Are you ready for the craziest revelation I’ve had in years?

I’ve discovered that, much like the secondhand smoke I inhaled around my practically chain-smoking parents for the majority of my life — I had also been well trained from childhood to behave as a secondhand gaslighter…to myself.

Yes — I have spent many, many years gaslighting myself! What?!

It isn’t quite that simple, but that’s rather what it boils down to. Here’s what I mean.

Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which the abuser manipulates their victim into doubting their perception of reality. The victim has one understanding of a circumstance or situation or relationship, and the abuser either demeans or dismisses or disregards or actively messes with details intensely, or frequently, enough that the victim questions how they’re perceiving what’s going on, and eventually buys into the insistence of the abuser that their perception is incorrect and reflective of a deeper issue on the part of the victim.

The term comes from the 1938 play Angel Street, later adapted into the 1944 film Gaslight, where a husband tries to convince his wife she is insane to steal from her. Back in those days, they used gas powered lighting, and he would repeatedly dim the lights and then dismissively tell his wife she was imagining things when she commented on the dimmer light. Gaslighting thus eventually became a metaphor for this sort of mental manipulation.

My mother was and is a master manipulator; narcissists like her are always either the victim or the victor, never the perpetrator, so she excelled at making everyone else around her the problem. As a second child with an older sibling who had developmental disabilities and mental health issues, it was my job to make sure everything and everyone was fine, especially myself. I couldn’t have problems or cause problems because my parents already had their hands full and I couldn’t add to that or make anything worse. Again, my job from early childhood onward was to make sure everyone and everything was fine.

Unfortunately, that bred some excessive people-pleasing issues that I’m still working through. I like the idea of not caring what other people think of me, but in reality, that’s not a place I’ve managed to successfully navigate to yet. I am in the process of realizing that I define my self-worth far too much by how I think I’m being perceived by others. As a result, I force myself to put up with a lot more unsavoriness than I should, because I want everything and everyone to always be fine. Essentially, I gaslight myself into thinking that anything I don’t really like or that doesn’t fit my wants or needs is okay, it’s close enough to good, it’s fine, so that I can continue going along with this false sense of equilibrium. Because I “need” things to be fine, I gaslight myself into believing that things are fine, or close enough to fine, when in fact they very well may not be fine at all.

It’s like when you’re craving macaroni and cheese for dinner, but what’s on the menu for the evening is spaghetti. You can try to say that isn’t what you want, but the part of you that needs everything to be fine shouts you down and says, well, we’re having spaghetti, and it’s still pasta, it’s close enough, it’s fine! And because you don’t want to cause any problems, you hunch down and nod and say yeah, sure, close enough, it’s fine…but it is not, in fact, fine.

Amplify that by decades of this experience in all matters large and small from an extremely young and impressionable age…well, you see, not a whole lot feels fine to me anymore.

My therapist called it candy coated bullshit today. I don’t take Advil, so I can’t be sure myself, but she told me that she believes it’s that type of pain relief medication in which the coating has just a hint of sweetness to it to make it (theoretically) more palatable to swallow. It tricks your brain into thinking the pills aren’t so bad after all so that by the time you may second-guess swallowing them, it’s already all done. Now, as someone who does take a lot of medication for various health needs, I can appreciate this little mind-game for swallowing actual pills. But as a metaphor for putting up with way more stress and trauma and abuse and harm than anyone ever should have to bear, man, it really grinds my gears. I was taught from an extremely young age to excuse and explain away far too many misbehaviors and misdeeds, to accept them without complaint or concern to the impact they actually had on me. And I was trained to do this so well that I continue to do it still today, for almost every single instance of unsavoriness that crosses my path. I give far too much benefit of the doubt (benefit to the doubt?).

I don’t watch Grey’s Anatomy very often, because it’s a phenomenal show. I enjoy it but get too emotionally invested and that simply gets too taxing for me. That being said, there’s one quote in particular that I absolutely love and try to keep in mind, especially at times when my decision to remove toxic people from my life gets called into question (by myself or others). I honestly don’t even know the context, but I know Meredith Grey said it: “I make no apologies for how I chose to repair what you broke.”

My therapist is trying hard to help me understand and remember that I have choices. I can choose to engage in activities that please other people rather than myself to a detrimental degree, or, I can choose to do things that help me live more authentically, and how other people feel about the choices I make is a them problem. In theory, and even in word day to day, I endeavor heartily to follow through on the latter. In practice, I am still learning at a very elementary level how to avoid the former. It is a bumpy ride, and I am still working on fastening my seatbelt.