[00:00:00] Today, we are talking about all things gaslighting and how you can trust yourself after you've been gaslighted.
Speaker: Welcome to Heartbreak to Wholeness, the podcast helping you heal from the mindfuck of narcissistic relationships and move towards the secure, peaceful woman you want to become. We will explore all of the tools that you need to get through your grief, to move past those I'll be alone forever fears, and rebuild your confidence so you can move forward in healthy relationships as your full self.
Never to get sucked into the narcissistic spell again. I am your host, Bre Wolta, Relationship Clarity Coach and EFT Certified Practitioner. Let's dive in.
Welcome. Welcome. I have to start by just saying that gaslighting really puts the fuck in mind. Fuck. To experience a gaslighting is insidiously painful and makes you literally question if you are going crazy.
So [00:01:00] in this episode, we're going to really piece out what gaslighting is, how it affects yourself as seam. And most importantly, how you can regain trust with yourself after you have been gaslit in a narcissistic relationship. Because it is possible. Ladies, I am walking proof that you can come out of the fog. Reclaim your sanity and reclaim your power.
And I want that for you to be sure, to stick around to the end of the episode, where I will pull an Oracle card that will offer you a specific message that you can use this week to stay more conscious in your healing.
All right. So let's unpack this. Starting with where the term gaslighting even came from. So it was coined from the 1940s movie called a Gaslight. And in this movie, there was a husband and wife and the husband was slowly turning down the literal gas lights in the house. And as the wife started noticing that the rooms were getting [00:02:00] darker. She came to her husband and was like, Hey, why is the room's getting darker? I think, I think something's wrong with our lights and he would respond back by saying the lights aren't getting dimmer.
You are going crazy. I think you need to see somebody. I think you need to go on medication. Like something is wrong with you. So he was actually denying her reality, making her question, her reality. Which is where the term comes from. Now. The goal of gaslighting is in its bigger essence, really to put one person in control over the other, by de-stabilizing the other person.
So if somebody can destabilize you and make you question your identity, question yourself worth. Lose trust in yourself. We become more dependent on the abuser on the other person. And that puts them in a place of control. Guess I didn't can look a couple of different ways. So we have what was shown in that movie, [00:03:00] right?
The total, like. Denial of your reality, the person saying, no, that's not happening.
It can also look like a deflection. The person, when you try to bring something up to them, they deflect the concern back on to you. An example of this would be,
let's say that you happened upon a text message on your partner's phone from another woman that made it very clear that they had been having sexual relations, that they had been cheating in some capacity. And you try to bring this up to your partner. Likely what would happen in a gaslighting situation is that the partner would say, I can't believe you are going through my phone.
I can't trust you. You are so X, Y, and Z. And then creating a lot of, of stir around the fact that you found the evidence as opposed to taking accountability for something that they were doing. Another way. This can look.
Similarly to that vein is then just accusing you of doing the behavior that they are actually doing. [00:04:00]
So if they are actually the ones cheating, potentially if it's gaslighting, they can come back and say, well, I just feel like you you're going through my phone because you're so suspicious of me, but you're the one that's actually cheating. And totally flipping. The script.
Totally putting all the attention back on you. What you're doing wrong, why you're ruining the relationship and deflecting, deflecting, deflecting, so that they don't have to take accountability for anything that they're doing.
They also can just outright tell you that you're wrong, that your memory is bad. So an example of this would be, let's say you guys had a fight and you know that you didn't come to resolution around this fight. You know that you went to bed angry, you know, that you woke up angry. And you walk into the kitchen the next morning, and you're like, kind of walking on eggshells, seeing how he's going to react. And he's smiling and maybe whistling while he's making his coffee.
And you're like, [00:05:00] uh, hi. And he's like, Hey, babe. Totally like skirting past what happened last night and you're you are like, um, are we going to talk about what happened? And him responding was something along the lines of, we already came to that conclusion. We already talked about it last night.
Stop bringing things up. When, you know, in your heart and your soul, that you didn't have completion around that fight, you didn't have the resolve that you needed.
Another way that that gaslighting can happen is. Sort of the sense that you're being spun around, like. I love the term word salad, because I had the experience with my ex partner where I would try to bring up a topic. It didn't matter what the topic was, but it was somehow trying to hold him accountable or trying to set in a boundary or something.
He didn't like. And he would just throw all of these words, like words that didn't make sense. Like statements. That didn't really make sense. He tried to put in big words to make it even more confusing. And after he [00:06:00] would go on a ramble for like 10 minutes, just spitting words. I'm like, what the fuck are we even talking about?
And I, I got confused of what the original issue was. So I would leave those conversations, feeling more confused than clear and almost to this point of like, I just I'm giving up on this conversation because I am now. So confused at what you're saying.
