Your Body and Mind on Gaslighting
You feel the truth inside your body about someone or a situation, but they are telling you that you are wrong. This creates havoc in your body, mind, and soul.
Often, empathic people will be attracted to narcissistic people. Have you heard this? They have been groomed from childhood to lie to themselves about what is really going on in their traumatic home environments, which makes them a perfect target for narcissistic people to hook into. Empathic people feel a lot through their bodies. They usually have a clairsentience gift and sometimes a claircognitive one as well, which means that they know intuitively on the level of body and mind about something that might not be evident in the outside world. All of us have a sixth sense, but we can’t experience it well when we have unhealed trauma and wounding covering our intuition. You might get hits of intuition or of psychic ability once in a while, but it’s not consistent when you have fear and false beliefs blocking parts of yourself from yourself. This is why turning inside and remembering how to love ourselves helps our lives run better. Once we can access our inner knowing again, we have clarity and confidence about what the next right move to make is for us. Believing and knowing that we all are higher beings having human experiences who have these amazing intuitive GPS systems helps us to heal and be in our higher state of being, which helps all of us. You and I might have different gifts and abilities and that is just fine, but we all have gifts and abilities nonetheless.
Like Always Attracts Like
As an empathic child raised in a traumatic home, the child picks up on all the energy and emotions from the home environment and feels all the family’s pain as well as joy—all of it. Often, an empathic child has to learn to go into their minds and lie to themselves about what they are picking up on because it would be too frightening to KNOW the truth all the time. In essence, they have to gaslight themselves—they have to change what they perceive about their reality in order to simply survive the actual reality. They deny their feelings of sadness, anger, fear, or shame and become emotionally shut down (unavailable) to themselves in order to adapt to their environments. They put on a mask and hide from themselves. They learn to pretend and live in a fantasy that all is well like their friends’ families homes are.
This is important to see because we attract who we ARE to ourselves. We attract our wounding or our healing to us. We don’t attract THOUGHTS alone. Thinking positive thoughts is not the entire story when it comes to manifesting what we want. We manifest from the level of our state of being. We attract the gaping emotional wound or whatever we believe on the level of EMOTION to us in the form of love, work, friendships, money, etc. When we attract someone who gaslights us and who is emotionally unavailable, they are mirroring what we do to ourselves already. Like attracts like. We point the finger at the other person for doing things to us, but unless there was something for them to hook into within US, we never would have attracted them to begin with. It’s a hard pill to swallow and sometimes the truth hurts, but the more we know, the more we can change. Knowing this gives us more control over our lives. So, this is simply good information to use as desired.
The Empathic Child’s Home Life Experience
Usually, there is a lot of truth that children do not want to know in the abusive home and we learn to cope by going into our heads, becoming very logical and analytical, and not feeling so much. Feeling can be excruciating for the empath’s body because other people’s pain, anger, and self-rejection is palpably felt by the empath and it really, really hurts a lot to feel this. For instance, if the empathic child had to constantly feel their father’s inner rage, their mother’s self-rejection, or their brother’s deep resentment about his life in the home, the empath would implode or go crazy. So, he or she has to learn to survive and not feel all of it. It would cause a nervous system breakdown. It causes a lot of stress on the child. It also creates a lot of rage and anger inside the child because feeling and absorbing someone else’s inner anger is viscerally very painful and makes you want to scream your head off. And you will!
But if you are in an abusive home where displaying feelings is not allowed and you will get abused more for doing so, you have to stop yourself, feel the shame that acts as a protector to keep you from acting out, and do something else that is more appropriate for the family system, like be pleasing or helpful, be a good student, or do anything that will not rock the boat. You can likely see how this creates an emotional unavailability within and even gaslighting of yourself, right? You absolutely had to do this. You had no choice at all. For all your little child self knew, he or she might have actually been killed for expressing this absorbed rage because often the abusive parents are also in denial of their own inner rage and emotions (happy and miserable ones) and will use the child as a scapegoat instead of seeing their own denied emotions. Add to this that rage feeds rage, so if the child expressed the father’s inner rage that he or she had absorbed and the father has denied rage inside of himself, the father could act out. One person’s inner pain will affect and feed off of the other’s. The child would never want to have to face the impact of the kind of abuse that would be inflicted on him if his father was forced into a rage, so the child adapts by shutting down these feelings and going into their mind where logic reigns and finding other solutions instead is safer.
This is very often why we see empathic children who are overweight. Their bodies are in deep pain and comfort foods calm the nervous system. Often, empathic people will turn to drugs, alcohol, sex and other distractions (healthy ones too) for the same reasons. It’s an emotional overload to take on another’s emotions in addition to your own. So, the child needs to escape their bodies to feel safe and calm. It’s a lot! Empathic people are true earth angels, but it comes with a very high price if they are not able to protect their energy and love themselves.
Enter Toxic Relationships
When we enter into toxic relationships that we have been groomed for since childhood, we may eventually come to realize that it is very draining for our bodies when we can feel or sense how someone is feeling inside themselves, but they are pretending to feel another way. There is a part of us that intuitively knows that the other person is angry, sad, frustrated, self-rejecting, or self-loathing, and when they pretend they are happy on the outside, it creates confusion, frustration, or anger within us. Just as in childhood, our nervous system picks up on and lines up with how the other person’s nervous system is feeling, and it makes us go into dysregulation with a fight or flight reaction when their energy is feeling anger or negativity in some form. We might decide to actually fight with them or run away from their energy; we might fawn in order to please them or freeze in fear, which would be us protecting our energy from their bad mood. But when the person says, “No, you’re being ridiculous, I am happy, see my smiling face?” when we FEEL their inner resentment and pain, it confuses our mind. We have this disconnect between what we know intuitively and what our mind now has to believe. This creates a lot of stress and even more fight or flight reactivity inside of us. While we are drawn to the person who gaslights and is emotionally unavailable (to themselves and to us) because it is so familiar, we might also be able to sense the energetic discord happening inside of them. This is especially true if we have done any amount of our own inner work and healing.
