- Hey everybody, I'm Katie Morton,
a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist
and today we're gonna talk about gaslighting.
I feel like that term is everywhere.
It's all over the internet,
people saying that they've been gaslit
and often we can know when someone is gaslighting us,
if they're making us question our own reality.
But can we tell when we gaslight ourselves
or can we even gaslight ourselves?
Let's get right into it.
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It is essentially a type of emotional abuse.
When someone gaslights us, it means that they tell us
that the way we remembered something wasn't correct
or that how we feel isn't right.
They try to erode at our belief
in our own selves and our experience.
And the goal of gaslighting is really to get us
to question our own reality.
And if you like videos like this,
make sure you like and subscribe, it really helps.
While it's most commonly associated
with abusive relationships or toxic ones
we can in fact, gaslight ourselves.
Now it's most commonly born out of trauma.
And if you just think for a second
what trauma does to us, when someone harms us
and we fear for our life and our safety,
let's say we were abused as a child for many years,
we can start to think that something is wrong with us
or if our memories are spotty, we can even think,
maybe it didn't happen in the way I remember, gaslighting,
or maybe I'm overreacting, making it into something bigger.
This can happen a lot with emotional abuse.
They didn't break any bones, I don't have any bruises,
I must be making this into more than it was.
Those are all examples of gaslighting ourselves.
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If you're concerned that maybe you are doing this,
here are some ways to recognize
if you're gaslighting yourself.
And the first sign or symptom
is that you consistently minimize
or invalidate your own experience.
This could mean that when we're going through a situation
where we feel terrible or someone really hurt our feelings,
instead of acknowledging that and allowing ourselves to say,
yeah, that sucked and that person was a jerk,
we turn it in and say,
no, no, no, you're being too sensitive, you're overreacting.
They didn't really mean it that way.
And by doing that, we are in fact, gaslighting ourselves.
And rolling nicely off of that is a second symptom
that we dismiss our feelings right away.
This means that we don't allow ourselves
to actually acknowledge them or feel them,
we just push them aside.
They're not important, they're not correct,
onto the next thing.
The third sign or symptom is that we convince ourselves
we're overreacting, meaning that how we feel
and the experience we're having is just too much,
meaning like we're too sensitive, right?
We just judge our experience
rather than allowing ourselves to feel it
and accept that that's what's going on.
The fourth sign is that we constantly think,
I must be lying or I'm just making it up.
You can see how these all kind of roll together
in this complete minimization or invalidation
of our experience.
If we're constantly telling ourselves, I must be lying
or I'm making it up, we're never gonna believe
that our experience is true and correct.
And that is the definition of gaslighting,
when we never believe that our experience is true.
The fifth sign is that we struggle to trust our own gut.
You know, that feeling that you get
when you know something isn't quite right
or you get really excited about the potential in something,
if we don't feel okay enough to feel that and listen to it
and instead push it aside, ignore it
and trust outside perspectives.
This means that when we don't feel comfortable,
we'll turn to other people to ask them
if they're comfortable, not allowing ourselves again,
to just acknowledge what we're feeling and act out of that.
An the sixth symptom and we've kind of touched on this,
is that we constantly think we're being too sensitive
or dramatic, and we can have these conversations
with ourselves all the time.
It doesn't necessarily have to be around a scenario
or when we are feeling incredibly upset,
we are just constantly telling ourselves
that we're too sensitive.
That friend hasn't texted back in four days,
we're being too sensitive or we're being dramatic
by thinking that maybe something's up with them.
We are just constantly negating our own experience
and telling ourselves to kind of like repress it,
stuff it down.
Like you're being too much, Katie, not today.
And the sixth sign is that we constantly overlook harmful
or hurtful things others have done to us.
And this is hard because often we just don't,
some of us don't like conflict
and don't like to be in disagreement with other people,
so we will, quote, forgive and forget right away
without even asking for an apology
or having that difficult conversation around the upset.
Instead, we just move on because again, how we feel
isn't correct how we remember it isn't quite right,
minimize and validate and move on.
The next sign is that we take on more blame than necessary.
We assume everything that happened is our fault.
And you can see why this would happen
if we don't really trust our own experiences,
our own emotional feeling, our gut reaction.
We push all that to the side, we look out to other people
to either validate or to tell us what to do.
If we're always looking outward,
then if something goes wrong, we, oh, well I'm always wrong.
Everybody else is always right, so then of course,
I'm gonna take on all the blame.
I'm going to assume the responsibility for this fault
because everything I think and say,
and do and feel is wrong.
Next, we can always assume that our thoughts and feelings
are not valid or at the very least,
not as valid as someone else's.
So someone else's experience thoughts, feelings,
whatever their upsets, is going to take priority over ours.
Again, kind of going back to what I said at the beginning
about that fond response, we will try to people please
almost to the max by stuffing down our own feelings
and our own needs and putting someone else's first.
And finally, we can assume that we are not deserving
of care, love, or attention.
If we think something's wrong with us
and we think that the way that we're experiencing the world
is just wrong, something about us is just incorrect,
then what about that would make us lovable?
