it's all about manipulation and making you doubt your own reality.
You're supposed to doubt yourself, your perception of reality, your sanity, basically gaslighting is all about making you feel crazy,
so that the narcissist can be in more control of you. Since toxic relationships can be so painful and so
life-changing in not great ways, many survivors find themselves, kind of reeling for years afterward.
But there are things you can do to kind of speed along the process of healing and that's what we're talking about today.
You have to know that you might still be struggling with certain symptoms of trauma even well after the relationship ends.
You probably don't feel really self-confident. You might have nightmares, occasionally. You probably have a little depression.
You might be suffering with some dissociation where you're not sure about reality. You might be dealing with anxiety,
nightmares, flashbacks,
triggers, all that stuff. So how are you supposed to get past it and talking about gaslighting,
how are you supposed to reconnect to your own true reality? How do you get your arms back around it.
Well self-care is really important here, and I know you've heard that a bazillion times.
But I want to give you a couple of specifics here.
One thing that really helps is like affirmations, where you do your daily
affirmations or you come up with an affirmation to kind of keep yourself on track.
For example,
whenever I think a negative thought, I tell myself, I now cancel that thought and replace it with this affirmation of my true divine desire.
Then I think of something positive related or not. It helps me kind of redirect my thoughts.
I'm all about a good pattern interrupt and this is one that is very effective.
Of course meditation is helpful for everyone
but especially for survivors and here's why, there is a lot of research out there that says
meditation can actually strengthen your neural pathways in really good ways and
increase your grey matter density in the parts of your brain that are related to emotion as well as
kind of help you settle down when it comes to your fight-or-flight reaction,
which is all over the place after abuse. Plus meditation can help you be more mindful of your emotions,
which helps you in your everyday life and dealing with people and may help you stay with no contact
longer because it kind of gives you a little space and time from dealing with your urges.
So if you have an urge, you don't necessarily jump right into it, you give yourself a minute to think about it.
That's really positive, being aware of yourself is very important. But the main purpose of this video today is about reality anchoring.
It's about anchoring yourself in reality, intentionally.
There are a number of reasons that we might want to do this as survivors.
One of the biggest reasons especially early in no-contact or at the end of a relationship
is because the longer we stay out of our relationship with a narcissist, the more likely we are to have abuse
amnesia, where we quite literally forget the abuse and start remembering all the things we loved about that person.
It's unfortunate, but it happens way more often than any of us would like to admit right. So because we've been gaslighted,
it's really easy for us to sort of let go the things that the narcissist did wrong to us.
It's almost like built into our brain to do that and as survivors of abuse,
those of us who did experience the gaslighting are more likely to believe that it wasn't real,
that the abuse wasn't real, there goes the abuse amnesia, right. This is the hard part, a lot of times
it's easier for us to think we just need to move past it.
We need to forget about it and for the short-term moments of anxiety and stress the pattern interrupt is perfect.
We sort of redirect ourselves and think about something else.
But sometimes we need to kind of anchor ourselves back in reality and realize that we were in fact
abused, which is why I always recommend that you write down a list of all the reasons you're leaving as soon as you think of
it whether you're still in the relationship or you're out of the relationship.
Do it now if you haven't done it yet, write down all the reasons that you don't want to go back to that particular person.
What this does is it helps to anchor you in reality, so that you don't forget, you don't have abuse amnesia.
You don't start idealizing that relationship again.
It's natural to have mixed feelings about this person.
It's natural for you to remember the good things and not every narcissist is all bad, all the time.
There are moments in that relationship that you might still kind of miss,
and of course, we know that narcissists were really good at giving us what we call Intermittent Reinforcement where they
they give us little crumbs of affection throughout the relationship in order to kind of keep us hooked, right? So we spend the whole relationship
remembering that we were once loved bombed by that person or idealized by that person and then when we get a tiny crumb of affection,
we remember that and we think oh, this is great.
We're gonna go back to the old days and we kind of spend the whole relationship in this spinning
cycle where we're constantly seeking approval of the narcissist and this is true whether we're talking about a romantic relationship or a parental
relationship or even like a friend
relationship, any kind of relationship where the narcissist has mental control or emotional control over you this can happen.
