Apr 13, 20222 min read

More on Gaslighting

Gaslighting is the most common tactic that a narcissist uses to abuse you. It involves telling you that your perception of reality is wrong. Your narcissistic mother might tell you that what you say happened didn’t happen or that it didn’t happen the way you said it did.

If you disagree with her, she will simply rewrite reality and insist that whatever you thought happened was all in your imagination. If this happens enough times, you will start to second-guess yourself and begin to distrust your memory, perceptions, judgment, and sense of reality in general.

Your toxic mother might also tell you that you’re unstable or even psychotic. She will lie to support what she is saying, and no matter what you say, she will just brush it off as something that didn’t really happen, or if something did happen, it was all your fault.

This can have devastating effects on your self-esteem and even your mental stability. It creates something called cognitive dissonance where you have trouble distinguishing what really happened even though you just witnessed it.

Once you get to that point, you begin to distrust your feelings, your experiences, and your perceptions. That can have a crippling effect on your life. You can’t trust your own senses and that affects everything else you do.

The term gaslighting comes from a movie entitled Gaslight in which a husband tries to convince his wife she’s losing her mind by doing a number of things, including turning the gaslights up and down, to make her question her sanity. This is the same thing your narcissistic mother is doing to you.