We have to think of the conversations
we're kind of having with ourselves.
When we gaslight ourselves, we're essentially
putting ourselves last and telling ourselves we're stupid,
we're doing this wrong, we're not remembering it correctly.
You're losing your mind, you're going crazy.
We're like shit talking ourselves so much so
that we can believe that we're not really worthy of love.
And I'm here to tell you that each and every one of you is.
(gentle music)
Gaslighting ourselves kind of comes
from things like people pleasing,
codependency and enmeshment.
People pleasing is when we go out of our way
to put other people first and to do things,
to ensure that they're happy.
Now, the interesting thing about people pleasing
is it can actually be very manipulative.
We think of it as like, oh, I do all this
to make someone else feel happy.
Take a beat, that's not the truth.
As a recovering people pleaser, I can tell you,
I people pleased to reduce my own anxiety
and to help me feel better.
And so you have to think about this
that when we're people pleasing,
it's actually to soothe our own system.
And this is also a way that we can gaslight ourselves.
I can tell myself my needs aren't as important as theirs,
I might feel better because they're feeling better,
then they can't get upset at me, hate conflict,
hence the people pleasing
and we can kind of go around and around.
So just consider this role of people pleasing in your life
and instead of thinking of it
as I'm just such a nice person, I just please other people.
'Cause I thought that for years,
it's been incredibly like mind blowing and life changing
to be like, "No, Katie that was a manipulation tactic
"because you have a lot of anxiety and don't like conflict."
So just think about that,
maybe that will affect you the way it affected me
'cause it was like boom.
Moving on to codependency,
which if you haven't heard that term
or maybe you've just heard it thrown around
and no one has defined it, know that codependency means
that we have an intense or excessive
emotional or psychological reliance on someone.
And this term is used a lot when it comes to addiction,
let's say our partner or family member or other loved one
has alcohol or drug addiction, then we can be codependent,
meaning that we allow them to still live their life.
Like we pay the bills, we make sure everything's okay
so they can still use.
And having that kind of dynamic in a relationship
is really unhealthy and can lead, as you can kind of see,
to us gaslighting ourselves.
Because if we're codependent on another person,
we have an excessive, emotional reliance on them.
We wanna make sure that they're happy
and everything's good for them, so that then we feel good.
Kind of like the people pleasing,
it's a form of manipulation
so that our anxiety or our overwhelm is soothed.
And so just pay attention, do you feel
like you have an excessive reliance on someone else?
Does someone else's mood completely affect
or change your day and your mood?
Something to consider.
And finally there's enmeshment.
And oftentimes codependency and enmeshment
are used interchangeably
but that they're a little bit different.
Enmeshment is when we have no boundaries between us
and another person that we're in a relationship with.
And this can mean like codependency,
that we're affected by their mood, but more than that
we can struggle to even think independently,
make decisions on our own.
And we can rely heavily on checking in with them
and making sure they agree before doing anything.
So essentially enmeshment means
we don't have any self, it's always us.
And you can see how this can cause us to gaslight ourselves.
If we are in a disagreement with our partner
and we're enmeshed, it's gonna be hard for us to say,
"Yes, I was upset by that
"and I'm gonna need you to apologize,"
or "That really hurt my feelings.
"Why did you talk to me that way?"
We're not gonna feel that ability,
we're gonna think that we're together
and we just have to stuff it down and move forward.
Overall, know that gaslighting yourself, unfortunately,
is incredibly common and it's usually a survival tactic.
It helps us get through overwhelming, abusive
or traumatizing situations.
If we put ourselves second and kind of negate
or ignore or invalidate our emotional responses,
then we can keep moving forward.
Sometimes it's too hard or difficult,
or maybe even just overwhelming to acknowledge
what we're going through.
And it might have prevented us from continuing to go forward
but we can only do that for a short period of time.
Survival tactics are helpful, pat yourself on the back,
we got through, but now we're through it
and now we have to recognize that this is happening
and figure out a way to slowly but surely
acknowledge what we're going through and validate.
And yes, I know it's hard, it's not gonna be
like all of a sudden we go from thinking,
Katie, you're so stupid, you're overreacting all the time,
to, oh my God, I'm so upset,
I need to tell everybody about it,
I need to ask for apologies.
There's a lot of space in between that.
And I really think the first step at least for me
was to start identifying those emotions.
Like what is it that I'm actually feeling?
'Cause if I've been stuffing them down for so long,
I can't even put words to it.
Or maybe it's even just recognizing that I'm upset.
I might not have any other terms to put to it.
Just noticing that I don't quite feel happy or good.
And maybe be curious about like, what's coming up for me?
Why is that happening?
So be patient with yourself as you try to untangle
this kind of old pattern of being
and pattern of treating yourself,
because just noticing and paying more attention
and tapping in can be incredibly healing.
But I wanna hear from you, do you gaslight yourself?
What does it feel like for you
and which one of these symptoms really lined up?
Let me know and I'll see you next time.
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