So I had a client let's call her Becky, and
Becky came to me and said, listen
I'm not the type of person who falls in with a narcissist and I just don't understand what happened
and I said, well, what do you mean the type of person and
Becky said, well, I'm fully self-aware. I really feel like I'm totally awake.
She said I know what I want, I have goals, I have opinions, I have thoughts and feelings,
I'm not just some dummy. I'm not someone who doesn't
believe that she's capable of having in life, I just don't understand. I'm smart, I read people really well.
How is it possible that I got stuck with this person? And then she said it just seemed like it came out of nowhere.
She said, I was going along, I was in this great relationship and all of a sudden I started to doubt myself,
I started to question my own thoughts and my own feelings. It seemed like it came out of nowhere.
She said, I started to wonder what people's motives were,
why were they doing this or that, what was I gonna have to do to repay somebody who did something nice for me or
why would somebody say this or that or what did it really mean? And then she started to doubt herself.
She started to wonder who she even was and what she was doing and whether it was right or wrong.
She started to think she was crazy. She said she would ask herself all the time,
am I going crazy?
But she wasn't going crazy. It turns out Becky was being gaslighted by a toxic narcissist in her life.
Can you identify with how Becky was feeling at that time?
If you can then, you know, you probably have gone through gaslighting. So today at QueenBeeing.com,
we're gonna talk about gas lighting and three things that happen to everyone who goes through it,
plus a couple of ways that you can deal with it effectively.
So, let's get started. (Closed captioning provided by Athena Moberg and
CPTSDFoundation.org) My name is Angie Atkinson
and this is toxic relationship rehab where I help you discover, understand and overcome toxic relationships in your life.
So, if you want to take back your life embrace your power and become the best possible version of yourself, hit that subscribe button
with me and let's get going.
So, before we get started,
I'm gonna share with you a very quick definition of what gaslighting is and then at the end of the video
I'll leave you a playlist with some additional information on gas lighting and kind of expanding on
What it is and how you can deal with it gaslighting is a complicated
manipulation technique that narcissists use to gain control over you, they want power over you.
During gaslighting, the narcissist says and does little things that make you doubt yourself, make you question your own
perception and over the course of time you
begin to actually wonder as our friend Becky did -
if you're crazy and don't doubt it. Gaslighting is not some cute little buzzword, gaslighting is literally a
form of emotional or psychological abuse
that is used against you.
People who go through gaslighting have a number of issues that come along with it and like I mentioned, if you've been in a
toxic relationship with a narcissist or anyone else
chances are you may have
experienced gaslighting at some point.
So the thing is that gaslighting happens in stages,
sort of layers, if you will and today we're gonna break down the process for you so you can see it for what it is.
While the stages are not always done in order and they do sometimes overlap,
they all create very different states of mind and psychological
issues for a person, not to mention emotional issues. So the first stage in this process then is
Disbelief. It's,
are freaking kidding me. You become shocked,
it might feel like just a weird moment in a relationship or
like kind of an anomaly, something that just is totally out of the blue, something that you never expect from this person.
So little interactions you'll have with this person, whoever they are, will seem kind of weird, kind of kind of strange,
but you just kind of blow them off and move on because you figure oh, it was just a weird situation,
that person's not usually like that or they come up with some excuse, you'll find yourself
wondering what the heck just happened or you'll think maybe they just snapped for some reason, maybe you'll be shocked at something
they said or something they did and you'll just go what and then you'll kind of,
ooo, let it go, it almost feels like just a fluke the first time, it continues to happen over time.
The second stage is called Defense. This is when you become very defensive and you start to kind of doubt yourself,
you're second-guessing everything, you start to wonder if maybe that narcissist is on point, maybe they're right,
maybe you really are the one to blame,
this is around the time that you'll notice the
devalue, things starting where you're getting constantly criticized by this person and then you start to think
maybe I really am stupid, slow, lazy, boring, whatever it is that they're putting on you and
once again, you are in self-doubt you start to think hmm
maybe I'm really messed up, maybe that person is right, maybe I really do need some help,
you might become exhausted just because of the simple insults they're hurling at you or the
constant mind games, you might start to feel like you're kind of losing it a little bit, you kind of withdraw socially from other people,
you start to just kind of batten down the hatches so to speak and if you're anything like I was you might even
promise yourself, you're gonna make personal changes in order to become
whatever it is the narcissist says you're not, you start to lose yourself in this stage.
This brings us to saves three which we'll call Depression, because it is at this point that you are fully and completely
engulfed in the manipulation, the narcissist is in control of you.
Now, you might not even recognize
yourself and you kind of feel like you're not even really there, you become cut off from your friends,
you don't want to talk to people about your relationship because you know
something's not right and it turns out maybe the people around you don't even like the person you're with,
they might even start to act like
they're worried or they feel sorry for you and they might treat you like there's really a big problem in this
relationship, at this point you start to think well,
maybe I really need a serious life overhaul, you think maybe I'm having an existential crisis,
you kind of hit rock bottom and you think maybe I need to get therapy
or maybe I need to go to the doctor, maybe something's seriously wrong with me or
maybe I just need to get out of this house, but in any case, you know
something's not right and you need help, well understanding
the gaslighting process is the first step to creating change in your life, because when you know what you're going through,
number one you were able to identify those behaviors in this person and when you see that person
using textbook behaviors,
well
then, it kind of takes the sting out of it a little bit and then the next thing you have to do and
I'm really sorry to have to tell you this, but if you're going through a toxic relationship
with a narcissist, if you're ever going to find peace, you can't live with that person and
ideally, you will have no contact with that person.
