To be sick of the word gaslighting?

[NotOneOfTheInCrowd]

Thats it.

Every time someone has an experience they don’t like they say they’re being gaslighted.

People need to and look up the meaning of the word, because by throwing it around so casually has led to the trivialisation of genuine abuse.

I agree it's annoying.

I was in a relationship where I was gaslighted in the true meaning of the term. He tried to convince me I was going crazy, claimed I had memory problems and that I needed to speak to a neurologist. He claimed that everybody else could see it, everybody else was talking about and were concerned for me but they were too afraid to tell me. He told me things had happened that I knew hadn't happened, but when I challenged him he would put on a concerned face and say 'sweetie you really need to speak to a doctor'. He tried to convince me that I'd cheated on him, that he'd followed me out of concern and that he'd seen it with his own eyes, that he was heartbroken but he would forgive me, even though I knew I hadn't left the house or so much as looked at another man. All of this was done under the guise of a kind, caring and sensitive man.

I felt like I'd lost my mind. It's taken me a long time to start to rebuild my confidence.

My (then) closest friend spent over a decade making me think that the man who raped me was also sending threatening messages and was having people follow me.

Eventually some of it seemed so impossible (and yet I had received the detailed messages etc so it couldn't be impossible), that I thought I was going mad.

I had PTSD from the rape, but my friend's actions made me so unwell, so mad (for want of a better word), that for years I was in and out of a psychiatric hospital.

He seemed such a good friend to me that I was immensely grateful to him, and our mutual friends and my family admired how kind he was.

When I eventually realised what had been going on, he convinced our friends that I was making it up. I don't blame them for believing him - I was crazy and confused. He'd always been calm and logical and plausible. And he tricked me into actions which made me look so much worse. I lost my whole group of friends.

He was a gaslighting bastard. It isn't that he lied. Or that he kept lying. It's that he made me think I was insane, to the extent that I started to become insane.

@HowDoYouSolveAProblemLikeMyRear That's sickening! Did you ever find out his motivation for doing that?

Wow @kitteninabasket and @HowDoYouSolveAProblemLikeMyRear - both very concrete examples of gaslighting! Sounds horrendous for you both! So sorry you had to go through that

I’ve seen a video doing the rounds on SM of a woman lying on the floor of a very messy living room and literally screaming her head off. She ran in to a door frame and hit her head and fell on the floor, still screaming. You could just make out that she was saying ‘stop kicking me’
The person filming it, I presume her partner, was very calm and was just saying “I’m filming you for my own safety and so people believe how crazy you are” (or similar words to that effect) and then obviously posted it on SM and it went viral.

I feel so sorry for that woman. Obviously you don’t know the back story, but just by virtue of the fact that it ended on the internet makes me think he provoked her and then filmed her.

My ex did something similar. He knew how to push my buttons. He once wound me up so much, got right in my face and I lost it and started shouting at him. At that point, he sat down and just calmly kept telling me to calm down. I eventually did and went to bed and was woken up by him playing a recording of me shouting at him, at full blast from the living room. He said I “needed to know how crazy I sound”
He also played it to a lot of our friends.

It's an extremely valid point though. I've been gaslit in the past by people who claimed that things that were demonstrably true (as is the case that this film does actually exist) simply weren't, and then continued to persist with the claims despite all my counter proofs I offered up. It's a total mind fuck. I have genuinely ended up thinking I must be becoming delusional (which is,of course, the point of gaslighting).

@Errors What a revolting bastard. I’m glad he’s an ex. It’s frightening how easily they can switch it off and on. I remember trying to exit a room from an ex from when I was much younger, while he was shouting at me (he was one of those who would get in your face, follow you, block exits etc). He ran in front of me and carried on shouting centimetres from my face, at which point I lost it and started shouting back. He pushed me over and then suddenly put on his calm voice telling me it was for my own good because I was hysterical

another time he was shouting at me while I was sitting on the bed crying and asking him to stop. He then made a comment about my childhood so unforgivable and sick I can’t even repeat it. I picked up a glass and threw it at the wall. He looked at me with horror, backed away as if he were afraid and said I was crazy.

God that sounds awful! I used to get that too. Got told I needed to seek help for my ‘anger issues’
Funnily enough, as soon as I left him I stopped getting angry!

He once managed to convince me I was a narcissist. I was so worried that I was that I was doing all these quizzes online and wondering if I should seek help for it. Ironically, an actual narcissist wouldn’t care!

Anothet unless already said 'discrimination' for example if someone even thinks about going to work they demand they get paid a full weeks wage

If not they cry discrimination and there will be people going along with a 'handhold'

Not for certain. I suspect he liked feeling needed, and I certainly leant on him for emotional support after the rape.

When I started to recover, I loved him just as much but wasn't so dependent on him. And then I got the first threatening message, which set me back in my recovery. That pattern continued for around a decade.

So many puzzle pieces fell into place when I realised what he'd been doing. But it still makes my sad that I've lost that group of friends. About 20 of us, the core friends since school but now with partners/spouses/others. Great group. I hope one day the truth will come out.

I agree OP.

I agree although I've never seen safeguarding been overused? Can you think of an example where that one has been overused?

I’m fed up with people claiming their ex was a narcissist. I doubt it.

Statistically it's unlikely he was a full blown case of NPD, it's not a common disorder. I think many more people have some traits of it. I certainly don't doubt that these people were horrifically abused by these exes, but full blown NPD is unlikely.