This is why we stay in the abuse cycle as long as we do. A lot of times these warm feelings come up for people
because we remember the love bombing, because of the intermittent reinforcement, but the flip side of this is that in some cases
survivors look back at their
narcissist whether it was a parent or a romantic partner or
otherwise and we think the reason I survived that time in my life was that person, that person saved me from this, that or the
other thing, maybe they saved you from a worse abusive relationship.
There are a number of reasons that we can stop remembering what we went through with a narcissist
but if we practice anchoring ourselves to reality then we can actually
stay clear on purpose and not continue that horrible cycle in our lives.
Not only that but it validates us because one of the biggest problems,
I think the most soul-crushing thing about narcissistic abuse is the extreme lack of validation that we get in those relationships.
We might spend our whole lives trying to get our narcissistic parent to say,
You know what?
I'm really proud of you,
you did a great job. And then we might never hear that.
So we have to learn how to self-validate and the same goes for a romantic partner.
We might just want them to say, you know what,
you really are a good mother or father or you really are very attractive or you really are good at your job.
whatever it is, they won't say it and we have to suck it up and deal with it.
And if they do say it, usually it's an attempt to manipulate us in some way.
This is how we get sucked back into the relationship,
the abuser comes back at you and reminds you of the good times, if you are not armed with knowledge and anchoring to
reality here, where you don't forget the bad times. I'm not saying you want to live in them forever
I'm not saying you want to dwell them,
I'm saying you need to have them written down so that when you start to let go and if the
narcissist comes back and tries to suck you in, you can pick up that paper or whatever and read it again and remind yourself of
the emotions that you felt. This is why we block the
narcissist from our phones, our social media accounts, any way they can contact us when we do go no-contact because it helps us to
steer clear of that fake
self that they present to us, the one that we fell in love with or that we liked in the first place.
Knowing about them and what they're doing every day,
it creates temptation in our lives, even though we know logically that person is terrible for us,
our heart is always kind of confused about that. It never quite gets it on the same level, at least not right away.
Eventually, you'll get there.
But if you can totally clear your slate, then it gives you an opportunity to rebuild your life from the bottom up or from wherever
you are and it prevents that narcissist from distorting the whole situation.
And you know, there are a multitude of things we have to deal with, we have smear campaigns, we have Flying Monkeys, etc.
The best thing we can do in any case with a
narcissist as we all know is go no-contact if possible, if we have kids with that person,
maybe it's low contact and then we just deal with them about the business of the kids.
But how do we let go of the effects of gaslighting after it's all said and done? That is where
anchoring comes in. So as I've recommended before, make a list of a minimum of 10,
it can be as many as you like though, of the most
difficult situations that happened, abusive situations that happened in your relationship and don't be shy about it.
You know put it behind a password on your phone if you want, you know
write it on a piece of paper and stick it in a drawer, whatever works for you.
But anytime you feel tempted, pull that thing out and read it. If you're not a big list-maker then come up with some kind
of a reminder for yourself that says this is not acceptable to me.
So if you're struggling with cognitive dissonance, maybe you want to remind yourself that you didn't have a voice in that relationship
or maybe you want to remind yourself that you were treated without respect every day of that relationship or 80% of the days.
Or maybe you want to remind yourself how miserable you felt, if you knew your abuser was out cheating on you
or while they were screaming and yelling at you or whatever it is or when they didn't speak to you for two weeks,
remember how it felt. That is the most important thing as you move forward to reduce the cognitive
dissonance, to let go of the feelings of
confusion, loss, etc. Even though you're going to have to go through those emotions,
you're also going to have to put in place some way to anchor back to reality, so that you don't have abuse amnesia,
so that you don't allow that person to come back into your life and try to
renew the connection because the truth is as we all know most
narcissists will never change and there's just not a lot you can do to create change in a narcissist because they don't really believe there's
anything wrong with that. As a survivor many of us struggle and still struggle and have struggled with shame,
with embarrassment, with just emotional pain in general and of course, we know logically it wasn't our fault.
But that doesn't change the way we feel, sometimes our heart just does its own thing, right?
Most of us probably grew up feeling like we were never good enough or at least we came out of those
relationships feeling that way and so that is why I'm gonna circle right back around right now and remind you that self-care is so
important as you're going forward, you can't just let go and just
willy-nilly, try to recover without any sort of
intention, you've got to have intention in your recovery. You have to intend to recover safely, you have to intend to recover
specifically in a certain way, so you have to think about what goals am I trying to meet, what do I want my life to look like now?
