Self Gaslighting is a sad case where you’re your own enemy. You’re your own voice of evil punishment, torment, and judgment of everything you do, feel, think, etc.
Normally, people associate the term gas lighting with external factors. Accordingly, gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse that stems from another person diminishing the significance of your emotions. Trying to make you feel like your emotions are immature, questionable, and irrelevant.
However, most of us aren’t aware that we practice self-gas-lighting.
What is self Gaslighting?
Self-gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse inflicted on ourselves by diminishing and suppressing our genuine emotions, thoughts, and ideas.
I’m all too familiar with this concept, and I’m not proud of it. I try my best every day to work on my self-gas lighting tendencies. It’s a behavior that affects the mind, body, and spirit of an individual.
What does self gaslighting look like?
Basically, the signs of self-gas-lighting manifest in many forms. But they’re all emotional abuse no matter how small it may appear. Self-gaslighting could look like this;
Constantly doubting yourself can be a sign of self gas lighting
“Should I really…?”
“I’m not sure of my …”
Whenever you find yourself in doubt about your honest feelings, you may be doing something bad to yourself.
No matter what, your feelings are yours, it’s better to address them than to doubt them. I’ve been in many situations where I doubted my honest feelings and emotions.
Unfortunately, I’ve found that this can keep you in bad situations longer than it should when you could actually save yourself.
Suppressing yourself:
When you consciously press down your genuine feelings because you’re scared of hurting other people or just dealing with your emotions. Once, I was sexually assaulted by a mutual friend. For a long time after that, I kept blaming myself for what transpired, pressing down any feeling that said otherwise.
“I should have known better, it wasn’t as bad as I’m making it seem in my head”. “It was my fault, I shouldn’t have gone to visit”
Instead of acknowledging the situation, I chose denial and self-blame, living constantly with suppressing my real feelings about the event.
Diminishing the significance of your emotions is a sign of self gaslighting
If you’ve ever found yourself saying the following or similar lines to yourself:
“I’m probably making a big deal out of it”
“It’s not that deep right?”
“I’m overreacting again”
“ I shouldn’t have reacted that way, they probably didn’t mean it the way I received it”
These are examples of things you say to yourself that are classified as self-gaslighting. You’re consciously making yourself believe that your emotions should have come out better.
You make excuses for other people’s bad behavior
Although people do things that are outrightly disrespectful, you look on the bright side and create excuses for bad behavior.
“They probably didn’t mean it that way, they’re tired and stressed from work”,
“ It was actually my fault for…”
“He was out with friends”
”She was drunk”
“She’s going through difficulties…”
“I shouldn’t have been in there at that time…”
“I asked at the wrong time, that’s why they…” etc.
When you don’t trust yourself, it is a sign of self gaslighting:
When you don’t trust yourself, it means you do not Know yourself.
Consequently, this will leave you at the mercy of other influences. Not trusting yourself means you’re inactive in your life. And you just let things pass by. You doubt your capabilities, you think you’re not worth it.
Consciously holding back, suffering low confidence, and self-esteem. You always want to hide in the shadow of other people because you have a conception that you’re not worthy.
You constantly think of ways you “could have done better”:
You’re always thinking back to unpleasant events and thinking of ways you could have done better.
“You could have been more thoughtful of situations”
” I shouldn’t have been vulnerable at that point”
“Maybe, shouldn’t have felt that way”
“If only I had made a certain move”
You feel a lot of shame and regret over the last unpleasant events. You constantly torture yourself mentally with the wide list of options you could have taken but failed to do so.
WHAT CAUSES SELF GAS-LIGHTING?
Upbringing and childhood:
Accordingly, Studies have proven that people who grew up in unhealthy families and communities tend to exhibit unhealthy characteristics.
Obviously, it makes sense that one of the things that influence our self-identity is our upbringing. The accumulation of what we learn consciously and otherwise, from our families.
Simply, if your family invalidated your experiences, feelings, perspectives, etc. you might have absorbed that character subconsciously.
Relationship experiences
I was once in a relationship with someone who was a few years older than me. For some reason, he made it a point to diminish all my experiences and ir-rationalize my emotions.
If I had a new experience and shared my excitement with him, he’d just brush it off. He consciously instilled in me that he was the perfect example of a good man and that I would never find anyone better as he was the embodiment of perfection
Firstly, these thoughts were his own thoughts being subconsciously injected into my head by a clearly manipulative partner.
Furthermore, if you’ve found yourself in a relationship where your thought and feelings are overshadowed, you’ve fallen into the hypnosis of believing those are your thoughts. This could cause you to Gas-light yourself.
