{"id":6631,"date":"2020-04-29T14:49:12","date_gmt":"2020-04-29T18:49:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=6631"},"modified":"2020-04-29T14:49:12","modified_gmt":"2020-04-29T18:49:12","slug":"gaslighting-reprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=6631","title":{"rendered":"Gaslighting, Reprise"},"content":{"rendered":"

I posted “Another Complete Cycle<\/a>” on March 18, 2020. \u00a0It’s about a day when Daily Kos posted something about Donald Trump’s minimizing of the COVID crisis, and I suddenly didn’t trust Daily Kos. \u00a0Now that didn’t really make sense, because I never trusted Trump, and I usually believe what Daily Kos says, so why am I suddenly not trusting Daily Kos? Why am I suddenly feeling that I can’t trust anyone? \u00a0Why was it such a total knockdown?<\/p>\n

Recently, as I’ve been reading through my old journals, I came to place where I did some work with Dana. \u00a0He was using a counseling technique called Structural Consulting<\/a>, and what resulted was seeing that I couldn’t trust myself. \u00a0I remember that I said “You mean I really am as lost as I feel?” \u00a0He said yes.<\/p>\n

From my journal for April 1987:<\/p>\n

Dana said that I felt that certain feelings were only appropriate in certain circumstances, and if my feelings didn’t match the circumstances, then I would invalidate my feelings.\u00a0 <\/span>“I shouldn’t feel guilty for the deaths of my cats, I was so sick I couldn’t have done anything different.”\u00a0 <\/span>“I shouldn’t feel fear, there isn’t anything to be afraid of.”\u00a0 <\/span>“I shouldn’t feel angry at the planes, they aren’t doing it to me on purpose, they’re just having fun.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>I realized that I had been persistently and systematically invalidating my feelings for a long, long time.\u00a0 <\/span>I’m so busy telling myself I shouldn’t feel what I feel that I never look further, to see what information I might get out of the fact that I do feel this way.\u00a0 <\/span>The picture Dana got was of a person who did not trust her feelings, and so she does not know who she really is, nor what is really happening.\u00a0 <\/span>Such a person would be disoriented.\u00a0 <\/span>My reaction to being disoriented is to make up an explanation, justification, fantasy, whatever.\u00a0 <\/span>But since this gets me no closer to the truth I remain disoriented.\u00a0 <\/span>Or else I recognize that my fantasy is not the truth and demolish it, but this leaves me more disoriented than ever, because I still don’t know how to find the truth or how to tell the truth when I find it.\u00a0 <\/span>No wonder I went into science, at least the rational process of science gave me a method for checking the truth of my perceptions.\u00a0 <\/span>The problem continued, however, when I discovered, through the rational process (and my own desire and commitment to the truth) that the rational process could give me only a limited truth.\u00a0 <\/span>But how to get in touch with the real truth?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Much later, I saw that the only way to know something was true was if I experienced it myself, or trusted the person who told me about it. \u00a0Everything else is second hand, and might not be “true.”<\/p>\n

But I’m realizing now that my childhood with Mom was an immersion in “gaslighting.” What Erica calls her “mis-representation” is being a very important concept for me. \u00a0An example: when I would get excited about something and start talking about it with enthusiasm, she would call that “thinking I was so great.” This left me terrified to share about something I was excited about, thinking that I was “bragging,” and believing that bragging was bad. \u00a0Mother was wrong. \u00a0What I was thinking was “great” was not myself but something that I loved and wanted to share.<\/p>\n

My first post on Gaslighting<\/a>, September 2018<\/p>\n

Gaslighting, Again<\/a>, August 2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I posted “Another Complete Cycle” on March 18, 2020. \u00a0It’s about a day when Daily Kos posted something about Donald Trump’s minimizing of the COVID crisis, and I suddenly didn’t trust Daily Kos. \u00a0Now that didn’t really make sense, because … 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":[16,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-story","category-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6631","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=6631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}