With me apologizing: “I’m so sorry that I made you feel so unhappy here that you needed that as an outlet. We went back and forth some more, and do you know how that conversation ended? “Look, I just feel so suffocated by you lately,” was the first thing that came out of his mouth when his eyes made it to the text message I had seen by accident. While choosing a Netflix show through his phone the next day, I learned that the friend in need was actually another woman – he had cheated on me with the night before. I said yes, and woke up again when he came back home after helping said friend. One night, my boyfriend and I were asleep in bed when he woke me up asking if he could borrow my car to help out his friend. They will block, distract, undermine, divert and blame you for their behavior – anything at all to keep them off the hook from admitting one ounce of fault. You’ll approach your partner with something that unsettles you and that conversation will shift immediately to why it wasn’t their fault, or why something should not have unsettled you in the first place. With gaslighting, your grievances are never validated. And the goal of the person doing it is to control you mentally and emotionally by overriding your perceptions of events. Gaslighting is an emotional abuse tactic designed to get you to question the integrity of your reality. When I tried to learn more about it, I found plenty of theoretical explanation, but not many accounts from people who’d actually been through it. These are not faults of my education or myself for that matter but a lack of awareness about this issue among the general public. And if anyone perhaps should have known about gaslighting, it was me - the therapist-in-training who lived in the throes of it. For a season, gaslighting was a part of my daily life, and I didn’t even know that it was a thing. During our time together, I was in school for another one and even I had never heard gaslighting discussed in-depth. When I started dating my abuser, I had a Master’s degree in counseling under my belt it’s true. Written by Writer’s Corps member Amanda Phillips
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