Even if you still miss your narcissist,
it's a great time for you to start focusing on kind of getting excited about what's next for me.
And I know sometimes that's hard, especially when we're not spring chickens anymore.
You know what I mean, but it's something that can really positively affect your life. For example,
I have a client I was talking to yesterday and she said she was starting to look for a new place to live,
she was concerned that people thought it was too soon and she felt guilty, so she stopped. But then she remembered that
while she was looking for a new place to live she felt hopeful and that's because she was dreaming about a better future for herself.
So even if you're not out of the relationship yet,
even if you're still in it, start dreaming about your better future, start looking at apartments on like Facebook or
Craigslist or whatever, start looking at the pictures of houses, start thinking about you know, what kind of clothes am I gonna wear?
How am I gonna do my hair? Maybe you're gonna go a new color, whatever, start dreaming about it.
That is a great way to sort of dream your way out of the bad part.
But as you do that, keep your reality anchor which is going to be your list or your
bullet-pointed document of what you went through, not because you want to keep it in your heart,
(that's why I suggest you put it on paper)
but because you want to keep it as an anchor in case your narcissist tries to come back into your life, so that you can
remind yourself why that is not what you want. You have to be gentle with yourself. You've gone through hell, I feel you.
It doesn't mean that you have to just freeze up and stop living. It just means give yourself a break,
give yourself some grace if you struggle with this and you still keep beating yourself up and you still keep doubting yourself ask yourself,
how would I respond if my friend or my child or someone I really loved, came to me and said,
hey, this is what I'm going through and then they described exactly what you're going through word-for-word
What would you say to them if your child was an adult or is an adult and had the same problem. Or your friend or
your sister or anyone who you really truly care about and want the best for. If you do this,
you're going to restructure your thought process a little bit and you're gonna stop automatically beating yourself up.
You're essentially going to undo the damage that the narcissist did to you. So give yourself that grace, ask yourself,
what would I do if someone I love told me the same problem? How would I help them
get through it. Chances are you might be an empath.
Chances are you might say something much different to someone you care about than yourself.
You've got to start seeing yourself as someone worth caring about, you feel me? When we're beating ourselves up, when we're always
down on ourselves. We're more likely,
statistically speaking to
self-sabotage. We're more likely to just blow our whole thing out of the water. Go back to the narcissist, forget it ever happened
and while that might seem like the easy thing to do
sometimes it is certainly not the best thing to do and it certainly does not promise a beautiful future for you.
You have to feel like you're worthy of being happy.
You have to feel like you're worthy of peace,
of love in your life and it has to start right here, my friend.
It has to start with yourself. You deserve stability in your home.
You deserve to feel at peace and not be scared to come home every day or have someone else come home every day.
You deserve to feel happy and free, you do. When you give yourself a little
compassion, when you give yourself a little grace.
You are just stepping
closer to finding the life that you want, creating the self that you want and having what you want in your life,
self love and self
compassion is something that the narcissist took from you and now it's time for you to take that back
because that's powerful. It is so much more powerful than I can even express to you right now.
The thing you have to know is that whatever you're vibrating, which is your thoughts and your feelings,
those are your vibrations. Those are the things that you're bringing more of yourself, more of back to yourself.
So I want you to vibrate powerful. I want you to vibrate peaceful. I want you to vibrate calm, strong, happy,
joyful, what are you vibrating today? All right, this brings me to the question of the day
And the question of the day is are you struggling with Cognitive Dissonance? Are you struggling to stay anchored in reality?
Have you struggled with the Hoover Maneuver, where the narcissist tries to suck you back in? Have you tried anchoring yourself in reality?
Share your thoughts, your ideas and your experiences in the comments section below and let's talk about it.
Alright, that's all I've got for you right now,
but as always thank you so much for being a part of my day and a part of my life and hey
Thanks for letting me be a part of yours
It really does mean a lot to me. Now before I go make sure you take a look at the videos
I'm leaving for you right here and right here
and while you're here, hit that subscribe button right there so we can stay connected and continue on this healing journey together. I'll see you soon