Coping with Being Used and Gaslighting

The title says it all...an acquaintance that often requested my ear for support is now flaming me and harassing me because I've laid down boundaries. Then I saw this on Facebook and it just rang true. And I wanted to share it with all those who find themselves in similar situations... It doesn't happen often to me, being used like this, but there have been a few instances that ended in a person gaslighting and harassing me, just a few, and I see the pattern in it now, and it's in the below image.

Hope if you're also going through this that it helps you cope too!

Just saw this too...also true for me.

@seesaw You're not alone. I've been on the receiving end of gaslighting.

Thank you @shakespeare47! The good news is that the gaslighting is SO far from the truth that it's not really phasing me. I've had to set this person's communications to be immediately deleted because it's just nonsense.

It really illuminated for me that saying about cognitive distortion where feelings are facts. This person, their feelings are facts, meaning however they feel about something or someone in that moment means it must be so. And in the next moment if they feel a different way, then that is now a fact and the truth, and they'll deny that they ever felt/thought differently.

The biggest problem is that I believed this person had the potential to really do a lot and go far, and so I stretched myself to support them, even when it felt at my detriment or dangerous to me. Well, I think the lesson is finally learned. That first image said it all: Don't fall in love with potential, believe the red flags, and don't lower my standards.

When you say flaming and harrassing can you elaborate? (if you are comfortable?)

Besides the lies the person is saying in drastically rewriting history...

By flaming and harassing I mean the person continues to send me nasty, hateful messages even though I haven't responded, and they are using obscene, foul language to try and insult me. I dont need to say the exact things said. Like a truly manipulative person they have tried to use the very few things they think they know about me to insult me and upset me. Fortunately this person knows very limited things about me so they arent very successful, lol.

Thanks, Sarah.

Ug, well, I didn't think the attempt to manipulate and gaslight had affected me all that much, other than being a bit surprising and astonishing. I had been able to keep my boundaries and not respond; however, I still cannot control my brain. Was triggered into some pretty disturbing PTSD/flashback nightmares last night, and that's the only thing really that would have triggered them. It's okay, I'm okay. Trying to shake it off. It was a scary nightmare based on a previously disturbing and scary experience but it's in the past, and I am not in danger now. Especially not from this person, whose only weapon is a keyboard and some foul language.

Remember that it was only a dream and that it can't hurt you. I'm so sorry that you've been experiencing this. You're in my thoughts and Prayers. Keep standing up for yourself! You're the strongest! I'm thinking of you. Don't let these people "get" you. You're stronger than them all! You know that to be true!

This is something I experience myself. I manage to control myself in the moment but tend to struggle afterwards, sometimes badly. My older sister is one who believes her feelings are facts and she definitely had/has cognitive distortions and it got to the point where I just had to avoid her completely because every encounter would trigger me to experience nightmares and I would struggle for a few days. Also, I do NOT like how it affects me in how I interact either where I am more sensitive than I normally am.

Yes, more and more I am beginning to see how "feelings as facts" plays out. Like if their feelings change, then the facts change, lol. Even when you can point to written proof...that mist somehow be a lie.

I'm sorry you've had to experience this as well, OE. Even when you set boundaries and know how to cope, it can be a bit of a mind f***. Fortunately the narcissistic supply this person wants won't come from me. They will continue to be ignored. I'm really loathe to call people narcs bc I feel like we can all be narcissistic from time to time, just in the basic sense of the word. And regardless of why, they are trying to manipulate and gaslight me. It won't work. I know what's real and what's not and what happened and didnt and what's better is that I have got loads in writing to prove it.

It's almost funny when someone tries to gaslight you when all communication has been written and theres a full track record, lol. It's like, seriously? Are you for real? When you point out the precious written statements, then it's all obscene insults and below the belt punches trying to hurt you or make you take back the truth. Omg, just grow up.