It’s thrown around fast and loose.

I used to think I had been gaslit, but I was wrong. I think the behaviour I was exposed to was more invalidation than gaslighting?

Examples:

#1
I endured a sexual assault from somebody as a teenager. My abusive father made me tell him what had happened (it came out some time later) and then he basically told me it hasn't happened like I said it had. He said that I had only had my bottom pinched. I had actually been pinned against a wall and penetrated with a finger. I was 15 and had been through CSA (not by !y dad) at an earlier age and just froze. My father kept denying it and eventually rewrote what happened as a bum pinch and told me all girls have that happen to them. Some years after that he kept saying I had never been SA.

#2
I had a community psychiatric nurse who didn't like me very much. One visit I had been unable to clean my house up because I was so low I just couldn't even move from the sofa. Earlier in the visit I tried to explain how I had been feeling. Later on in the appointment she was berating me for not cleaning and I mentioned I had been feeling very low and not eating or sleeping etc and she said "you didn't mention this before." I had told her only 20 minutes before. She was often trying me that the trauma I had faced as a child with an emotionally and physically abusive father was not enough to cause my symptoms of complex ptsd and BPD/EUPD. I took an overdose under her care as invalidation is a huge trigger for me. It was in my notes that I had a history of ED (admittedly it was BED with some purging , not a restricting disorder or proper bulimia). This lady had a downer on my weight (I was very large when I saw her) and told me I didn't present as having an ED, told me to leave Overeaters Anon, where I had had some success and try Slimming World? To be fair to this woman on our first ever session I lied to her about something because I was afraid of her disapproval and abandonment, it was wrong and I felt guilt and confessed, but because of that she considered everything after I said that was a lie, even though the things I supposedly was "lying" about were confirmed by other professionals in my records and care co ordination plan. So it was my fault, sort of. I don't think she was trying to make me doubt myself, she just wanted to catch me out. She meant well, but it broke me and I swallowed all the medication I could find in my dosset box after slashing my arms and wrists to pieces.

3# My father has forgotten a lot of what he did to us as children physically. My sister, as an adult in her 40s, confronted him about how he had threatened to cut her throat with a knife how he chased her with the knife and he said "that sounds like something I would do." He had done a lot of work on himself at this point and although when we were kids he used to deny things were happening he admitted some of it .

Here's the thing though, my dad has issues remembering stuff. He got very angry with me when I reminded him of how I dropped out of my a levels for a while due to health issues and had a tutor. He said "you've never needed a tutor." I had a slight learning issue at school as a child and he would always tell me " no it's that you're lazy , you've never had issues at school. " I had a tutor for what was to help me with what I know believe to be a form of dyscaluclia but he denied that happened too. He used to punish me for getting answers in my maths homework wrong and would threaten to beat me until In got them right . To this day he denies that happened. Because he has a memory issue. He honestly doesn't remember things the way we kids remember them.

I'm sorry you went through all that, @Purrdrop. I do think your dad was trying to gaslight you - he wanted to change your knowledge of your own experience into something he could cope with. He failed.

People often rewrite their own memories - not always about abuse, it could be anything - and then want others to confirm their beliefs by agreeing with them about what happened. This can obviously create conflict, as each side believes the other to be lying, and can be extremely destabilising when the person with the changed memories has authority.

I think that holding two different versions of your life in your head - the objective truth, which you've suppressed, and your re-imagined story - must set up a fair amount of mental strain. It's not too surprising that the constructs tend to crumble as we get old, leading to confusion.

Your nurse was just an arsehole. She clearly had difficulties of her own and was in the wrong job. I hope she was at least reprimanded.

Well, it’s MN….everything is so over dramatic! Everyone has experienced ‘trauma’ their mental health is always ‘spiralling’ anxiety ‘is through the roof!’ everyone is a ‘narc’ they’re constantly being offended, not sure if they’ve been offended, asking if they SHOULD be offended, not sure if they should go to a wedding! Who needs to know whether they should accept a wedding invitation without asking randoms on the internet??? How they hold down these high pressure jobs they do, I can’t imagine!

I agree. People use it to describe a situation where someone disagrees with them or basic lying. Bit more to gaslighting than someone telling you you're wrong about something

Ive had an incredibly tough tough life and I'm 31,
I've had to drag myself up I have multiple mental health diagnosises ( psychiatrist diagnosises before anyone pipes up) I've had near fatal suicide attempts. I'm resilient. Only because I've had to.
I am fed up to the eyeballs of all these people on tiktok and Instagram screaming "mental health" for the most trivial shit and minimal inconvenience to their lives, people are growing up as snow flakes, people aren't growing up to "cope" with things. Not saying anyone should have to deal with anything but people trying to make mental health conditions - especially anxiety and PTSD fashionable is astounding!
No wonder the mental health services in this country is so so overrun - the people in severe need for CPNs, psychiatrist, inpatient beds are not getting the most care because the people trying to make anxiety the new "in" thing are making a spectical of genuine debilitating conditions!

I was on a very interesting thread where it was properly discussed whether the op had been gaslit by a hospital who made her question the whole events of her poor treatment. I think most of us on mn do know the real definition, even if the word is bandied about on other threads too easily.

Oh I agree with this 100%. Thanks for expressing it so well and I hope it does bring some comfort to @Purrdrop .