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Self Gaslighting

Self Gaslighting

Buckle up, this is going to be rough….trigger warning for emotional abuse and narcissistic abuse. Possibly also triggers around minimising and micro aggressions to self.

Okay, there’s the triggers out the way. If I’ve left anything out please let me know and I’ll add them in.

This is something I want you to really listen to if you’ve grown up in a narcissistic household.

When you say to me: ‘I don’t want to cause a fuss’, or ‘I’m really over emotional’, or maybe ‘she only wanted the best for me’; I hear you repeating the internalized messages from the years of gaslighting you have suffered.

You are literally doing their gaslighting for them. You are SELF GASLIGHTING.

Let’s take the first example I’ve used. ‘I don’t want to cause a fuss’.

Over the years, every time you have asked for a need of ANY kind to be met, if it hasn’t aligned with the need of the narcissistic parent, it will have been made very clear how much of a gross inconvenience that is. Every time you expressed an autonomous need, you will have been told something along the lines of ‘don’t make a fuss’. You may even have been physically assaulted for requesting it, possibly even sexually assaulted.

You will have internalized that every time you ask anyone for any kind of need to be met (a drink, a tissue, for them to stop kicking your seat on a plane, your food order is wrong etc etc) you are creating an ungodly fuss and EVERYONE hates you for it.

Let me say right now, they don’t.

And if they do, the chances are that it’s very much firmly in the camp of THEIR issue. Not yours. Remember what I say about boundaries? If we can honestly (key word right there!) look at the situation and without justification realise there isn’t anything we would change, then we have nothing to apologise for, and can go peacefully on with our day.

(Side note, if we are justifying, it may be that we are trying to convince ourselves as much as the other person, it might also be a sign that we’ve been emotionally abused and have to explain at length why we need to have our needs met – not healthy, not ok, not your fault. I’ll blog about it soon)

So how do we combat it? We have to adjust our boundaries and our language. One way we might do this is put ourselves in the shoes of the person we are asking to meet our need.

If you were a waitress in a restaurant and you got an order wrong, would you be angry/irritated with a customer who politely and quietly says ‘My order is wrong, could you correct it please?’

I really hope I’m right when I say ‘no, of course you wouldn’t!!’ You might feel a bit embarrassed you had got it wrong, you might even get seriously triggered, but that would be about you and your unresolved issues (probably around perfectionism/being good enough; thanks narcissistic parents!!!) not the customer.

Self gaslighting, does the work of the narcissist even when they’re nowhere to be seen. You are subconsciously continuing their abuse for them. By challenging this behaviour, you will start to establish some healthy boundaries around your self-worth and self-value, and you will break the cycle.

Be kind to yourself, this is hard, and it hurts to realise the perpetual insidiousness of their vile abuse, but awareness = healing, and I KNOW you can heal this. I know you can. Because you would have scrolled past this post and not even dared to read the rest of it. I’ve attached a table of examples of the taught message, the internalised messaged and the message we need to change it to. Read it, save it, and learn it. And heal. Stand up, you’re not an inconvenience you’re astounding.

All the love <3

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Mental illness isn’t an excuse to abuse.

There is a permanent struggle with clients over whether the behaviours narcissists exhibit are in intentional. There’s a deeper struggle around the fact that narcissism is listed in the DSM, which officially makes it a mental illness.

Society is shifting towards an understanding and awareness of mental health issues and conditions. There’s a growing acceptance that people struggle emotionally in all kinds of ways and as such we should still our judgement and increase our compassion and tolerance.

And that’s a BEAUTIFUL thing. It’s amazing. It warms my heart and I’m so grateful that we are starting to normalise it.

But there’s a but.

What can get mixed up in that is that toxic behaviour can be assigned to mental illness. And it’s just not true. Lots of people have depression or anxiety, and aren’t toxic. However in narcissism, it is toxic behaviour that characterises the condition.

Here’s the thing. The narcissist knows exactly what they’re doing. They know how to ‘play’ you. They know how to create the trauma bond. They know what their manipulative behaviours do to you.

They cannot be excused their abusive behaviours on the ground of their mental illness because they KNOW. (I have research to back this up if anyone wants the article name)

When we know we are using an unhealthy behaviour, even if it’s something that we’ve been using to survive emotionally, we have a responsibility to correct that behaviour.

Back in the day I did a law degree. In criminal law, the defence of innocent by reason of insanity is only upheld when a person is unaware that what they’ve done is wrong. So for example, when someone murders someone else and hides the body, the act of hiding the body indicates they knew what they had done is wrong.

If they know what they’re doing they’re responsible.

Narcissism is borne from extreme abuse, neglect or smothering, where a child has to develop the idea that they are okay in the world for themselves because their parent doesn’t mirror that for them. To survive they develop narcissism. That isn’t their fault. But it is their responsibility.

What I’m trying to say is that you can hold people accountable for toxic manipulative abusive behaviour, even if they have a mental health issue.