Another way that they can spin you around a kind of opposite of that is if you. Are bringing up something again, that you are upset with or a feeling that you're having. And you're talking very rationally, very consciously,
in a way that anybody should be able to understand and them just coming to you and saying, I don't know what you're talking about. Uh, you're confusing me. I'm done with this conversation. I don't know what you're talking about and just totally cutting you off at the base.
Gaslighting is very directed at making you the problem, cutting away your self esteem, your identity, your [00:07:00] trust in yourself. It is not based in true communication.
So it really is a manipulation tactic. And what this does. If you have experienced gaslighting. Is, it feels like you're going fucking insane. It feels like slowly but surely. You are questioning yourself. You are blaming yourself for, oh, I brought that conversation up wrong or, oh, I didn't try to set that boundary.
Right. Or, oh, I just need to do more of my own work to be able to have the right verbiage and say the right thing at the right time.
So when you go through a relationship like this, where a good amount of the conversation is gaslighting, you can really start to feel like you're losing your fucking mind to go back to putting the fucking mind.
Fuck. Like, that's why I use that term in my marketing and how I describe these relationships, because it feels like a mind. Fuck. It feels like your sense of self has been solely trip chipped away. And not only is this other person telling you [00:08:00] that you are too emotional, too needy, or causing all the fights you're being dramatic, but you start to believe that
you really start to put blame on yourself for what is happening in the bigger picture of the relationship. It's your fault. You're not bringing things up, right? It's your fault that he's cheating. It's your fault that you can't have a conversation, right? All of these. All of these pieces, redirect back into you being the nucleus that is causing the issues. Again by design, because if it's your fault, then they don't have to take accountability for what's happening in the relationship.
And you really start to question yourself. You start to question your memory, your ability to show up healthfully in a relationship. You question your feelings, you question your needs. You think everything is wrong. You think that you're no longer a smart person. You think that you are just misremembering, that something is wrong with you. [00:09:00] And there's no more trust.
That's how we lose trust in ourself because each time we try to step forward in a conversation and say, this is how I feel. We get spun around, pushed down, shoved aside and told that we're wrong. And when that happens to you enough, you really start to resign.
You really start to have this resignation around, even trying to have conversations. And you just, at least in my experience, I totally just like faded into the background of the relationship. And I was like, I'm just going to exist over here because trying to be in conversations with this person. Was causing me so much anxiety, so much distress, so much self-blame and then I would reel from those conversations trying to figure out. What the hell happened? What went wrong?
Where did I go wrong? How could I have done it differently? And it was so all consuming. When we hit that resignation point and we [00:10:00] stop trying to speak up, we stop trying to have these conversations because they are so painful. We start to really also question if the partner was right. Am I really losing my mind.
Am I really stupid? Am I really asking for too much? And so we're not just getting the gaslighting from them. We're not just being spun up in our reality. From our external partner. But we're starting to spin ourself in our reality. And we just become detached from our knowing we come detached from our intuition.
We cannot access it because we are living in such a state of survival. When you're being gaslit it's not safe, ? That's not a safe foundation for a relationship. If there's no space for you to show up in the relationship. And so on some level we have a guard that comes up. That's like, okay, I need to be hypervigilant.
I need to be on guard. I need to protect myself. [00:11:00] And when we are in that mode, we don't have access to the other parts of our brain that help us to tune into what we actually know. R Y itself, our rational self or higher self, whatever verbiage resonates for you. We're just in survival mode. So if you're feeling like you can't connect back in with yourself, it's not because you're broken.
It's not because something's wrong with you. You just have been living in an unsafe way.
And when I say unsafe, that doesn't necessarily mean physically unsafe. It means on some level you're sensing in your environment that your, your yourself is not safe, right. Psychologically unsafe. Emotionally unsafe. Maybe financially unsafe, sexually unsafe. It could be unsafe and a lot of different ways. But we know that we can't let our guard down.
We can't. Drop into ourselves. We can't regulate our nervous system to a point of connecting.
So we're just stuck up here in this [00:12:00] tizzy and this worry in this panic, in this unsafety, trying to figure out what's going happen. Trying to figure out what's going on. Spinning around in this tornado, in the midst of the fog, it's chaos. It is chaos, absolute chaos in your body, your mind, all parts of you.
So, what do we do?
How do we learn how to build that trust back in? How do we learn how to not second guess ourselves or not think that we're crazy or trust that what we need is appropriate. I have two, two ways. I want to tackle this the first being, if you're in a relationship and the second being, if you're not in the relationship anymore.
So if you're still in a relationship where there's gaslighting happening, the first most important step is to find a safe, supportive person that you can be real with. This for some people who are very lucky, have it in a friend or in a family member. Some people do not have [00:13:00] friends or family that can hold. Nonjudgmental space for you to share.
