“Last night, I told my SO (significant other) I wanted to separate. This wasn’t the first time I brought up being unhappy, so he wasn’t surprised,” one Redditor wrote on r/adultery.
She continued, “I gave him my reasons: you yell at me in public, you call me names, you punch holes in the walls when I say no, you give me days of silent treatment for no reason, we haven’t had sex in two years, we have no emotional connection left. The list goes on and on.”
“GET OUT,” I thought to myself, reading.
“He denied none of it. Expressed no remorse,” she wrote.
Instead, he fired up his Gaslight Machine.
“No one will ever put up with you.”
“You have no friends.”
“You are depressed. That’s the real problem.”
“This house is a disaster.”
“You don’t try to help yourself.”
“Then he went to the Punishment Phase. First, he took the kids away to do fun things while I was in the shower,” she wrote. “Then he took the clean laundry and dumped it all over the floor.”
Gaslighting and punishment.
Nope. You don’t come back from those two easily.
I have had enough of both to know. It’s time to cut your losses. Call it a day. Whatever you want to label it. It’s marriage kaput time.
When will she realize it?
When is it too late to salvage any shred of her non-existent self-esteem?
Lying is one thing. Gaslighting is another. That’s taking it up a notch.
“You always read too much into things.”
“Your anxiety is out of control.”
“You need to discuss your meds with your doctor.”
“You assume the worst, no matter what.”
It’s a fine line between deception and trickery. Going from “I didn’t say that!” to “You must be crazy!”
Too many women hold on. Myself included.
Instead of putting a fork in it and saying they are done, they stay married and suffer. Unfortunately, many don’t know how to end a relationship humanely.
What’s worse than gaslighting?
Cheating when your spouse steps up. They want to work on the marriage and save it any cost, and you’d rather have your cake and ice cream, too.
“Babe, I want to make the changes we need to make us work,” your spouse pleads.
“I’d rather be with my lover,” you think selfishly.
Ignite the flames as the gas monster grows back to life. Here comes the barrage of endless excuses for why you’re no longer trying in your futile marriage.
The “I didn’t do that” to “You are the problem, here” becomes the standard refrain.
“You don’t trust me,” you pull out as a final retort.
OF COURSE, THEY DON’T TRUST YOU.
It’s gaslighting in reverse.
Would you trust yourself if the shoe was on the other foot? Hell, no! Trust is not an infinite commodity. It wears down. You both burn more bridges.
Thus, the vicious circle of which one of us is to blame for our dead bedroom and our lifeless corpse of a union keeps going round and round. So what’s more terrible? Not wanting to stop an affair to repair your wedding vows or being gaslit ad nauseam by the walking dead spouse?
Both.
Neither works. It just prolongs the pain of an unhappy union.
You know it’s time to leave.
…
If you liked this one, read my original here:
Gaslighting for Pro’s
7 Tips from an adulterer who knows all the tricks
medium.com
Randy Hudson explained gaslighting very well in one of his comments:
I think of “gaslighting” as a very specific sociopathic behavior, manipulating reality so as to cause the victim to doubt his or her own perceptions and understanding, making them more reliant on the gaslighter’s interpretation (including whatever lies that the gaslighter finds useful).
For example, in the original play, the gaslighter physically turns down the gas pressure where the gas enters the home, so the victim perceives the lights as inexplicably dimming. But since she knows of no reason that would be true, she doubts her own perceptions, not just of the lighting but of the other things she observes. That increases the gaslighter’s influence on what she believes, and reduces the effectiveness of the victim’s own common sense.
Simply telling someone “that didn’t happen, perhaps you are imagining things” can be effective, but not as effective as giving the victim a separate perception, outside the apparent control of the gaslighter, to cause that victim to not trust their own common sense.
“I tried to phone you half a dozen times last night, but there was no answer” “Oh, dear, let’s look at the bill… well, the phone company has no record of you trying to make those calls. Perhaps you were dreaming?”
The phone company’s records, like the gas flow, are *external* to the conversation, and apparently not under the control of the gaslighter. So there is no common-sense retort “or you are lying to me.” By establishing even 1 or 2 such external sources of doubt, all the internal suggestions and lies become much more powerful.
…
- Subscribe to The Scarlett Letter — it’s much more fun with the sinners. Billy Joel was right. Only the good die young.
- And to [email protected] because it’s free and I’m so bad, I’m good.
- Plus help a lady adulteress out: Ko-fi/monalisasmiled or [email protected]
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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