What does gaslighting really mean?
Lots of things happen both digitally and physically in our everyday lives, which is true for most people. Some are excellent, while others are not so nice. In addition, some are engaging in practices such as gaslighting—something you may or may not have heard of yet.
In today's essay, we'll go over what it is and how it occurs, with the aim of being able to comprehend what it means and how it occurs.
From some online sources, gaslighting is basically a form of psychological exploitation and control in which the level of cruelty is high. It's being used by narcissistic people in order to progress or, over time, instill and consolidate inside the person a severe level of fear and uncertainty to the point where the victim no longer considers their own cognition, perspective, or conviction.
It is one of the most heinous and insidious forms of abuse. The abuser wears the victim down to the point that they can no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy, allowing the abuser to totally dominate them. It occurs following feelings of loneliness and inclinations to dominate others. At this point, the abuser may counter their protestations by transferring responsibility from the abuser to the abused, thus making the abuser seem to be the one who is being victimized.
Because they do not believe they can depend on even the most fundamental facts, they will experience the following difficulties.
It causes them to become anxious because they feel they have lost control over their lives. It also causes them to lack initiative because they lack the feeling of power and believe they can't estimate what is true. It causes them to notice a difference between before and after the gaslighting, and they are led to believe that they are crazy, losing their minds, demented, psychotic, hallucinating, among others.
Essentially, it's the equivalent of slinging a sack over someone's head, twisting them around, and keeping them off balance until they collapse. The assailant then makes it look as though he is assisting the victim in getting up while simultaneously causing him to tumble. The victim is unaware that he is wearing a sack over his head, and he is also unaware of who is causing him to fall; instead, he believes that the aggressor is just helping them up.
It really is a serious mental mess. Several of the psychiatric problems that are connected with it are made up. They may seem to be the same, yet they are not because they are very different in their causes. Consequently, they should be treated differently as a result of their differences. In practice, however, individuals who report being fooled are sometimes not taken seriously, and revealing the entire narrative could serve to their detriment, leading them to assume that they have been all delusional and must not trust their senses... and so the whole process continues.
It is simple to see how to break out of this situation: all that is required is that the sufferer depend on their senses and quit thinking that anything is wrong with them. However, in practice, this is very difficult since, in a sense, the victim is forced to go through the process of not believing what they believe to be true afresh, acknowledging that somehow they will cease accepting what is wrong.