Transcription
Hi everyone, it's Dr. Romini, and welcome back to this YouTube channel on all things related to narcissism and narcissistic personalities, and just difficult relationships and situations in general.
Today, I'm going to be talking about a specific element of gaslighting. And that is this idea of gaslighting. We often think of it in a very traditional way, but a part of gaslighting actually involves putting, putting you, throwing people off balance so that you look unstable to other people.
Gaslighting in general is a rather simple, simple sequence, but there's a very specific sequence in narcissistic relationships that's even more simple, and that many of you may be familiar with. A narcissistic person accuses you of something you haven't done, or claims something that isn't true, or they break a promise and claim they never made the promise in the first place.
When this happens to you, you defend yourself. You give your point of view. You vehemently deny it. You may even become so emphatic as you try to communicate with them because you're being told something so untrue that your, your volume increases. "That's not true! I didn't do that!" See, you kind of get worked up, worked up a little bit more. You may become agitated. You may cry because somebody's saying something to you about you that's abjectly untrue.
Once you become a little bit worked up, you may notice the narcissistic person calms down significantly. They may even seemingly relax, and then they may calmly, and perhaps even contemptuously, say to you, "What is wrong with you?" Or they will say, "Stop overreacting." They might say, "Yikes, you really are a dramatic and chaotic person." And then they may go on to say and say, "You know, I am not a fan of drama."
And when you hear that, it may activate your own fears about feeling like you're to blame for any issues in this relationship, and you may lose this person. The narcissistic person may say, "You need to calm down. Is there something wrong with you? Maybe you need to see a therapist because you sure do get some strong emotional reactions." They may say to you, "Ah, you've become really paranoid. I'm worried about you."
And they'll do this from this very calm, almost cold exterior. They may roll their eyes at you and start framing you as an agitated and unhinged person. They may even give you a logical framing for their accusation or their argument, and you now look more unhinged than the narcissist. And you recognize that if anyone was watching this, and they may very well be, that you may look to that person who's watching this whole argument as though you're the one who's really out of control.
If this sequence happens enough times, your role in the relationship starts to settle in. The narcissist will often instigate you and keep kind of poking at you by accusing, making accusations about you and gaslighting, and you respond. And over time, it can start to feel that the narrative is that the narcissistic person is the one who's calm, cool, and collected, and that the other person in the relationship, and that might be you, but the other person in the relationship is the one who's dysregulated, dramatic, and chaotic because they find themselves chronically defending themselves against these false accusations and this gaslighting.
Because most people do not want to view themselves as dysregulated and chaotic, you may start tamping down your reactions, buying into the narcissistic person's version of reality. It might just almost feel like they keep saying it. Somebody tells you the sky is, you know, green enough times, you might actually start believing it. You may even seek out therapeutic help, and you're initially seeking it out saying, "Gosh, I'm really dramatic and paranoid." And slowly stop becoming yourself because you actually really think, over time, you get indoctrinated to believing the version of reality that the narcissist is selling you.
Now, the version of reality that the narcissistic person is going to start peddling around town is that, "Uh, my partner's such a handful. They always get so worked up," or "My partner is so dramatic and always overreacts to everything I say." Perhaps these arguments have happened in front of other people, and if you do get, if you do sort of find your, you're sort of raising your volume and getting agitated because somebody's saying things about you that aren't true, your agitation may sadly support the narcissistic person's version of the events.
Here's the bottom line: Nobody out there ever wants to be accused of things that aren't true. So, not surprisingly, when someone tells us something false about ourselves or something that's completely not aligned with our reality, we defend ourselves. We provide our version of the events. And when it is clear that the other person is going to keep foisting their version, their gaslighted version of events on us, we find that we keep explaining our side. We pull out facts, we pull out text messages, emails, anything we have to defend our position.
And with a narcissistic person on the other side, this is a mistake because the other person, they're not listening. This is about manipulating you, not about listening to you, but about manipulating you. This is why understanding high-conflict and antagonistic personality styles becomes so important. It becomes so important for so many reasons because if we understand this, we may be less likely to fall prey to it. And even more important than that is to hold on to your version of reality and truth when someone denies it. To learn to nod, smile, and just shrug and say, "All right, it appears we're just having different experiences of the situation," instead of feeling you have to defend your position to a narcissistic person who's not listening.
Don't get me wrong, by the way. A narcissistic person will get even more agitated if you do not engage with them and respond in a dramatic way. Remember the way that baiting works, and it can even feel unsettling. They want you to look as unhinged as they feel. And ultimately, the goal of all gaslighting is to get sort of mental control over another person.
If you have ever gotten caught in this loop, you may actually not understand that a significant part of the gaslighting process is to leave you doubting yourself. That's the goal. If you doubt yourself, if you're doubting yourself and even considering yourself to be an individual who's living with mental illness, "Maybe my anxiety means I have an anxiety disorder." You're anxious because you're in a toxic relationship.
In so doing, though, you may feel less able to set boundaries because you're so unsure of yourself. You may feel less able to get out of a relationship. You may even doubt yourself in other areas of your life, including at work and in other close relationships, because you're so plagued by the self-doubt.
Please practice holding on to your reality, knowing your truth, and always remembering that nobody needs evidence for their feelings. Practice mindfulness, which can allow you to draw upon tools like breathing and mindful focus when you feel like reacting, and to help you get centered when someone is tossing accusations at you. It's important to understand that your, and I even feel, don't want to call it agitation, but your sense of unsettledness or just sort of, you know, kind of feeling like you're escalating a bit, that your agitation in that way, something that fosters their sense of power.
But you may feel a need to let that strong emotion about being manipulated. You need to find, may need to find a place to share it and find safe spaces in which to share your feelings. This experience of feeling as though you are, um, you, you have almost been rendered sort of unstable by this relationship and internalizing that sense of, "I think I might be unstable," in a relationship. It's actually a big reason that a lot of people out there who think that they're narcissistic actually aren't narcissistic at all, but they've been told it by somebody in a narcissistic relationship, or they've been told many other things that are patently untrue.
"You have, you have any number of mental disorders," a partner will tell them. "You have obsessive-compulsive disorder. You have anxiety. You have this. You have that." Sometimes even tell them they're psychotic. But they throw all of this at them, and a person who's constantly having their reality challenged and doubted, it gets exhausting. And after a while, some people find that they don't consent, they relent, they just give in and say, "Fine, fine, it's what you said." And you can see how that deflates a person and can really pull them away from being themselves.
So, thanks again for tuning in, and I hope that was helpful.