The Toll of Pathological Narcissism on Loved Ones | Psychology Today

Interesting article. Mentions me by name: "compulsive caregiver" Also two types of narcissists, grandiose and vulnerable

Eta - you wanna get past the middle portion of the article which is stats, to the end, which is more descriptive and prescriptive.

OMG, me too! Thank you for sharing this!

This is what I can experience myself seesaw. I am in a new kind of therapy called "Accerated Resolution Therapy" and my new therapist explained to me how he has found this therapy more affective than CBT, DBT and talk therapy in that they have learned that the area of the brain that is reactive doesn't really respond to these other therapies as well. What you never really processed in your brain was the old trauma you experienced that you did not have the skills to prevent whatever it was you experienced. Our brains are set up where when we sleep we have a period in our sleep called REM sleep. This is when things we experienced are processed in a way where our eye movement acts as a way of taking whatever we experienced and connects that to another area of our brain that uses our skills to look at it and file it with the different skills we have developed in our mind.

For myself, when I experienced a major trauma, I struggled to sleep, was even AFRAID to sleep for fear of these nightmares I would experience. So I took medications so I could at least sleep, however, when the medication wore off, I would often wake up from a bad dream which means that even though the medication knocked me out, my brain still needed to do REM and process which it would try to do when the medication began to wear off. What my therapist is doing is he is simulating this with me and having me revisit these old traumas while having my eyes follow his hand and he has me pay attention to how my body feels too. When I get triggered, I don't JUST suffer with emotional triggers, but I also experience it in my body as well and it can get very painful and exhausting for me. Once I revisit whatever it was, he has me create ways to reduce whatever it was that I experienced and he also has me blacken it out and even change the event. Well, in all honesty, that is often what we actually do in our REM sleep too. But with trauma that overwhelmed us in some way that can get triggered when something similar happens, we CAN relive it and as you know that is extremely disturbing leaving someone to say "I can't control my brain" and "then I suffer when I honestly do not want to".

So, this person's interactions with you triggered you. What happened from that? A nightmare right? It's not that person that's REALLY the problem, it's more about something you experienced that your brain could not seem to process and it's still unprocessed because once again your brain tried to process and could not and instead you woke up all upset. Actually seesaw, your brain just showed you something when that happened and in all honesty, I think that if you did this therapy I have been doing it could help you finally process that old trauma where you are not so reactive like you "still" are.

I have a strong feeling that your challenge with sleeping stems from your "fear of dreaming" that developed from your inability to process some old traumas you experienced. In all honesty, after listening to this therapist explain this therapy and how it has proven to be the one thing that has helped his patients the most, is that often a trauma can cause a person to begin to "fear" sleep and then without realizing it, these individuals begin to only sleep up until they might begin "rem" sleep. What I have learned from this therapy is that while I can never change what I experienced in a trauma, I CAN change how my brain continues to react to it in that "stuck" way that I could not seem to process and often experienced what is called "night terrors".

What are manipulative people looking for? One thing that tends to come to me when I sit and analyze an encounter is "control over". May even be their own effort to gain control over their very own fears seesaw. That tends to be what some of the crazy things my sister comes up with that I know are not true but she needs to insist on them being true as it's what fits in with HER own need to believe her truth is the ONLY real truth.

Sometimes, a person really does believe their own cognitive distortions. For example, one evening my sister was blow drying her hair and glanced into the darkish hallway where the front staircase is. She saw a light that to her looked like a ghost moving down the stairs and she ended up screaming in fear. She decided the house was haunted and she even went out and got this Ougi board and a tape recorder to see if she could communicate with this so called ghost. She decided that because her bedroom was cold that the ghost was also in her bedroom too. She fed into this belief of hers that it was a fact the house was indeed haunted.

