What The Actual Fuck…
Gaslighting Is An Abusive Technique Used To Distract and Confuse The Victim
Gaslighting is something that has been happening to me my whole life. From the time I was a child, people would tell me that what I was seeing and hearing wasn’t there, but none of them stopped to consider the fact that what I was doing was an anti-trauma exercise.
You see, hearing and seeing things that aren’t there can be a sign of schizophrenia, but it can also be a way of reminding yourself what happened to you.
It can be your brains way of saying “Yo fuckface, pay the fuck attention, this happened to us, wake the fuck up.” The problem for some victims is that they tend to ignore the feelings inside of themselves because they don’t want to deal with the result of said trauma.
Recently, I had a conversation with a neighbor and former “almost” friend.
I sat back, and I watched as she tried to gaslight me into saying that I’d said something I’d never said — she tried to convince me that I had verbally assaulted and threatened her, and I laughed because I knew for a fact that it never happened. Until she said, “I know for a fact it did because I filed a police report.”
That’s when I started questioning things, because I don’t recall any cops coming to my door talking to me about verbal assualts and threats, and a few moments later she said to me, “You’re right, you didn’t,” but in those few moments when she tried to blame my cannabis use for not remembering, I genuinely felt sick.
It’s not the first time people have accused me of doing something I haven’t, but it’s the third time I’ve watched someone gaslight me in the last two years, to my face, and the third time I’ve watched it fail.
It’s fascinating to watch someone try to gaslight you, and then at the same time to know that they are trying to gaslight you, and to watch it fail is just fucking beautiful.
It’s stunningly gorgeous to watch someone who is trying to abuse you, stumble and fall, because they can’t control you the way you are used to being controlled.
Recently, a different neighbor threatened my life, and while I am working through that, I am starting to realize that the more men threaten me these days, the more humored I feel.
Don’t get me wrong, it stresses me out and brings up deep seated trauma, but it’s more like a brush of harsh wind, than a slap to the face or ass. It’s something I can deal with these days, which is not something I’d ever thought I’d be able to say.
Very few people in my current and personal life know what I have been through. The internet knows more about what I’ve been through than some of the people in my life, and one of them decided to threaten me.
It makes me laugh because this fuck face has no idea who I am, or what I survived. I am a UFC champion compared to some of the men who have tried to take me down.
I am a WWE Superstar compared to some of the women who have deliberately told lies about me because they’d rather protect their rapist husbands, instead of innocent little girls.
I am a fucking nightmare, to any man who thinks he can control me with his words, his hands, or any part of himself, ever again.
I will “never” allow a man to control my life, my path, my journey, ever again. This means that because of the degree to which I’ve been abused, I worry that I’ll never trust anyone enough to let someone in.
Gaslighting is a technique that many people use — I didn’t do it, it wasn’t me, you must be confused, you sure you saw what you thought you saw, you sure you heard it that way, etc.
It’s all designed to deflect and point at someone else while they ignore their actions and refuse to take responsibility for their actions.
The thing is, once you’ve been gaslit — and then woken up to the physical reality you’re living in — to realize you’ve been gaslit makes it a struggle for any abuser to be able to gaslight you again.
Once you open your eyes to gaslighting, people will fail miserably at trying to do it to you again. Largely because you know the signs when you see them.
You know what to look for, the shifty way people treat you stops to burn you the way it used to, when you start putting up boundaries and setting yourself free from the bullshit that other people are shoving into your face.
I may not have a massive group of friends, and I may not be the most famous or beautiful person in the world, but what I am is happy.
Yes, it sucks not being able to trust the idea of having a partner, because I always thought I would find someone and settle down by now, but given that I have all the freedom I could manage, to do whatever the fuck I want, yes I am happy.
As my old friend M.D. once said;
“I’d rather be fat, happy and single, than in a relationship that makes me fucking miserable just so I can say I have one.”
Women — even in the sixties, seventies, and eighties — were told and are still being told that “Life would be better with a man.” “Not a 'Person,' not a 'Partner,' life is only going to get better with a man!” That’s what they keep telling us.
And yet, for so many women, it is the men they choose, or rather the men that choose them, that are the cause for the pain girls and women experience every single day.
I knew at an early age I liked girls, more than girls are supposed to like girls, but when I was growing up, I always figured I’d marry a man. Not just because I was told it was a sin to love the same sex — although I was — but because I figured that was how it was supposed to be.
A large part of the reason I wanted to walk down the aisle toI a man if I am being perfectly honest, isn’t because I cared whether or not he loved me. If you as a man asked me to marry you ten years ago and promised to protect me, I’d have jumped at the offer.
Not because it’s what I saw at home, but because I was more desperate to be taken care of and protected from the world than I was concerned with living in the world.
When I was growing up mom’s boyfriend made fun of the fact that I was getting raped — he called it “sex” — and told all his friends I “had a little boyfriend…” it never occured to him that the child he was supposed to take care of didn’t want to be treated the way I was being treated.
And that formed a whole bunch of parts of my identity as I was getting older. The more that I got raped, the more that I convinced myself it either wasn’t happening, or I was crazy. I had my abusers who convinced me that “God wanted things the way they were.”
And when I finally came forward and told the world what was happening to me, I was the one called crazy, and no one bothered to help. I largely suspect that it’s because I am a vocal and visible Black person who struggles with mental health issues.
I think racism, sexism, and ableism played a huge part in why I am the way that I am today, and if we can stop one person from being gaslit and abused the way that I was, then I will highly consider my work a success.
Because I was gaslit, because I was abused, because I was “Sacrificed,” scarred, and branded by my abusers, I have stories for centuries on how to recognize and deal with abusers, but that doesn’t mean this is the story I wanted to tell.
I wanted to tell fantastical stories of heroes and heroines and change the world with my work, but I will settle—this one time—for you remembering that just because someone swears that you’re crazy, psychotic, or insane doesn’t mean you actually are.
But life doesn’t give us what we want all the time, so I’ve learned to make beautiful lemonade, out of absolute bullshit, given to me by fuckwads, who thought they could take me down, simply by tearing me a part.
The problem is, I’m a survivor, and like many of you know, it’s almost impossible to take down a survivor whose survived the amount of shit we have.
So yes baby, we fucking got this!
Sending you all my love,
Devon J Hall, The Original Loud Mouth Brown Girl.
