Sunday, April 28, 2019

Gaslighting in a graphic

I found this on Twitter today.


And while I suppose I really no longer need to complain about my life with Wife any more -- I'm free of it now -- it's comforting to know that somebody else went through the same things. To know, in fact, that enough people went through these things that it was worth making a graphic and posting it. I'm not sure I experienced every single one of these over the years, but certainly I can remember ...
  • I would apologize without knowing what I did wrong. Oh yes.
  • She would never hear me explain how I felt. Not sure if she actually used the words "overreacting" or "too sensitive" but she would stare at me like I was speaking Chinese.
  • She would insist that it didn't happen that way. In these cases I was always sure that it had happened that way, so she never made me doubt my own perceptions. But she did convince me that she saw the world through radically different lenses.
  • I questioned my beliefs and opinions. In some cases I didn't go back the old ones, ever: for example, by opinions about infidelity and divorce are a lot more nuanced than they used to be. But I also questioned my belief about the importance of always telling the truth, and that one I have sure come back to!
  • An imbalance of power? She always used to accuse me of having all the power in the relationship because I had a better income and paid all the bills. I think she had the emotional power, however. When D first came to help us clean up the house, she said she was amazed because Wife had always told her how tyrannically I ran the house and she saw with her own eyes that it was Wife who was the despot in real life.
  • She assigned motives to my actions that were the opposite of my real intentions. All the time.
  • Interactions left me feeling small or ashamed? Not "most". But many.
  • I edited every word before speaking it, to make it impossible to misconstrue. Oh my God. Every waking minute of every day. And it was the same with D. One of the biggest gifts Debbie ever gave me, when I finally got together with her, was "the right to say it wrong" ... the assurance that, if I said something which upset her, I could take it back and try again and she would stop being upset. It should go without saying that I never got this from Wife.
So yeah. Gaslighting. Good to know.
   

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