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Relationships

Mumsnet has not checked the qualifications of anyone posting here. If you need help urgently or expert advice, please see our domestic violence webguide and/or relationships webguide. Many Mumsnetters experiencing domestic abuse have found this thread helpful: Listen up, everybody

Tell me your gaslighting stories

75 replies

Sandra15 · 11/04/2021 18:22

I had a relationship with a guy in my 20s who was obsessed with the idea I was a cheat and hated me seeing my friends. One day he told me he had received an anonymous letter telling him all about how terrible I was, flirting all the time with different men at work and so on. It was a three page letter torn out of a spiral bound notebook. He told me it had been sent to him at work.

I knew it was a load of old pony because nobody I worked with was sufficiently interested to do that, nobody knew where he worked and it was all untrue anyway. I asked him to show me the envelope it had arrived in.

He came up with a Jiffy bag and it was his own handwriting on it in capital letters. He had written it himself using his non-dominant hand and sent it to himself. Absolutely ridiculous.

Of course this is mildly amusing not to mention stupid, but the guy went on, a year later, to beat me up and tell me he was doing it to restrain me as I was in danger of hurting myself.

OP posts:
fedup078 · 11/04/2021 19:41

DH on many occasions drunk as a skunk telling me he's not and that I'm just looking for a fight and I have 'mammy issues' (my mother was an alcoholic) that he doesn't have a problem and that I'm the one with the problem for thinking he has a problem blah blah blah....
He even once fell asleep sat upright while trying to explain how not drunk he was

Wontgoquietly · 11/04/2021 20:23

Ex had "quit" smoking as he did every weekend after a sesh for less than 4 hours, walking through town he asked me to go in the shop and buy him some cigs whilst he popped to the loo in a nearby restaurant. Cigs purchased ( I don't smoke) and passed to him as he came out, at this point he flips out in the middle of town. Screaming at me that I was trying to kill him off, wanted nothing more that to watch him fail and he never asked me to get them.

Sadly this wasnt the worst of it and is pretty tame in comparison to everything else he did to manipulate and bully me.

StephenBelafonte · 11/04/2021 20:25

My ex put banners and balloons up on my 41st birthday all saying "happy 40th" and swore blind I was 40. I knew it was deliberate, it was also the last straw.

He also used to accuse me of being drunk all the time. I used to drink vodka and coke. One evening, I sat there drinking coke and he said to me "whats that your drinking" just out of interest I said it was vodka and coke. Later on in the evening when I said something he didn't want to hear he called me a drunken bitch and said i was always horrible when i'd had a drink. I knew then that it wasn't true.

JohnLeeCooker · 11/04/2021 20:29

Ah "gaslighting"
The latest in thing. Along with great walls. Nobody using the word even seems to know what it really means

StephenBelafonte · 11/04/2021 20:30

ODFOD

OppsUpsSide · 11/04/2021 20:31

Well thank fook the great JohnLeeCooker is here to let them know hey

JohnLeeCooker · 11/04/2021 20:34

Grey walls I meant

AdaThorne · 11/04/2021 20:55

@JohnLeeCooker

Grey walls I meant
Your point would have made more sense if you got it right first time.

No, wait. You couldn’t even manage it second time. It’s grey rock.

You seem a little... chippy? U ok hun?

vyff · 11/04/2021 20:56

I am not sure what gaslighting is. I had a short relationship with someone who told me they were single. When I questioned it he would be annoyed with me and make me feel bad for questioning him. I eventually found proof he was married. I think he got married while we were seeing each other.

Is this gaslighting?

Cloverforever · 11/04/2021 20:57

@JohnLeeCooker

Grey walls I meant
OMG, how embarrassing Grin
OppsUpsSide · 11/04/2021 20:59

@vyff that is lying.
Gaslighting is done to make someone doubt their own mental state/perception of reality. Wontgolightly’s is a ‘good’ example.

MadgeMidgerson · 11/04/2021 21:00

all the time. we moved a year ago before the pandemic, i had a job to go to and he did not.

he sat around the house doing ??? fit nearly a year and when i said please will you look forward work he said he was only doing what i had asked, taking care of the children.

the children were 11 and 13 and at school all day. i was home daily by 4:30.

Cocopogo · 11/04/2021 21:01

DP goes off the deep end when I question his constant use of WhatsApp. He’s had several affairs.