What's actually going on in the relationship and help you find clarity about what that is. So sometimes you need to reach out to a therapist, to a coach. Sometimes we have to pay for that self, that safe space, because we just don't have it yet in the people that we're surrounded with. And there's absolutely no shame in needing a professional to hold that space for you.
In fact, having somebody who specializes in this type of work is really beneficial to help you start to piece together what's happening. So, whether it's with a coach or a therapist or a friend, you want to be able to say, Hey, this is what's happening. Is this normal. You want to be able to get that, that reflection, that feedback. That validation that this is not normal. And what you're doing is not causing his behavior. So, let me [00:14:00] give you an example. Let's say that in your relationship, you are trying to bring up a concern with your partner, that you guys are not spending time together, that you really want to spend more time with with him. And he meets that request or that, that feeling that you're having with rage. And he comes at you and he says, you're too sensitive that he spends all of his time with you.
And you're asking for so much. And can't you just be grateful for what you have. And at the end of that exchange, you're like, oh, am I asking for too much? Do we spend enough time together? And you start to question what you need, your original feeling was that you need more time. And then you start to question that based on his reaction.
So if you have a safe person, you can say, Hey, this is what happened. And this is how he responded. And hopefully. That person will be able to reflect back to you. Like, Hey, that's not the [00:15:00] way that somebody who loves you responds to you when you bring up a feeling. Right in a healthy dynamic. If you came to me and said, Hey, I miss you.
I want to spend more time with you. The healthy partner would at the very least. Want to be curious about where that feeling is coming from. And want to sit down
and have a conversation about what each person is experiencing. There would be space. To talk about it. There would not be rage and blame And telling you that your X, Y, and Z. But if you've never been in a healthy dynamic, Maybe you don't know. You don't know how it's supposed to go in these conversations with a healthy partner. So having someone be able to reflect back to you and say you are valid in your need to want to spend time with your partner.
That is not ridiculous. And how he responded to you was unfair and potentially that was a verbally abusive of what he said or [00:16:00] does say to you. Most of the time. So you're getting that, that check of reality. Because you don't, you can't grasp your reality. Because you're questioning yourself so much because of the gaslighting. You need the outside source to be able to say no girl, you're, that's valid. You're not crazy.
This is not asking for too much. This was an inappropriate response to your request.
The other thing that I want you to do, if you are still in a relationship where you're feeling like gaslighting may be a part of the dynamic. Is to start taking notes after your conversations. So specifically conversations that are, have some sort of emotional charge where you are starting to feel confused about what happened. Try your best, right after the conversation to write down what you know, you said, or what, you know, they said, and sometimes this can be hard.
So we start small bits. Like if there's just one thing that you can remember, [00:17:00] that's perfect. But the practice of this will get you into the habit of being able to look back on actual data. If the other person is telling you later on that, that didn't happen. That they'd talked that you talked about that already, right?
It's like, no, I know that this is what happened. Cause I wrote it down. So starting to get into that practice is really helpful. Now, if you're out of the relationship. And you're listening to this and you're like, fuck, I was totally gasoline or have been gaslit and a lot of my relationships. We can start to really build back that trust when we are. Out of the relationship. Because if you think about trying to build back confidence and trust. It's already tough.
It's already an uphill walk for us. And if you throw gaslighting on top of it, it's like trying to walk uphill with wind blowing in your face. Like, it's just, there is more resistance. It is harder to [00:18:00] do. It's not, it's not to say that you can't and that it's impossible, but it is harder to do. So if you remove that one piece of being pushed back down every time that you take a step. Then you can take more steps forward. So when you're out of the relationship, the first thing that I want you to do. It start to use hindsight as your friend. And look back at each of those moments that your intuition was like, I knew that we talked about that, or I knew that he was lying or I knew that he was cheating.
I knew that I saw that text message, even though he erased his phone the next day. Those moments that you knew without a doubt, even though you had a lot of doubt in the moment. Somewhere in you, you knew that that was true. And making a list. Using data like data points coming back into data points. Is so helpful because gaslighting takes us out of reality. Data's brings us back into reality.
So the more that you can [00:19:00] write down, the more facts that you can write down, the more proof that you can write down.
The better. And with all of that proof, you can look back on it and be like, wow, I did, I could trust myself. I did know when these things were happening. So it helps to validate yourself, even though in that specific instance, at that specific time, the person was telling you one thing, you knew the, the opposite to be true.
And then we want to start with small decisions.
We want to start with trusting small decisions. In order to build our self-trust back up to bigger decisions. One of one of, I don't know if this is a funny example or not, but for me, it's funny. One of the small decisions that I started with when I was rebuilding, my trust in myself was like, what route I wanted to take to the gym in the morning. You can get places a lot of different ways that I was kind of always in ones in one route. And I would have these moments where I'm, I was pulling out of my [00:20:00] driveway and I'm like, I kind of want to go this other way. But I would talk myself out of it. And so what I started to do was if I had that little nudge, I would let myself go the other way. And usually it was something like cool that I saw along the way, or it was just a whole new. Environment, right. You're you're more tuned in.
