hey guys welcome back thanks for joining me for a new video it is a beautiful
cloudy day let me see if I can actually there we go we'll scoot this over a
little bit um now that we are out of April and Mays here I am waiting for the
May flowers and the sunshine so I'm just praying that it's gonna come soon um
anyways if you are new to my channel my name is Stephanie I am a life and
relationship coach if you are a subscriber welcome back thank you for
all of your love support comments likes everything I really appreciate all of it
if you are new don't forget to click the subscribe button down below and I will
also post my Instagram information here as well if you want to check me out
there there you have it so let's get into this week's video I want to talk
about gas lighting I want to talk about really how gas lighting affects your
mental your mental well-being right so how it basically creates mental illness
within you if we don't know anything about gas lighting I will tell you that
gas lighting is a form of emotional abuse if you did know that then you will
understand that this is a tactic someone uses to basically create a lot of
self-doubt within yourself now this tactic is used because the
abuser is looking to like I said create doubt within the person so they want you
to doubt what you think they want you to doubt how you feel they want you to
doubt what you perceive to be the reality of situations so they want to
convince you that your memories and your thoughts are wrong or that your possibly
just overreacting to an event or something that happened
they are then going to tell like their side of the story and their side of the
story they are going to be so convincing that what they think is the reality is
the truth and they're going to be so I don't want to say stubborn in it but
their their confidence in what they think happened is going to be so strong
that you begin to doubt yourself and think well maybe that didn't happen so
if you've ever been in that situation where you thought well maybe they didn't
say that or maybe that didn't happen then you were being gaslighted now an
abuser can use this and when they do use this is in very small
doses so it might be something as simple as you know when we went to the store
yesterday and the abuser says no we didn't go to the store yesterday and
you're like wait a minute didn't we didn't we go to the store and
they go no no we didn't go to the store and they kept kind of pounding that in
you or they might say that small little detail the story didn't happen so those
little tiny things are going to start to form more self-doubt within your own
mind so a lot of the times they're not gonna be huge catastrophic things where
someone says no that didn't happen it blatantly didn't happen and you know it
did it's gonna be those tiny tiny little nuggets in a story that they're gonna
say no that wasn't right their sweater wasn't right it was blue something like
that for example and all of those situations that happened time and time
again begin to cause or create some doubt within yourself
now the reason why an abuser will do this is because they want you to create
so much doubt within yourself that you don't trust your own judgment you don't
trust your own thoughts and feelings you basically rely on them to tell you what
is the reality of the situation so right off the bat mental illness here we go we
are creating some mental illness within ourselves because you are allowing
someone else to control you you are becoming codependent on what someone
else thinks and feels as being what you think and feel so there you go
I mean step one you are already being programmed or groomed whatever you want
to call it to lose your sense of self so your ability to connect with yourself
and know what you think and how you feel that is something that you have to
constantly be working at because if you just allow someone to come in and tell
you who you are and what you think and how you feel and you give them that
power you're creating like I said that low a sense of self low confidence
insecure codependent type of a person so you're relying on someone else to
basically tell you what you think and how you feel so one of the biggest
things with gaslighting like I said is your ability to lose that connection
with yourself and if you lose that connection you will slowly start to form
a lot of things you're going form anxiety you're gonna form
depression you're gonna form you know social isolation you're not gonna want
to be around other people your your connection with yourself and that
relationship that you have yourself begins to really dwindle and that a
hundred percent causes so many problems in terms of mental illness now how do we
begin to protect ourselves from this you know one of the biggest things with
gaslighting is that it is a form of psychological manipulation so this is
you know the victims way excuse me the abusers way of really trying to control
their victim now if you know this and you know I always say the best thing you
can ever do is kind of know your audience I mean when you're getting to
know a brand new person you don't give yourself to a brand new person you were
slowly getting to know them so you have to see consistency you want to be able
to see what someone's character is light and you won't be able to know that in
the first month or two months or six months of getting to know a person it's
going to take a long time to see who this person really is because everyone
always shows their colors eventually because people can't play characters for
two to long they're eventually going to show you know show you who they really
are their character so you being able to be very self longing to know okay the
new person I have to be on guard of my own heart my own mind and be able to
protect myself and try to find out who this person is are they right for me are
they healthy for me with the people that are already in your life you have to
know who in my life tends to do this so when you start to learn about emotional
abuse when you start to learn about these different types of tactics you all
of a sudden start taking an inventory of the people in your life and think wow