This is when cognitive dissonance occurs. We know something to be true but are gaslighted into having to believe someone else’s point of view instead. If they would only admit to how they are truly feeling, it would be so much easier! The mind needs to know what to expect, so it simply has to believe what the gaslighter is saying. This is, of course, unless you choose to believe your own knowing and walk away from the gaslighter. You might feel tempted to stick around, especially if someone emotionally unavailable does not even know they are denying their true feelings, right? I will argue that, no, that is not a good plan and here’s why. When someone does not have access to their deep pain in order to transform it and heal, they are IN pain and, as a result, they CAUSE pain. It is bleeding out of their pores. You can literally feel their inner rage and they will often take it out on you, blame you for their pain, and hurt you continually. They will make you believe that you are at cause for their inner pain. And you are not. That was given to them in their childhood. And, as we know, hurt people will hurt people again and again.
So, until we have stopped gaslighting and lying to ourselves about how we actually feel inside our own selves, we won’t quite be able to discern if the inner pain is ours or someone else’s and so we will often stay in the abusive situation trying to make it better for the abuser. Just like with our abusive caregivers, we will do those old coping mechanisms such as pretzeling, pleasing, and over-doing for the gaslighter because we don’t want them to abuse us more.
So, you are in a pickle here. You have to either stop trusting your own intuition and believe that what your partner claims is true about how they feel is right OR you have to decide to trust yourself anyway. It seems easy enough, right? Many people would say, “Well duh, just believe in your own intuition.” And as was previously discussed, this might not actually be such an easy choice. Your patterns die hard. Add to this that if you do decide to choose your own knowing, you will be in a relationship that is almost totally unbearable because you will start to heal and love yourself, which will show you very clearly the contrast between healthy self-love (yours) and total self-hatred (theirs). You will begin to feel very intensely the unhealed partner’s deep and abiding inner pain. And, once the gaslighter can no longer gaslight you and still has not chosen to heal, they will treat you worse than ever. They will discard and devalue you simply because you cannot be manipulated and controlled anymore. They might try other forms of abuse like sexual, physical, or verbal kinds in order to try to get you back under their thumb. They might tell people negative stories or lies about you. They might find other love interests who will believe them. They might try to triangulate you with those other love interests in order to make you jealous so you will stay under their control. And if you cannot help them or if they will not help themselves, you drown in their pain each and every day. As you might imagine, this life can become very imprisoning and suffocating.
If you decide not to believe yourself and to believe the partner’s denial of their own pain, the disconnect creates a lot of downstream health issues. You are constantly bombarded with stress hormones when you are lied to about how your partner is actually feeling and you are in constant confusion and frustration not being able to believe your own self over the person who is lying to you. After all, your mind is telling you that they must know how they feel, so they must be telling you the truth. The stress and anxiety overwhelm your system and, as in your childhood home, turning to food for comfort or drugs or alcohol are coping mechanisms that are not healthy and will eventually create chronic illnesses like heart disease, obesity, diabetes, any number of autoimmune disorders, cancer, alcoholism, or overdose. The stress alone can cause all of these things, but when you add in unhealthy foods, drink, loads of sugar, or drugs to the mix, you can see how that can negatively impact your health even faster.
All of this works very well for a narcissistic gaslighter, however. This person will likely never change or see their own childhood trauma or abuse in order to stop denying their own latent anger, deep grief, fear, or shame. They will project this onto you, tell you that you are wrong or paranoid for thinking they feel the way they do, and continuously tell you that your reality is not correct. When they can make you believe that you are incorrect, crazy, or wrong over and over again, it chips away at your self-confidence and makes you more pliable and controllable.
Self-Love…Ahhhh! Always the Way!
Once you see what is going on, even if you can only see it in a tiny way, it will help you leave the toxic situation. LEAVE! Your brain on gaslighting is pretty messed up. There are those pesky trauma bonding brain chemicals like oxytocin and dopamine that are always being ignited that keep you in a drug-induced haze. From the confusion, you also have the constant stress hormones being dumped into your system and wreaking havoc on your body. Once you are away from the gaslighter, your brain and body can detox and you can learn to trust yourself again.
Once you are safe and away from the toxicity, you can do the hard but empowering work of learning to trust and love yourself. Once you have healed and changed all the false beliefs about yourself that you have been given since you were a child, you will transcend and transform your entire life. That inner critic that came on board to protect you with shaming messages in order to protect you and keep you safe as a child in an abusive home no longer needs to be in charge and at the forefront of your mind and controlling your every move. You are a grown-up who can now do other things.
“Self-love is the antidote to all forms of abuse.”
-Kristen Dicker
Going deeply into the scary places and facing the parts of us that have been burdened with fear, sadness, insecurity, shame, or anger is courageous and liberating. It helps you to get to know your internal family system and start a real communication and love affair inside of yourself that will help you rise into your authentic self. You will never lose this again once you have come home to your true Self.
