Hello friends,
Here’s to another day we get to have together, here’s to another day that we are healthy, alive or at least have many things to be grateful for. Here’s to Tuesday.
I figured let’s learn about another topic that believe it or not many people have faced, felt negatively impacted by, tried explaining to psychologists, people who wanted to help them but couldn’t put the negative experience down in words or in one word. Many domestic violence victims have faced this and haven’t really understood this experience until someone tells them about it or until they read information out of interest. So, if my blog is of massive interest then I want to make sure you are aware of this, maybe you can help yourself, help someone else or stop this if you are the person doing this or protect yourself from it. I want to make it clear, this is a very important topic, very important. Why? Because gaslighting is something that creeps up on a person, it is something that gradually grows, hence why it is so hard to detect.
The person on the receiving end of gaslighting is clearly under abuse. Gaslighting is a form of abuse that an abuser uses to feel in control especially when they become threatened with the loss of power, which really boils down to control even if the victim has no bad intentions or even if the victim is naturally doing things from his or her healthy upbringing or habits.
The ultimate aim for gaslighting is so that the victim questions their sanity, reality, perception and even their memories.
So, what is gaslighting?
According to one article, this is what best explains the term gaslighting.
“Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that occurs in abusive relationships. It is an insidious, and sometimes covert, type of emotional abuse where the bully or abuser makes the target question their judgments and reality. Ultimately, the victim of gaslighting starts to wonder if they are going crazy.
Gaslighting primarily occurs in dating and married relationships, but it’s not uncommon for it to occur in controlling friendships or among family members as well. Toxic people use this type of manipulation to exert power over others in order to manipulate friends, family members, and sometimes even co-workers.”
Gaslighting consists of the following techniques:
Countering
Withholding
Trivializing
Denial
Diverting
Stereotyping
This article below goes into all of the above points in details as well as other types of situations such as institutional, political, racial, medical, child-parent relationships, and intimate partner relationships.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/gaslighting
With gaslighting, the victim often starts to believe they are the problem. The abuser is a master liar and will dodge all the truths about their destructive behaviour by lying. Gaslighters try and show others that they are worried about the victim subtly and inevitably make people, friends, family members, the social circle of the victim and their own groups believe that the victim is unstable, has medical conditions that are not even true, that the victim is the one who has the bigger problem or issue. The Gaslighter may also use this by making the victim feel that others feel the same about them even when they don’t. They will continuously discredit the victim. The Gaslighter will consistently deflect blame and shift blame to their own advantage. The Gaslighter will consider themselves as “the golden child,” where they almost always position themselves as not ever doing any wrong and when confronted with that they will lie, deflect, deny, and push things back onto the victim, however, when confronted with their truths, faults and errors they show more aggression at deflection and shifting the blame. Gaslighters pretend that they care for the victim and use words they never use to the victim during genuine times such as “I care for you and I love you,” and often use these words in a morbid sense especially during the times they are abusing the victim. Gaslighters twist and reframe conversations and happenings of the past so that the victim is not onto their behaviours so that they can keep manipulating them.
This article is very good at going over the highlighted points I have just mentioned above, most of all the section on 15 signs to look out for when a person is subjected to gaslighting can be viewed on this link https://www.verywellmind.com/is-someone-gaslighting-you-4147470
I want to make it clear that if gaslighting has been going on, left unexamined and left as-is for too long the person experiencing it may have negative physical, phycological, mental, and emotional impact.
The advice I would give anyone after being in such situations is that forget about being right and wrong with the abuser just focus on how you feel and how to centre back to yourself without getting hit or impacted too much. This will most likely give you a true reality, and chances are if you feel everything that is happening is wrong then you are right. Do not let the abuser know that you know this, find a way out by finding help from good samaritans.
This article is really good, “But gaslighting can have terrible consequences in the long-term, destroying the victim’s self-esteem and confidence and either trapping them in a dysfunctional relationship or blowing up the relationship.”
This is a very good article https://www.thehealthy.com/family/relationships/gaslighting-examples/
Other articles describe gaslighting as a way to brainwash the victim by distorting, disorientating, diverting, and distracting a person. This begins with small offences otherwise the person will suspect the abuser’s intentions and run.
It is important to understand that before COVID and the explosion of domestic violence that is now in billions of homes around the world is because power seemed to people as a way of order or the way of sustaining something, but decent people don’t enjoy having power over people wrongly, decent people empower. – T. Dench Patel, 11 May 2021, 18:11
To give you as much information on this subject as possible take a look at further links below.
How to recognise gaslighting and get help
What is gaslighting and how do you know if it’s happened to you
11 Warning signs of gaslighting
What is gaslighting in relationships?
Yours sincerely,
T. Dench Patel
Thank you for the comments and support. Thank you for offering to donate if there was a donate button on here. I prefer not to take donations. You can support by purchasing my books (Paperback or Kindle), The South African: True Colours, The South African: Roamer or my children’s book Light. These books can be found on Amazon mainly and other sites in your country.
The audiobook for The South African: True Colours is available on iTunes, Apple and Audible. The South African: Roamer and Light will be released soon.
