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Self-Gaslighting: When You Don’t Trust Yourself
What to do When you Keep Lying to Yourself
Gaslighting has become an important term over the past few years to describe the experience of being lied to and manipulated into believing fake from real.
Often times, individuals doing the gaslighting are using this manipulation tactic in order to control and coheres others and save their own back from potential guilty charges if reality risks placing them in an unappealing light.
Despite what friends might be observing in the relationship and telling the individual on the gaslighting-end what is real, the manipulated often disregards this in favour of the lies they’re being told.
In these instances, it’s as if the desire to maintain a relationship outweights the reality of the situation. Despite red flags and intuition that might tell us to believe otherwise; to call out the person for their blatant lies, we’re fooled and fool ourselves into believing an alternate reality.
Of course, the blame isn’t entirely on us for ignoring our intuition. Gaslighting can occur within sinister environments, built up over time to break down our perception of real and fake. Our feelings towards the other person and the power dynamics at play will also likely play a role.
But this article isn’t so much about being gaslighted about others.
It’s about gaslighting ourselves.
Self-Gaslighting: A Bad Habit
Sometimes we don’t need someone else to tell us what is real or false, we may be in a habit of mistrusting ourselves in general and ignoring our intuition.
As a personal example I did this not too long ago:
It was my friends birthday, and I was committed to not staying out too late because I know the impact drinking can have on my mental health. Hangovers just aren’t 1 day hassles for me, they’re multiple day slug-fests where I fall back into old patterns and shame-spiral.
But a few drinks in I began to rationalise my actions.
“It’ll be fine, just enjoy the night”, “Don’t think about how you’ll feel tomorrow, you’ve done this before”, was just some of the drunken…
