Narcissists, sociopaths, and other types of highly toxic people really should come with a warning label. Even if the cause of these disorders is deep-rooted trauma, no one deserves the psychological abuse that they unleash onto others with zero remorse.
Today I’m talking about five ways a narcissist will gaslight you to psychologically strip you down and tear you to shreds. It’s really important to be aware of red flags in relationships, but please be careful about throwing around a mental health diagnosis or label.
That said, if you suspect your partner is gaslighting you, I want you to know that this is at the end of the spectrum when it comes to toxic behavior in relationships.
Unfortunately, many will blame and shame victims of narcissistic abuse. Let me just start by saying that if you are experiencing the behaviors I’m about to describe, know that you are being psychologically abused and you are not the problem.
Yes, there may be things you need to examine and sort out so that you can avoid toxic people in relationships in the future, but you are not to blame for psychological abuse and you do not deserve it. No one does.
What is Gaslighting?
First, let’s talk about what exactly is gaslighting and why it is so harmful. By definition, gaslighting is the manipulation by psychological means to the point of making someone question their sanity. So just to be clear, gaslighting is deliberate. It is an intentional manipulation meant to cause the victim to question their sense of reality. In recent years, the term gaslighting is often overused and not necessarily used correctly. Sometimes what’s referred to as gaslighting is a disagreement, a legit memory lapse, or maybe manipulation. But to qualify as gaslighting, it must be done deliberately to make you question your reality.
Gaslighting makes you feel like you are slowly going insane. You feel like you are the problem, something is wrong with you, you’re confused, can’t think straight, can’t make decisions, and things are always shifting. You’re overanalyzing everything you say, worrying about how you say things, what you said, and whether you should speak at all. You worry about how your words will be twisted and turned, how the narcissist will react, and how they will shift things right beneath your feet.
Gaslighting keeps you in a constant state of confusion. Your internal experiences—whether that be your thoughts, feelings, experiences, or memories—are all wrong. You are being led to believe that you are faulty, you are defective, you cannot trust yourself. Instead, you are led into the trap of believing you can trust the narcissist to interpret reality for you.
Related:
10 Reasons Codependents Fall For Narcissists
Expect THIS If A Narcissist Knows You’re Onto Them
3 SHOCKING Facts About Narcissism
10 Must-Know Signs You’re Dealing With Narcissistic Abuse
Daily Brain Exercises For A Healthy Brain Do This Every Morning (INCREDIBLE BENEFITS)
What most people don’t understand about gaslighting is that it is so gradual and often very, very subtle. If you try to tell someone about an incident, it seems small, insignificant, unrealistic, hard to pinpoint, or impossible to prove. The narcissist always has another plausible version or narrative to show that you are overly sensitive, overreacting, forgetting what was said or what happened. They make sure to do things and say things in ways that you can’t be sure of, intending to make you second guess yourself, doubt your internal reality, and feel like you’re losing your mind.
Five Ways a Narcissist Will Gaslight You
Gaslighting comes in many forms, but here are five ways a narcissist will gaslight you. In my opinion, the last one is the worst of all.
1. Using Social Proof Against You
One of the first things a narcissist will do is appeal to the people you know and trust. They get on their good side by putting on a show, acting kind, sweet, and sensitive, and making others believe that they have good intentions and would never be capable of doing any harm.
Over time, they start asking your trusted friends and family in a very genuine, very concerned tone if they’ve noticed anything odd about you. Nothing specific, just planting a seed at first. As the narcissist’s behavior worsens towards you, they start watering those seeds by secretly voicing their concerns to your loved ones—maybe about your memory, your mental state, or your bad behavior. They try to get anyone you might rely on for support to taint their opinion of you while painting themselves in a very good light.
So when you go to your support system for help, they are already concerned about you, and anything you say will look like evidence or proof that what the narcissist was concerned about was on point. Your friends and family, with no ill intent, may try to convince you that you are the one who needs help. Anyone who sees through the narcissist’s facade will be cut out of your life ASAP.
They will take whatever measures necessary to isolate you from those people. If you suspect you are being gaslighted, don’t go to the people the narcissist has already gotten to. Go to those the narcissists convinced you were out to get you or were bringing you down—those that you had to cut loose to please a narcissist.
