8:48am November 11, 2014

➸ There's a post going around about gaslighting

nicocoer:

And it’s a pretty great one. It even has a checklist so you can see if maybe you are a victim of it.

But I want to quickly say that the symptom checklist can give you a positive long after you are out of an active,y abusive situation. I spent years being told by my abuser that I was essentially…

I was relieved to find “You start lying to avoid the put-downs and reality-twists” on there, because that’s exactly what I did when my stalker started gaslighting me. (And when I say gaslighting, I mean a systematic pattern of abuse designed explicitly to undermine my sense of reality. I don’t mean “saying that something didn’t occur when I think it did, or occurred differently than I think it did,” which is how a lot of people around here seem to use it.) Because not only did I start lying to her, but she started using the fact that I was lying to “prove” to people that I was a “habitual liar” rather than someone in a sticky situation who was finding lying my only possible recourse at that moment.

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