Have you ever heard of Gaslighting? I hadn’t until yesterday when someone posted an instagram photo about it. Honestly I had no idea and guess what? It’s been done to me. I always knew something was wrong, I knew I didn’t imagine things and I knew what I said but I was told I was crazy. I was told it never happened. I imagined it. I am so confused yet so happy to know that first of all I’m not crazy and secondly this actually has a name and other have experienced it.

If you’ve never heard of gaslighting please look it up, research it and take a good hard look at what your loved one, who is an addict, has been saying to you. I thought there were times that I was losing my mind, maybe I was crazy, maybe I wasn’t remembering things correctly, maybe I did need help. It is a pretty scary thing when people you love have the power to manipulate you to this extent. It sure makes you second guess anything that anyone says because seriously how do you honestly know that anyone is telling the truth?

My son has used this as a way to disrupt and splinter our family. I’ve always said that he could sell ice to an eskimo. He can manipulate you into believing anything he says. But I had no idea that he was doing this to me. I thought I knew better, I couldn’t get caught up in his lies because I knew he lied. But this thing, gaslighting, brings clairvoyance. I read it and I said – This is me! It really is me! And it may be you too.

It sounds so much like what a loved one of an addict feels. How addiction can split families and how addiction destroys everyone it touches. But Gaslighting is a way to keep you off balance, to make you listen and believe what the addict is telling you all while closing you off to the rest of the world.

As I’ve written this blog, followed others, read and researched I have found out so much about myself. So much about how addiction is destroying masses of people. The psychological as well as physical affects on all it touched are devastating. Unless you’ve experienced this firsthand I don’t believe you can begin to understand what happens, how the effects spread through families and can affect generations.

This fight we are in is not just for the addict, it’s for ourselves.  We are fighting for our own future. We as parents are being sucked into this just by being associated with addiction. It’s an entire side of this disease that I didn’t know existed. Yes, I knew there was stress and anxiety which can cause physical symptoms but I didn’t even see the physiological warfare we are also facing.

So please, if you are feeling any of these things, don’t for a minute think you are going insane. You are being manipulated in yet another way by your loved one. Gaslighters know that people like having a sense of stability and normalcy. Their goal is to destroy this and make you constantly question everyone and everything around you. It is done so gradually, over time, that you don’t even realize it’s happening to you.

The following is the definition in Wikipedia –

Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim’s belief.