How to deal with gaslighting | Ariel Leve

Right now the world is experiencing what I experienced every day as a child. There is chaos. There is confusion. Everything is backwards. Reality is being canceled and nothing means anything. The term

gaslighting

refers to when someone manipulates you into questioning your own sanity. It's a term that we're hearing a lot right now and it's a term that I'm very familiar with. People may be confused about how to handle and cope now because I can help when I was in my thirties. I had a meeting with my editor. and it was my first major journalism assignment for the Sunday Times magazine.

I had gone to meet him for a drink and I was hopeful, I felt like things could work out and as I was leaving, another writer arrived, this writer recognized me from when I was a little girl and he said are you so-and-so's daughter? and I said yes and he had been invited to one of my mother's dinners after I left this meeting, my editor told me that he had said that I always wondered what that was like. The girl would survive. I thought her only options were suicide or murder. When he told me this line, I felt validation because here was this person who had witnessed what I knew to be true and confirmed what he knew, so he said two options. suicide or murder why would he say that and what does this have to do with gas lighting I grew up in an environment that from the outside seemed privileged and envied Abel my mother was a very glamorous poet and artist and there were always very interesting people around him there was a bohemian world she loved to entertain and there were raucous parties during the week.

I was in my bed trying to sleep and I was woken up by drunken laughter and noises outside the bedroom and sometimes these people would come into my space to escape the crowd and sit and smoke and use the bathroom and other times they would get up in their nightgown and opened the door and screamed desperately, please, can people be quiet? It's a school night. I have to go. go to sleep I have to get up tomorrow my mother would respond Ariel come and join the party or she would say after the belly dancer everyone will go home it was a total bombardment so the next morning what would happen is that I would confront her about the situation and It was as if this interruption had never happened what I thought had happened.

They told me that it hadn't happened and that she was making a big

deal

out of nothing if I confronted her with the fact that they were rejected. They sprayed me with words of adoration and words of contempt you are a stupid idiot and I wish you had never been born when I confronted her about telling me this they told me that I was making it up and that it was a lie so it wasn't just that my reality was canceled but my perceptions of the reality were overwritten and one of the most insidious things about

gaslighting

is the denial of reality, being denied what you have seen with your own eyes and know to be true, being denied an experience that you have had and know to be true. . it's real to me erasing the abuse was worse than the abuse so it may drive you crazy but you're not crazy i developed four strategies that helped me and at the time i didn't even know they were strategies so in these uncertain times im going to share them with you and such maybe they can help you.

Number one is to remain defiant. When I was a child I wrote a story about running away from home and when my mother saw the story she said it wasn't true. and I demanded that I change it and I didn't change it I actually screamed I'm not going to change my story I'm not This challenge was key because I trusted my version of reality and didn't allow it to be altered on demand This anger was protected I knew what I knew and it couldn't be erased, so the person cheating on you will often try to intimidate you, but being defiant is something that doesn't make it difficult for you, it's being resilient, now recognize that you will never have responsibility when you are in your twenties.

I tried to confront the truth about what happened in my childhood. I was sitting with my mother in a Japanese restaurant and said the words child abuse for the first time out loud. I said it jokingly so she wouldn't feel like it was an attack. about her and immediately her response was what about mom's abuse? Nobody talks about that. So what I learned at that moment was that she would never be able to take responsibility for her actions. I would never understand it. I would never say: Oh, you're right. You are right and that recognition was not in the cards.

Asserting myself was not only helpful but also harmful because the person who deceives you will never be able to respond to logic or reason, so if you think you can apply logic and reasoning, you are going to be disappointed with this recognition. You are no longer powerless. Let go of the desire for it to be different. This is very important to me because the desire for it to be different is very powerful. It inoculates you to the tumult. it allows you to continue believing that logic and reason will prevail and after a particularly bad episode my mother assured me that it would never happen again, it would happen again, promises were broken and I realized that I couldn't trust her word to turn on the gas.

The person gaslighting you makes you feel like the ground is always moving beneath your feet and that you have no center of gravity. You want things to make sense, but not interacting with someone gaslighting you means you'll never feel heard, so what's up? the solution, stop getting involved, put yourself first, number four would be to develop a healthy detachment. I had to develop coping mechanisms as a child, the back and forth and push and pull of affection was emotional whiplash, you are wonderful. horrible I love you I hate you I had to protect myself by believing that nothing meant anything so if you can't invest in anything the other person says what happens well when you grow up there is a price for me what had been adaptive as a child I became maladaptive as an adult, so trusting was very difficult.

I always needed verification. I paid attention to clarity. There was no room for misunderstanding and no room for error. Someone once asked me what you look for in a relationship and I answered certainty. Certainty is needed in an uncertain world, but we live in an uncertain world and therefore there has to be a way to find balance. Separating yourself from gaslighting does not mean total detachment, it means distinguishing between the world of the gaslighter and the real world in order to leave it. People have their alternative facts, you will stick to reality, so if the only options for me were suicide or murder, how did I survive well?

Actually, there was a third option, writing it down, this was my way of making sense of the chaos by organizing it on the page that happened this was real whether the writing was published or not it was something that had to be written to say what needed to be said to validate my reality, even if it was unauthorized, what it was was testimony, ironically it was my mother who gave me the tools I needed to survive because she always defended freedom of expression through writing and by telling my story it was and continues to be an act of redemption.

Thank you.