...for posting your thoughtful entry and the link to the article. Both were very insightful, and I learned a lot from both.
I have absolutely no issues with your entry. The only comment I would make about the article is that this may be an issue that is easier to recognize when a man does it to a woman, as the article points out, but the roles of gaslighting can be reversed. I’ve seen women do it to other women and men do it to men. I’ve been on the receiving end of it before. I am pretty conscious of the words I use with people, but I would say everyone has probably, in some way, been on both the receiving and giving end of this at least in some ways at some point in their life.
I did appreciate how the article pointed out that you can intentionally and unintentionally gaslight someone. Something I’ve really tried to grasp hold of in the last several years is that no one should ever feel badly for something they feel. Maybe it’s not always the healthiest reaction or the best way to feel about something, but it is what you feel and in that moment that is where you are at. It’s a personal issue and it’s not up to anyone else to judge how you feel about something (though I think personal reflection on why we feel that way is important, but again, that’s something you have to do yourself).
Any bad behavior, whether it is how we treat ourselves, how we treat others, addictions we may have, anger, manipulative behavior, or our ability to cope with what is going on around us, is simply the symptom of a greater underlying problem. For example, if you’re an alcoholic, alcoholism is just the symptom of something else that is going on. The real issue is why you became an alcoholic to begin with. It doesn’t take away from the fact that you have to now deal with the alcoholism, but often we just treat the symptom without going deeper and looking at the root causes. What it all boils down to is escapism and not dealing with something else deeply rooted within us.