Because the first time they do it might be about survival, but if they don’t take responsibility and they don’t change the behaviour, it’s toxic. End of.

You do not have to tolerate abuse because there is a mental illness. ❤️

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Genuine v Fake Apologies

Okay, so here it is, the blog I’ve been promising on apologies. It’s going to be long, so grab a drink, find a comfy spot and get ready!

Apologies are tricky. Have you ever had someone apologise, but it doesn’t really feel right? Like it’s left you feeling as though somehow they don’t really feel sorry, even though they’ve said they are?

It might be because it was a fake apology.

What makes a genuine apology?

Well, first it starts with ‘I’m sorry’, or ‘I apologise’. Then there should be some expression of remorse. ‘I feel really bad for hurting you’ or ‘I wish I could go back and do it differently’.

Then, there needs to be acceptance of responsibility ‘I shouldn’t have done that, it was unkind of me’ or ‘I should have done things differently, and that’s my fault’.

Then there should be some kind of amend making, ‘I will try and make it up to you to earn your trust and respect back’.

Finally (or so they say) a promise that the behaviour won’t happen again.

That sounds really simple doesn’t it? Except so often, that’s not how people apologise. When someone is offering a fake apology, none of those steps happen, although it seems like it does, but we are left feeling deflated and defeated, and sometimes guilty for ‘making’ the other person feel bad for their wrongdoing. How on earth does that work!?

How do some people manage to walk away from apologising without actually having apologised, and how do we spot a fake apology?

Well for me, it comes down to four things. Acceptance of responsibility, or lack of, justification, deflection, and behaviour change.

Acceptance of responsibility:

When someone starts their apology with ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’, or ‘that wasn’t my intention’, it’s fake. They aren’t taking responsibility. This can come down to boundaries, after all, I talk all the time about how we aren’t responsible for other people’s feelings, but when we know we’ve screwed up (and we all do it from time to time) we don’t get to tell the other person they aren’t hurt. We acknowledge the pain we’ve caused and we accept what we did was wrong. We don’t make excuses, or turn it back on them, we own our behaviour and we take responsibility for it.

On a side note, sometimes when we are being apologised to, we have to accept responsibility for our part in things too. It can go a long way to help resolving a situation when we offer that to the apologiser. When we can look at a situation and say ‘thank you for your apology, I should have done X differently too’, we are not vindicating someone, but merely showing we know where our part lies.

Justification.

I mentioned not making excuses. That is what’s called justification. When someone starts justifying, I know immediately that they know they’re in the wrong, but they’re incapable of taking responsibility. When ever someone starts an apology with ‘I’m sorry, BUT….’, I know they don’t mean their apology.

When someone uses the word ‘but’, everything before it becomes irrelevant (Name that show 😉 ). When we justify ourselves, we are excusing our behaviour on some flimsy basis. We are exonerating ourselves of responsibility due to external circumstances.

And that is not okay. It is not an apology, it is an excuse for behaviour, and does not go any way to making amends.

Another thing that can happen when someone is making a fake apology is deflection. Deflection is when the apologiser tries to divert attention from their behaviour to another subject. They may raise a past incident where you behaved in a way that upset them. They may even use this deflection as justification. When that happens, I would probably walk away and say ‘until you are ready to focus on the issue at hand, I won’t engage in further discussion’.

Basically by saying that, I’m not allowing the apologiser to shift blame for their behaviour onto me, and I’m not allowing the apologiser to distract me from their behaviour by dragging up past hurts. This only leads to escalation and removes the focus from their wrongdoing. Not okay.

And finally behavioural change. I said at the beginning that the final part of an apology is a promise that the behaviour won’t happen again.

For me, that isn’t enough. It has to be demonstrated. The best form of apology in my opinion is behavioural change. It’s showing how sorry we are by never repeating the thing that caused the hurt in the first place.

If for example, someone says to you, ‘I find it really difficult when you criticise my hair’ (random I know!), you apologise for causing hurt, you admit it wasn’t kind of you, and you never ever criticise their hair again. Ever. Not even once.

And it is that, that change in behaviour, that shows that the apology is genuine, heartfelt, and intentional.

Another thing to remember is how to accept an apology. I always think it’s best to say ‘thank you for your apology’ rather than ‘it’s okay’. That’s because when we say ‘it’s okay’ linguistically it could sound as though we are saying ‘your behaviour was acceptable, you can do it again’. By saying ‘thank you’ we acknowledge and accept the apology with the behavioural boundary in place. Hope I’ve explained that properly, I might come back to it!

Anyway, remember, when someone apologises, they do these things:

1. Start by saying sorry or a variant of.

2. They take responsibility for their part in the incident.

3. They make amends

4. The change their behaviour.

I hope you’ve had a good Christmas, and are looking forward to the New Year. Next Friday, I’m going to do a video on making change and how to stick to it.

As always, take great care, be kind to yourselves,

Helen x