{"id":6260,"date":"2019-08-10T14:06:09","date_gmt":"2019-08-10T18:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=6260"},"modified":"2019-08-10T14:06:09","modified_gmt":"2019-08-10T18:06:09","slug":"gaslighting-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=6260","title":{"rendered":"Gaslighting, Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

This actually starts with me being caught by a scam.\u00a0 <\/span>It involved an email from a woman I know slightly here at Kendal.\u00a0 <\/span>It involved a request to buy 3 $100 iTunes for her grandson.\u00a0 <\/span>I said I really couldn\u2019t do it and hoped she could find someone else.\u00a0 <\/span>When the reply was \u201cI need you to do this for me,\u201d I thought she was really desperate.\u00a0 <\/span>I wondered that she couldn\u2019t find anyone else – she didn\u2019t actually say that.\u00a0 <\/span>I don\u2019t know her well enough to know whether this was characteristic of her or not.\u00a0 <\/span>I liked her and thought she was a good person, but we never did more than say hi in the hall.\u00a0 <\/span>I was surprised that she was so insistent, but excused her because she was clearly too desperate to be \u201cnice.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>But I am not familiar with the realm of iTunes gift cards, so I asked for more information.\u00a0 <\/span>My computer person was helping me, and she said we could order them online and found the site.\u00a0 <\/span>So I sent \u201cAnne\u201d the link.\u00a0 <\/span>But she said she couldn\u2019t do it.\u00a0 <\/span>Again it crossed my mind that she could send me email, how come she couldn\u2019t get online.\u00a0 <\/span>But I didn\u2019t pay attention.\u00a0 <\/span>So I went out and got the gift cards, I had to ask a friend to come with me for moral support \u2014 it was that hard for me to do.\u00a0 <\/span>(This is the sort of thing that no one understands if they aren\u2019t also dealing with PTSD.)\u00a0 <\/span>I bought them, but the instructions to scratch them and photograph them and send them to her in an email were really beyond my capacity.\u00a0 <\/span>I don\u2019t have an iPhone, can\u2019t take pictures with my camera and send them right out, I would have to photograph them and then download them to my computer.\u00a0 <\/span>Again it felt like too much to ask, and again I let wanting to help override my feelings.\u00a0 <\/span>Fortunately I met her in the hall (again a sense of shock, isn\u2019t she supposed to be in Vermont?\u00a0 <\/span>Why can\u2019t she get the internet if she\u2019s right here) and said \u201cI got your cards, I can give them to you.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>She was horrified. \u201cIt\u2019s a scam,\u201d she said, and she was clearly upset about it.\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>The oddest thing was I felt great relief at hearing that it was a scam.\u00a0 <\/span>She said she would pay me back.\u00a0 <\/span>We both hoped that since I hadn\u2019t scratched the card that I could return them.<\/p>\n

Journal for Saturday, August 10<\/p>\n

Yesterday was a really horrible day.\u00a0 <\/span>I don\u2019t know what happened \u2014 well, I do know the sequence of events \u2014 but I don\u2019t understand.\u00a0 <\/span>I finally thought to ask myself \u201cWhat does that feel like in your body?\u201d<\/p>\n

First the events:\u00a0 <\/span>Registered the car just fine \u2014 I still need to mail the registration to Eleanor, I would have done that yesterday if I hadn\u2019t been blasted.\u00a0 <\/span>Then I went to West Lebanon Feed & Supply and got a harness for Mocha.\u00a0 <\/span>I hope it will work.\u00a0 <\/span>Then I went to Price Chopper.\u00a0 <\/span>I didn\u2019t expect to have any trouble.\u00a0 <\/span>But they wouldn\u2019t refund my money.\u00a0 <\/span>She pointed to a thing on the receipt that said \u201call sales final.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>She said I could call iTunes.\u00a0 <\/span>I burst into tears, left the store in tears, drove back home in tears.\u00a0 <\/span>I was very careful driving home.<\/p>\n

I parked the car.\u00a0 <\/span>I put on my sunglasses so people couldn\u2019t see my eyes.\u00a0 <\/span>Got back to my room all right.<\/p>\n

Made a 3rd cup of tea, and then did a small puzzle \u201cFishes\u201d because I couldn\u2019t write and I didn\u2019t want to deal with the computer.\u00a0 <\/span>I think I had to be non-verbal for a while.\u00a0 <\/span>The puzzle was perfect.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t even remember when I first started noticing what my body felt like.\u00a0 <\/span>I think it was in the car coming home.<\/p>\n

\u2014 I just realized.\u00a0 <\/span>This all happened during the hour when I should have been talking to Erica, but she\u2019s gone for 3 weeks. \u2014<\/p>\n

What I was feeling was the same kind of unpleasant skin prickles that happen on my skin when I\u2019m hot, except that they were inside my skin, and there was nothing else.\u00a0 <\/span>I felt like a bag of empty skin.\u00a0 <\/span>Then I started to feel like I had been hit in the face by a fierce blast of wind, and stopped dead.\u00a0 <\/span>It didn\u2019t push me anywhere, it just stopped me dead.\u00a0 <\/span>I think of the \u201cdeer in the headlights\u201d metaphor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Actually it’s not a metaphor, it’s one stage in trauma: arrest, and then freeze<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Went to Kilowatt Park with Dulany & Toby. I told her I had been upset by the scam.\u00a0 <\/span>She was very understanding and kind.\u00a0 <\/span>She said of the scam \u201cI would be very angry at myself.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>I realized that that was easily possible for me, but it didn\u2019t feel right.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I realize now that I was \u201cstopped dead.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>I was stopped in that moment, stopped in my life, and only the thinnest wraith could go on.<\/p>\n

When I saw Anne in the hall and found out it was a scam I felt relief.\u00a0 <\/span>I felt relief because my sense of Anne as a good kind person was not wrong.\u00a0 <\/span>But then when I couldn\u2019t undo what I had done, I got blasted.\u00a0 <\/span>Now I see that what the scammers had accomplished was to make me distrust my judgement of what kind of person Anne was.\u00a0 <\/span>If I had trusted my judgement of what kind of person Anne was, I would have seen through the scam right away.\u00a0 <\/span>I did not see the little red flags that went up at various places.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My failure to trust my judgement, and pay attention to the red flags, is part of a process called “gaslighting<\/a>,” where a person is made to doubt their sanity, their own perceptions. \u00a0As a victim of my mother’s “mis-representation” of me, I am very vulnerable to doubting myself.<\/p>\n

O God I feel so much better.\u00a0Thank You, Inner Teacher.<\/p>\n

It was when I \u201ccouldn\u2019t undo it,\u201d that the freeze \u2014 collapse? \u2014 hit.\u00a0That makes me think of mother, where no apology was acceptable, there was no way to make amends.<\/a><\/p>\n

My body didn\u2019t collapse, but my psyche did.\u00a0That\u2019s why I felt so oddly weak the rest of the day.\u00a0It wasn\u2019t dizzy, it wasn\u2019t hypoglycemia, it wasn\u2019t light-headedness, I was able to walk.\u00a0Yes, I think I wasn\u2019t present in my body, though I didn\u2019t experience being somewhere else, like floating overhead.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think I am actually dissociated more than I realize. \u00a0Because I don’t experientially leave my body, I don’t realize I am out of my body, I just feel weak and incapacitated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This actually starts with me being caught by a scam.\u00a0 It involved an email from a woman I know slightly here at Kendal.\u00a0 It involved a request to buy 3 $100 iTunes for her grandson.\u00a0 I said I really couldn\u2019t … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,11,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","category-present-day","category-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}