Now, if you're in a situation where you share children or this is a person in your extended family
and you just can't get away or maybe you work with them, whatever it is,
then you can deal with them using the gray rock method. So I'm going to quickly define for you
what the gray rock method is, because it truly is the very best way to deal with a
narcissist who is
gaslighting you. If you are not able to get away from that person and go no contact, such as in one of the situation's I
just described or if you're in a situation where you have to kind of you know,
get your eggs in a row before you're able to leave and
while you're planning to leave or while you're preparing to leave, you can use the gray represented to get through those days or months the
Gray rock method was created by this person called Skylar who writes on 180rulecom. As you may know,
it's been spread all over the internet by people like myself,
who believe in this method and the idea of it, is that you use
this in order to
encourage
the narcissist to kind of lose interest in you and what that means is that as you're going through the process of
being
gaslighted rather than reacting the way you might normally react when they say, twist a fact or name call or mess with your head,
you recognize what they're doing is gaslighting and then you don't respond or react to it at all, you simply go
oh, that's interesting,
so if normally you would scream and are crazy or you would cry or you throw things, don't do any of those things anymore,
just go, oh. mm-hmm, okay, I see, hmmm, or
nothing, you can say nothing. Now, you're not trying to avoid contact with this person,
but anytime they're coming at you with some manipulation or some name-calling or games or anything like that,
you don't give them what they want, which is your emotional energy,
because in some ways these people are kind of like vampires when it comes to emotional energy,
they want what you got they want all of it, because they needed to survive, it's called narcissistic supply.
Now, this is interesting actually, the original story of
how Skyler invented the gray rock method, I love this story. Actually, I just found it and I wanted to share it with you.
She said, in
2009 I left my psychopathic partner after 25 years,
but I didn't understand what was wrong with him,
I sat in a sushi bar lost in confusion when a tall athletic man introduced himself, to my own surprise,
I instinctively poured out my story to him, this complete stranger listened to my story and
then he explained to me that I was dealing with a malignant narcissist. He advised me, be boring.
he told me that his girlfriend would come home each night
begging, drinking and become abusive, they were both professionals who traveled in the same professional circles,
he knew that she would stalk him if he broke up with her and
he didn't want to risk the slander and drama which could leak out and damage his professional reputation.
She said his solution was to be so boring that she would simply leave him,
he declined to go out on evenings and weekends and he showed no emotional reaction about anything,
no interest in anything and responded with no drama,
when she asked him if he wanted to go out to dinner,
his reply was, I don't know. After a few months of no drama,
she simply moved out and
Skylar said that she chose the words gray rock as the name of this technique because she needed an object for people to channel
when they were trying to use this technique.
She says, you don't just practice the gray rock method, you become the gray rock.
She says there are gray rocks and pebbles everywhere you go, but you'll never notice them, none of them attract your attention,
you don't remember any specific rock you saw today because they blend with the scenery, she says that's the type of boring
you want a channel when you're dealing with one of these people,
I think that's profound and I wrote a post about this years ago at QueenBeeing, where I talked about Skylar's
method and the way that she talked about it, but I didn't know the story of how she
came up with the method. It's pretty cool that she added this to the site, or maybe I just missed it before.
Anyway, I wanted to share it with you
So that's what it all comes down to, if you're going through gaslighting, the best
answer is to end the relationship and get away from that person.
If you cannot do that, the next best thing you can do is gray rock method, try it, it works.
Alright,
now this brings me to the question of the day.
And the question of the day is have you been in a relationship with someone who has gaslighted you and
did you try the gray rock method? Did it work for you? If not, will you try it now?
Share your thoughts, share your ideas, share your experiences in the comments section below now
let's talk about it. Before I go, I want to remind you,
I'm gonna leave the playlist for you, right here. On that playlist,
you're gonna find a lot of helpful
information on both gaslighting and the gray rock method and a few other ways you can deal with gaslighting narcissists.
So, I hope you find that helpful. Go ahead and take a look at it right. Now, before I wrap up for the day,
I want to say thank you to my amazing channel members, those people who choose to support me through the youtube membership program, your
contributions to this channel make it easier for me to make videos and
to make better videos for you and to make more videos for you. So thank you so much, I appreciate that
you also helped me serve the community in so many other ways, so that more people can learn what narcissistic abuse is and how to
understand what they're going through and then how to overcome it and evolve into the person they truly want to be and
that is truly my mission in life.
So I just, I sincerely want to say thank you so much for that and to everyone who likes my videos,
subscribes to my channel,
comments on my videos, shares my videos, thank you,
you are also helping me spread this message just a little bit further and it really does mean the world to me, thank you
so much.
As always, thanks for being a part of my day and part of my life
and hey, thanks for it may be a part of yours,
it really doesn't mean a lot to me and hey, if you're still here, make sure you take a look at the videos
I'm leaving for you right there and right there and
while you're here, hit that subscribe button so we can stay connected and continue on this healing journey together. I'll see you soon.