Gaslighting yourself

Nimue Brown

Sep 29

(Nimue)

This is how it works. You care about someone and are invested in the idea that they are a good person. When they do something unkind to you, this is explained by the idea that you deserved it. When you're in a healthy relationship this is unlikely to come up often enough to be an issue. When it happens all the time, you end up having to carry a huge emotional burden. In terms of causing distress and undermining mental health, gaslighting yourself is just as effective as having someone else do it to you. Telling yourself that something is acceptable when it isn't does a lot of damage.

You can find that the person hurting you will tap into this. They will reinforce the idea that you deserve their behaviour and that something in you causes what they do. They may be unwilling to be accountable and their abdication of responsibility may increase your burden. Rather than resent them or get cross, you work on understanding them and being sympathetic. All the while you are telling yourself untrue things - that they are a good person so the problem must be you.

Over time this will damage your sense of self and your relationship with reality. If it starts in childhood you have no way of knowing what's fair and what isn't, and this will inform your ability as an adult to make good assessments of how you are being treated. If you aren't able to talk kindly to yourself you need to look at why, and be prepared to be uncomfortable about some of the people in your life and your history. Be kind about that, don't beat yourself up for beating yourself up.

It's also entirely possible to lie to yourself about what a good and reasonable person you are while ignoring any evidence to the contrary. This may seem protective, but it will damage you. Refusal to hear criticism cuts off scope for growth and can dislocate you from consensus reality. If criticism has featured in an abusive way in your history you might have a hard time trusting more challenging feedback from others.

I think the only way to counter this is to make sure you are more focused on being good than on seeming good. Examine your fears, because if what worries you is how other people see you, and if that looms larger than the need to get things right, a rethink is called for. Protecting yourself this way can work in the short term but you are setting yourself up for long term suffering. The more you have to bend the truth to make it fit the way you want things to be, the more harm you do to yourself.

We make our own realities. I don't mean this in a woo-woo New Age way about manifesting our desires or attracting things that are like us. We make our own realities because we experience everything through the filters of our beliefs and expectations. Our thoughts shape the physical structures of our brains. Our day to day experiences are informed by how we talk to ourselves. Honesty, as a virtue, is at its most critically important when it comes to what we say to ourselves. Hurting yourself to protect your good opinion of someone else isn't workable. It also isn't entirely kind to the person you let off the hook because it doesn't give them chance to grow.

Druidry is very much a spiritual path about relationships. How we relate to ourselves underpins every other relationship we have. Seeking honesty is therefore essential. It's also difficult in some circumstances. Practice compassion, don't require perfection of yourself or anyone else. Embrace your own humanity as it manifests in your mistakes and try not to allow any of those mistakes to become your identity.