Furthermore, in friendships, Friends who never accept responsibility for their actions but blame their faults in the friendship on your actions. “if you didn’t get angry at me, I’d have never said something like that to you”.
I literally had a friend who stole from me. When I confronted her about it after many days of actually contemplating, she tried to make me feel bad by blaming it on her insecurity. She needed it because she felt I was better off and she needed it most.
Likewise, places of work can also cause you to practice self-gas lighting.
Nothing worse than working with a colleague or superior who just never takes responsibility always blames you, and always tries to diminish your shine, your success, and your achievement, while manipulating you to think your contributions were insignificant.
Mental illnesses such as PTSD, Anxiety, depression, etc.
Past trauma from childhood, relationships, and friendships can indeed cause you to exhibit self gaslighting. We are very busy with life, generally. We never spend time with ourselves, face our emotions, and be present in our own lives. Thus, it can cause us to harbor emotions that can hamper our mental health.
When we ignore our mental health, we become subject to mental health illnesses. These are often overlooked because they’re “invisible” sicknesses, unlike physical illnesses. Self-gas lighting is definitely a mental health issue and can lead to other mental health issues that affect your life poorly.
Depression and anxiety can cause you to gaslight yourself. As a habit, your first response to unpleasant circumstances is to consciously gaslight yourself. It’s a vicious circle of self-hate.
How to stop Gaslighting Your self
You can manage your self-gaslighting tendencies by:
Identify your Self Gaslighting patterns:
The best way to effectively deal with something is to identify what we are dealing with. In a scientific culture test, you study a living organism, identify it and treat it based on your Information.
Get to know the events which lead up to self-gaslighting.
What words, what feelings, what memories, what events, what people?
What are the emotions you feel right before you fall into the hole of self gas-lighting?
Set healthy boundaries
It helps to set boundaries using the information you have on your patterns. Boundaries are conscious limits you set, indicating what you can tolerate, how far you’d go, and the most you’d bear.
Whenever that line is crossed, inevitable worry will be created. Boundaries are healthy because it shows growth and acceptance of self.
You are who you are. Most people may not understand that and it’s nobody’s cross but yours to bear. Hence, consciously try to protect yourself from actively or passively engaging in things, people, events or places, pages, profiles, news, content, etc. that could disrupt your “sanity”.
That decision should be backed by actually outlining these factors and sticking to them. Practice communicating said boundaries to those who matter to you, those who care about you genuinely. Honest communications are a foundation for healthier relationships with yourself and with other people.
Fight Gas-lighting with self-care:
Actively care for yourself the most especially when you notice patterns of self-gas-lighting in yourself. Self-care means being kind to yourself, and loving yourself. Being actively conscious of doing only positive beneficial things to yourself. Dedicating quality time to yourself, and caring for your mental, physical, and spiritual needs.
Consciously dedicating good thoughts and deeds to yourself for your betterment. Self-gas lighting is a sign of an unhealthy mental state. It can lead to a state of emotional infertility. You can’t reap healthy rewards in your life if you harbor unhealthy emotions towards yourself or others.
Fight hate with love, fight self-gas-lighting with self-care. Be your friend, and do only friendly and loving things to yourself. Let the standard of love you’d appreciated, and practice it to yourself.
“Be your friend”.
@rythmdiend.com
Be active in your life
Be conscious of your thoughts, actions, words, and mental processes. Being active in your life makes you safeguarded against external influences and opinions.
You have knowledge of yourself. Use said knowledge to make yourself a better person daily. A content and satisfied person.
Invest in ways to distract yourself from gaslighting thoughts.
Actively learning a new hobby or skill, learning a sport, hanging out with friends, etc. Be active and take charge of your life and emotions.
Accept and address your feelings
Whether they’re embarrassing or not, your feelings are your feelings. You felt a certain way for a reason. Don’t hate or belittle your emotions, you’re doing yourself a big disservice.
This makes it easier for other people to do the same to you and you’d accept it. Often, you may not know, because it’s the standard you’ve set for yourself. If anything, manage your feelings better by getting to know yourself through various circumstances. The emotions and the things which elicit these emotions from you.
Spend time with yourself to address your emotions. Every single iota of emotion you felt, don’t disregard it. Ponder on it, assimilate it, feel it, and do what’s best for you with it. Otherwise, talk to someone about it. Never say to yourself anything along the lines of discrediting your emotions.
“be my firend…breathe me ”
Sia