like my friend Susie she tends to do this to me and you kind of have like
this like awakening your next step is to in the moment of hanging around Susie or
whoever that is the abuser or whoever tries to do these tactics or maneuvers
on you you have to be very aware that they're happening the next thing that a
gas lighter will tend to do is want to make themselves the victim now when you
start to become a little bit stronger when you start to be a little bit more
aware that this is what they do they're going to want to kind of hone
in on your reactions and your I don't want to say like mistakes but where you
tend to overreact or maybe where your ego gets the best of you and they're
gonna immediately harp on that and make themselves the victim now what I mean by
that if the abuser is saying something like you know they're giving false
accusations that you do this and you do that and you become so emotionally
enraged or very defensive and you begin to fight back whether that's yelling or
screaming or getting defensive whatever it is that it looks like and the abuser
then sees that they got you because you're reacting exactly how they wanted
you to react so they can label them as the victim so this is where they're
gonna claim you're being so sensitive you're out of control look at you you're
yelling so this is immediately where you you almost like your mind like goes
crazy because you're like wait a minute you just flipped out on me like we were
just talking about something else you said something that was completely wrong
or irrational or hurtful or whatever it is and I engage which was my mistake
unfortunately and you have to learn from those mistakes but I engaged and then
they became the victim and now you're the abuser so when I hear my clients
tell me things like well now my partner is telling me that like I'm the gas
layer and I'm the narcissus and I'm the manipulative one and I can't believe
that they're even accusing me of that and we're the defensive 'no stenz to
come in is because now you're basically they just drank the kuku juice and you
have fallen for their trap one of the biggest things that you can ever do for
yourself is learn how to hold on to yourself is learning that you don't need
validation for what you think and how you feel it's for me the best thing that
I ever did was learning how to validate my own feelings was learning that what I
think and how I feel really matters was learning how to trust myself and of
course it's normal and healthy to have a little bit of self doubt like if you
said hey we went to the store yesterday and someone said no we didn't maybe they
really think that we did but I think I did so um I'm gonna just keep rolling
with that that ability to stay true to what it is that you're
and healing is a really huge important skill towards being mentally healthy now
when someone is fabricating stories making up lies making up accusations
whatever it is to make themselves basically not take accountability or
responsibility for the actions whatever the situation entails when you know that
you are having a conversation with someone who is using these tactics or
becoming irrational themselves or fabricating whatever it is you have to
accept that you're now not going to have a normal healthy adult conversation with
this person so it becomes your job to learn how to stand in your own self stay
true create the bubble and disengage or learn how to speak up for yourself and
not fear at that type of confrontation and even better taking the next word is
allowing the you know abuser to think whatever they want to think they can
really truly think and feel and believe in their bones that we didn't go to the
store yesterday but I know that I did so you don't think that you were there
that's totally fine that's on you and I don't need to convince you that was the
best most freeing thing that I ever did for myself was the ability to allow
people to think and feel whatever they wanted to and that they didn't have to
agree with me now if you are coming out of this relationship and you know that
for years you've been the victim of abuse and gaslighting then you're going
to have a lot of mental I wants a mental illness struggles but you're gonna have
a lot of things that you struggle with you're going to struggle with shame
you're gonna struggle 100% with trusting other people possibly even getting your
social life back because if you have left this relationship or out of this
relationship chances are your self-esteem and your self-worth are
extremely low because remember it was this person's job to chip away at your
confidence at your self-esteem at your self-worth because they wanted to chip
away at it so you would become so dependent on them telling you who you
are because you didn't know who you were you gave up that right and you gave that
you no power over to the other person and look it happens you can't dwindle
in the past all you can do is work forward to kind of heal yourself and get
yourself to the best place possible which is investing in your mental health
every single day whether that's watching videos doing affirmations investing in a
program private coaching listening to podcast feeding your mind self-care you
know working on this this is the most powerful thing you have so learning how
to have healthy and self and positive self-talk learning how to push past fear
learning how to motivate yourself learning how to distinguish who's
talking right now learning how to detach from negative thoughts all of these
different aspects of self development that I teach it takes practice so it is
your job to find what is the first thing that I want to start with right now and
really focusing every day on that so I hope you guys have enjoyed this video
please please please don't forget to give this video a thumbs up don't forget
to share it with anyone who you think would benefit from this information and
comment down below I always keep in the description box all my information in
terms of Instagram my podcasts my coaching programs things of that sort
so I will link everything there if you want it and I will see you next week