2. Messing with Your Memory
The narcissist will deny or scoff at your recollection of events constantly, adding, stretching, deleting sections, or rewriting the whole event. The narcissist loves to mess with your memory, so beware if you notice they frequently dispute your memory of what happened or try to convince you of things that never happened, or at least not in the way they present them.
Other examples include hiding things and putting them back in their place after you search for hours, then trying to convince you they were there all along. It could be leaving things out for you to notice, then removing them and saying they were never there, or accusing you of moving them. They may accuse you of other things you know you didn’t say or do.
It gets to the point where you feel like you need to start taking photos, recording conversations, or making notes of events. Even if you do, and even if you replay those recordings for the narcissist, they will say you are misinterpreting what they said or their intentions.
The narcissist will often use language and say things in ways that have double meanings, always leaving wiggle room to cover their tracks. They’ll say things like, “I don’t remember that,” “You’re imagining things,” or “Get your facts straight. You’re twisting what I said again.”
3. Invalidating Your Perceptions and Interpretations
The real key to gaslighting is keeping you in a constant state of confusion. The narcissist constantly plants seeds of doubt in your mind about how you perceive and interpret things, your decisions (no matter how small), how you feel, or what you believe.
They constantly try to make you feel uncertain or just plain wrong. No matter how you perceive or interpret something, there will always be an alternate explanation or ways to add an element of doubt to your mind. The goal of gaslighting is to keep you so focused on your problematic, defective, unreliable mental state that you don’t ever see the defective self they are trying to conceal.
Gaslighting starts very subtly and in ways that mimic normal interactions but have sinister intentions—to slowly change your internal reality, take control of your ability to think for yourself, make decisions, and trust your mind and memories. This makes you super easy to control and manipulate.
Narcissists lack the levels of empathy required to feel guilty about hurting others. They truly do not seem to be able to see or admit to themselves that their behavior is harmful or abusive. They constantly deny, deflect, minimize, and shift blame onto you or someone else.
4. Denial, Deflection, and Minimization
Instead of admitting any responsibility or fault for their bad behavior, they deny, deny, deny. If that doesn’t work, they deflect by mentioning things you’ve done wrong in the past instead of staying focused and resolving the issue discussed in the here and now.
They’ll start talking about something you did a long time ago. When deflection fails, they minimize, rationalize, and downplay it. “It was just a joke,” “You’re being so dramatic,” “You’re making a big deal out of this,” “Why are you being so stupid?” “Why are you even bringing this up? It’s minor.
I didn’t mean any harm. How could you think I would do something like that?” “You are blowing things way out of proportion again.” Keep in mind that trying to escape responsibility or avoid guilt on occasion is not abnormal. It does happen in relationships, but if you’re seeing this pattern of behavior, it is gaslighting.
5. Shame Dumping
I feel like this is the worst tactic. Although narcissists do not feel guilt—feeling bad about something they did—they are deeply tormented by shame, which is feeling bad about who they are.
Early on in life, they develop a sense of being unworthy, broken, and unlovable, which is why they create a false superior fantasy self in the first place. They not only need constant praise, attention, and validation to support the survival of this false sense of self, but they also need a place to dump all of that shame.
To the narcissist, externalizing shame is as important to their emotional survival as oxygen is for their physical survival. So they project and externalize their shame and self-loathing onto you and other people closest to them. They condition you to carry their shame by making you believe you are broken, flawed, unfixable, unlovable, and that you are the problem. They do this by getting you to confide the things you feel shameful about, sharing your deepest, darkest secrets, whatever makes you feel insecure, defective, or unworthy.
They subtly amplify and leverage your existing shame while planting extra seeds of shame for insurance—suggesting things you should feel ashamed of or getting you to do things that are incongruent with your values to prove your loyalty to them, then using that against you. By installing these additional backup shame buttons for more leverage, the narcissist can press them whenever they want to manipulate, control, and immobilize you psychologically.
As time goes on, you get completely buried in shame, your self-worth is eroded, your confidence is damaged, you feel like a shell of a person, and you loathe yourself and your life. When someone says they love you and would never hurt you, but the reality is that you’re living in a nightmare, feeling like you’ve lost your sense of self and sanity, it is toxic and it is psychological abuse.
Leave a Comment