So it was a different type of experience. And I always felt glad that I followed that nudge that I made that decision. So start with really small things. When you feel a little nudge towards something, follow it, see what happens, see what you feel, see if you're validated.
And like that was the right choice today. I loved that. And the more that you do that, the more that you can work up to the bigger decisions, the bigger choices and trusting your gut on those bigger ones, too.
And then also part of regaining. Our trust is learning who we are again. So in the gas side and dynamic, you're, you're being chipped away and that's not just your trust. It's your [00:21:00] sense of self it's. What you like. It's what you value. You're just second guessing, almost everything about like your core identity.
So learning who you are again. And becoming familiar with all of the pieces that make you you so that you can start to build confidence and self-worth and respect around yourself. When we respect ourselves and we're more likely to listen and to trust ourselves, So I put together a online course that is so important to me because this step is vital.
You have to have to have to take the time to re identify what's important to you. This online course it's called find yourself again, and it guides you through very simple exercises and meditations to recognize your values. To be able to name your non-negotiables, like your specific red flags, not just the general red flags of relationships. What's most important to you and what will you settle [00:22:00] for?
What will you not? It helps you identify your needs and your wants and your likes and your dislikes, and it really pieces out the correct order. To put those things in importance when you are. Coming across a new person or coming across a decision. Right. Does this, does. Decision aligned with my values. Does this new person align with my values.
It helps to give you a. Like a frame, a framework around who you are. So you don't feel so lost. You don't feel so nebulous. And most importantly, you don't feel.
Dependent on someone else to tell you who you are. So for thinking even farther term, much farther longterm in the future. We want to really, really, really have a solid sense of self. Really, really have those deep roots of who we are so that we're not so moldable or malleable to what other people are saying.
It's like, Nope, I know this to be true about me. You're not [00:23:00] aligning with what I need. This is a non-negotiable for me. decisions become much more clear when we have a directive outline that we've made for ourselves. In how we want to live our life and who we want to be in relationship with. So find yourself again, is that course again, super simple. It's under a hundred dollars.
And for podcast listeners, you get 10% off using the code podcast 10, which I'll link to everything in the show notes. So super affordable for you to take yourself with me as your guide through these exercises, to really start to give you that stable base. Okay. So. We've covered a lot covered a lot of ground today.
So I just want to recap quickly what we talked about. In essence, gaslighting is a manipulation tactic. That's used to destabilize you from yourself. When you're in it, it feels like a fog. You are unsure of your feelings. You are second guessing what you think [00:24:00] happened and you are wrapping yourself in self blame.
It's a very tough place to get out of by yourself. So if you are still in the relationship, please, please, please find a safe, supportive person. Be at a professional or a friend or a family member. To help mirror back to you. What is happening in your relationship and what is acceptable in relationships? And then also to keep notes, if you are still in the relationship after your arguments or after conversations where you feel like I just left Mo way more confused than clear. And I want to write down what I know to be true. When you're out start using hindsight as your friend to your advantage. Go back, write down all of the data that you know, to be true.
Show yourself the proof. And most importantly, start doing the exercises to really come back into who you are to really rebuild. Pick up all those pieces that got chipped away [00:25:00] and start to rebuild this. Strong ass, independent woman. That knows who she is. You can start that journey with my online course called find yourself again. Code is podcast 10.
To really give you like a very clear directive, start to where to even begin in that process. I promise you. It is so worth the money to be able to articulate who you are. Okay. And to end these episodes.
I always pull an Oracle card to just see what the message is for you this week. So I'm starting to shuffle the cards. And just asking what is the message for all of the listeners that are listening? This week.
We got slow. If you're not watching the video, it's a picture of those like sand timers that you flip upside down and the sand keeps the time for you.
This is what slow has to say. Slow [00:26:00] reminds you that you have all of the time. You need not all of the time in the world, but all of the time you need. Take a breath. Pause, assess. Soak in the tiny, meaningful moments in your life. You are missing so much. Shift your pace. Stop treading. Quit rushing. Take a breath. Touch your heart as your breath comes your system. Invite reflection on the things that you have been trying to outrun.
You'll never move fast enough anyway. Slow down without fear, knowing that you have all of the time that you need.
It's such a good, such a good, good message. Especially in these types of relationships where we are spun up and moving really fast in our mind and in our bodies.
Thinking of you here for you as you're moving through this episode, if things are resonating, please reach out. I always want to hear from you.
Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for walking through this journey of what gaslighting is and how to bring back trust in yourself with me. [00:27:00] This podcast is for you and you are not alone. Until next time.