Vargas · 11/04/2021 21:03

Vyff - yes. Unfortunately very common, particularly in controlling men.

notagainmummy · 11/04/2021 21:08

My ex told me again and again that, not only did I provoke him on purpose, but I wanted him to hit me because ........ he never got to that bit because even a gaslighting manipulative bastard like him hasn't enough imagination to think of a reasonable reason.

It was an attempt at gaslighting, but along with all the others, depended on me believing him, which of course i didn't.

notagainmummy · 11/04/2021 21:12

@JohnLeeCooker true gaslighting does depend on the victim being duped into believing the lies told to them, but it doesn't mean its not gaslighting just because the victim doesn't believe the lies. You may not believe the actual lie but you still believe somewhere along the line that, although you are not doing what you are being told you are doing, you must be doing something!

Eslteacher06 · 11/04/2021 21:30

My aunt, who I was very close to and like a second mother, sent me a very cold message when my dad was dying of cancer, but she wouldn't accept that it was the wrong time to send it. She said it was her duty to send it (?!).

I then realized how manipulative she actually was. Looking back, loads of stuff made sense.

Dacquoise · 11/04/2021 21:36

Took over a meal I had prepared for someone I was seeing. His sister was going back to Australia after a visit and it was a going away dinner. Checked that it was just the three of us, teenage son and nephew eating out, made appropriate quantity. When I got there son and nephew turned up and the guy was adamant he had told me it was 5 for dinner not 3. No he didn't cos I made three portions. He wouldn't have it and I ended up having to go out for more food. It was at that point I decided the 'relationship' had no future. His ego just couldn't admit his mistake.

Dacquoise · 11/04/2021 21:52

He tried to convince me of the occasion when and how he'd told me - complete gaslighting fairytale.

Sally2791 · 11/04/2021 21:56

ExH groped a woman in front of me at a party.
He managed to turn it round to being my fault, and had me apologise to him.

Wontgoquietly · 11/04/2021 21:59

The example I used was the most clear case of gaslightung for me. The rest was subtle and extremely unnerving like telling me I should go out more in front of my friends as I didn't see them enough or spend enough time for myself, yet when I planned anything he would spend the whole week in a bad mood, find excuses as to.why he couldn't have the children, if I did manage to get out it would be phone call after phone call asking when I'd be home, waiting on the doorstep for me when I did get back, ridiculing me for being a state, looking like a tart etc.

Constant lies about his whereabouts, accusing me of having affairs or flirting with his friends whilst he was having affairs the whole time.

Forcing me to handover all my finances because I was shit with money I wasnt

Telling me I'd be nothing without him, no one other than him would ever want me.

Telling.me he was a bad man but I made him want to be better.

Forced me to stop breastfeeding our baby at 3 months old because I was spoiling her and doing it deliberately to stop him from bonding with his child.

The list is endless.

Pleased to say after years of emotional, financial and physical abuse I got the hell out of there!

6 years on and have never been happier.

NeverAgain123456 · 11/04/2021 22:01

My step daughter was often really unpleasantly nasty to me behind her father’s back. Very manipulative behaviour.
During lockdown before any regs were loosened she regularly stayed at her boyfriend’s. she posted a dated photo on Instagram.
He denied it existed and said I made it all up even when I showed him the photo.

Dacquoise · 11/04/2021 22:11

My DM turned up with her latest infidelity and took him upstairs in front of us children because he 'wanted to see her bedroom '. When I confronted her about it years later she told me it didn't happen and that 'children have vivid imaginations'. Really? I was thirteen and in complete control of all my faculties plus my siblings have the same memories.

youvegottenminuteslynn · 11/04/2021 22:21

@Cocopogo

DP goes off the deep end when I question his constant use of WhatsApp. He’s had several affairs.
Hopefully this is an ex partner?!
Shodan · 11/04/2021 22:27

I'm not sure if it was gaslighting, but XH often used to tell me I had mis-remembered conversations- that I hadn't said such-and-such, or that he had never agreed to something.

It got to a point where we had received our booked DisneyWorld tickets, and I gave them to him to look after. On a whim, and jokingly, I got him to sign a 'receipt', which basically just stated that he had taken possession of them and would look after them. When the holiday arrived I asked him to get the tickets, and he was absolutely adamant that I'd never given them to him, or that we'd even had the conversation. Obviously I then pulled out the receipt and he backed down.

Like I say, I don't know if he was a gaslighter, or whether he just genuinely had a bad memory- but I do know that during our entire marriage, I questioned my own memory many times, which wasn't something I'd ever had to do before.