Well, I NEVER saw any ghost. However, one night when I was sitting in that room with my father I heard a car coming down the road as this house is OLD and is very close to the road. I happened to be facing this very same hallway and could see how this passing car's headlights ended up shining on these stairs where it looked like a ghost coming down the stairs but THAT IS NOT WHAT IT REALLY WAS. Also, when she moved out I ended up moving into her bedroom, and it did tend to get cold, however, the reason that was so was because the heat was blocked from getting into that room properly and once my father fixed it, that room was warm and fine. However, to this moment, my sister STILL believes she saw a ghost and that house is haunted when in reality, with that house being so close to the road and how that road can get busy, often the car's headlights coming in both directions can shine through different windows where the light can appear to be some kind of ghost if one wishes to perceive that, however, that is not REALITY. Well, I was the last child to live in that house, I was the youngest child and lived there the longest and other than these occasional headlights shining in from passing cars there was NO ghostly figures and nothing suddenly moving on it's own either.

To this day my sister still accuses me of causing my mother to have a stroke, that is simply not true and luckily I happened to be with her to witness her experience a mild stroke and when they looked at my mother's brain there was no new damage HOWEVER they did see damage from an earlier stroke to the motor area of her brain. My mother had been calling me in tears about how mean my sister was being to her about getting up and moving around and my mother kept telling me how she was trying but just could not do it like my sister kept bossing her to do. Well, there was good reason for that because my mother had already suffered a stroke that did cause damage to the motor area of her brain. Even though my sister, after storming through the ER doors and raging at me for being the cause of my mother's stroke, learned about the damage that was ALREADY present, she STILL needs to blame me when I had nothing to do with it. Truth doesn't matter to her all that matters to her is what she FEELS is truth. Unfortuantely, that is just how some people are, for whatever reason they decide that if they feel something is true then it is true and they base their own behaviors on these distorted cognitive beliefs.

Bottom line, human beings can be flawed in many different ways. Often, because of that human beings can act out in ways that we may not know how to deal with or respond to, so much so that we get traumatized by these very toxic behaviors. Add to that challenge, also in that mix is how we are learning more and more how people's brains can actually be wired differently, and that can lead to having difficult interactions with others simply because that other person is not quite wired the way we are wired.

I am sorry you are still suffering the effects of your sister's abuse. Hopefully you will gain some relief soon.

Well, human beings do need some narcissism in order to survive and thrive. We are very maleable by nature and susceptible to believing we need to be certain ways in order to feel deserving when often these beliefs are not really as important as we are often led to believe. We are also set up to navigate, so it's only reasonable to understand how someone could be raised to believe certain methods to navigate are best when in reality these ways of navigating are not very healthy.

Thank you for pointing that out seesaw in such a thoughtful way because I need to make sure I use "you MAY not have processed". I was responding to you with what my own therapist has been explaining to me. How he is explaining "processing" is very different than what I thought and even had been encouraged to think from therapists I had spent time with, but then a great deal of my therapy has been CBT and Talk therapy and lots of reading and learning.

You are RIGHT seesaw, thank you for pointing that out to me, it's very helpful for me to notice when I do this because you are correct in that my intention is to be validating and not to create what you are feeling from how I worded what I said. Honestly, I think this comes for literally YEARS of teaching young children and constantly explaining to them how what they need to do in order to get the ponies to actually behave the way they want them to. That together with the constant training I had been doing over the years of different animals and dealing with their different issues. I have to really recheck how I might be doing that unknowingly. I just spent this past weekend with lots of children again explaining things to them. I do spend a lot of time working with young children.

I appreciate this and YOU. Thank you for letting me be honest.

I am really glad to hear that you have a good therapist this time who is actually helping you!

Oh, I figured out how to actually block an email address, not just create a filter rule. So that's good. I won't even be tempted to read whatever bile they message to me. Score one for seesaw's well-being.

Definitely learning to follow the rules from that first meme I posted. It's taken me like 3-4 times of going through this and wanting to be like @unaluna said, a compassionate caregiver, but I'm not breaking my own boundaries anymore.