How do I know if I am being gaslit? Asking yourself that question then doing the self-help work necessary to educate yourself about the red flags and warning signs is essential to breaking the psychological and emotional hold most Love Fraud Predators strive to groom into their victims.
People who gaslight — meaning those who are willing to do or say anything to get what they want in any given minute by faking, pretending, or bending what they admit they know or think about any given situation in life or fact-based reality — are what’s known as Machiavellian social predators.
Liars can be of any age. Little kids struggling to understand how to socially survive in the world get a hall pass for a brief period of time in their earliest years for doing things like telling lies, for gaslighting, or for withholding pertinent information they should have disclosed without needing to be personally prompted.
Lying and gaslighting done by adults — noting that small children lying for the first time, fearful of facing punishment if and when they do something that they are fully aware was or is wrong — is the core of all social strife and dysfunction physically related to social compact dysfunction.
“If I ask you if you locked the door to the house when we left home and you tell me you did… when I could have actually checked on it if you did not know for sure and corrected the situation myself personally if you hadn’t… or worse — when you know for sure you did not… that is gaslighting, placing the home, our relationship, and my trust in your word at risk.” — says Anonymous Jones, Editor in Chief of flyingmonkeysdenied.com.
“By telling small lies in order to avoid doing or feeling something the person gaslighting their closest contacts for sport does not want to do… or to gain them favor for having said they completed a task they did not… the hospitality abuser shows other people and the moral universe in general not only who they are but what they are as well.” — adds the self-help writer.
Jones says when someone lies to see if they can play an effective mind game with another, their behavior is short-sighted, anti-social, and actually is a form of the person self-harming.
“When someone lies — they do something incredibly specific and damaging to the anatomical structure of their own mind, rewiring the plumbing in their own neurobiology in such a way that the brain learns to seek pleasure from conning or in bullying others to bend to their will rather than in things like feeling a sense of community or communion with another person. It makes the liar dependent on harming others to actively relieve their own neurochemical state of existential and profound physical boredom that comes from having complex emotional processing shut down in favor of fanning the flames of survival instincts.” — reveals the writer when speaking to ministerial clients in recovery settings.
“Think about it. What reward does a person get for lying to someone who shows them hospitality and who has extended them trust…”, Jones adds. “The reward they get is not that they don’t have to go check the lock on the front door of the house before they and their mate pull out of the driveway by car.”
The reward the person lying to see if they can get away with it is just that… seeing if they can pull one over psychologically and socially on targeted prey. It’s the grossest abuse of hospitality, lying to others for no reason about things that are little like our “Did you lock the front door?” scenario.
If you fail to shut the front door and to properly lock it… then you drive away for the day… and the door blows open and lets pets escape and vanish or end up accidentally harmed… or worse — the house gets robbed — understand the part the person plays in being willfully negligent about caretaking their social and personal responsibility and duties at the home.
Coming home to find the door still closed, the house in pristine condition, no signs of robbery or vandalism, and the pets inside all warm and fuzzy and safe does not mean what the person who lied to you originally about whether or not they physically locked the door is likely to say.
If you confront them about having lied about locking the door, the likely gaslighting and responsibility avoiding spin they are likely to dish is to claim that because nothing was harmed that the fact they lied did not matter… and that the person they misled intentionally who is upset for completely socially and emotionally appropriate reasons is somehow “Crazy”, “Emotionally Unstable”, or “Overreacting” if and when we express personal and wholly justifiable social, intellectual, and emotional upset.
“If a person cannot be trusted to keep their word about small things and to tell the truth under low to no stress load settings, understand that when their word and support of people like friends, co-workers, and family members is necessary that their response is likely to be unpredictable… based on the person who has been nurtured intellectually and socially to believe it’s their right to act as if their fickle emotional whims matter.” — says Jones, adding the following.
“When someone learns when they are little that lying to get what they want or throwing something akin to an emotional temper tantrum to get what they want works, chances are they will continue to exhibit the anti-social and self-neuroplasticity freezing behavior throughout their natural-born lifetime. You have to expect a child who fails to develop their EQ in favor of playing shifty mind games with people in a battle of toxic EQ minds targeting those who show them the most hospitality for abuse and social mistreatment to become an adult who truly never gets it.”
Jones asserts that by failing to develop emotional intelligence socially and physically in childhood that kids develop what’s known as Cluster B personality affectations.
“Expect little kids who are never taught things like how to take no for an answer, how to self-soothe, how to share attention in life with other people respectfully and healthfully, things like manners and appropriate psychological health care, or that their elder sibling’s things are not theirs to touch to become adults who create the most and worst forms of social and emotional conflicts with and for other more moral people.” — says Jones, discussing the impact of underparenting of children because their toxic parent wants to emotionally and socially drop the proverbial caretaking or parenting ball.
Jones adds, “By failing to teach young to have social care for things like the truth and the feelings of others, toxic parents groom children to be socially out of step with the planet — not simply with others. And that puts the child for a lifetime in direct social and physical harm’s way, noting that emulating Cluster B in youth and during young adulthood tends to cause neuroplasticity to freeze and toxic personality types to calcify in the mind of the underparented child by or before the age of 28 in most cases that have been witnesses using new brain scan technology to date.”
The first sign you are being intentionally gaslit typically includes an awareness that someone has told a blatant lie to or about you. Obvious gaslighting includes someone claiming something you and they both know is not true either to your face or to others to obscure the truth.
People who do terrible things to situationally abuse others and or to neglect them socially tend to deny, deny, deny they have done — or not done — anything wrong whatsoever after the person or peer group that person wants to hurt has been harmed.
They know they did it. They want victims to know they did it. They want everyone else to know literally nothing of the truth… absolving the predator, and. if the predator is incredibly Machiavellian and willing to completely mislead their own social network the victim will be made out to be morally insane, delusional, having some kind of hallucination, or some kind of liar for telling the truth about abuse incidents having occurred with them as the witness or the direct victim.
Gaslighting people will oftentimes ask you a bunch of really probing and personal questions early on in a relationship. They do this so anytime later in the social interaction with them they can blackmail, extort, or shame cycle prompt you to avoid confronting them or holding them responsible for toxic behavior choices by threatening to expose your private life to others in a way meant to do you harm or by throwing irrelevant and physically upsetting PTSD flashback triggering memories at wholly inappropriate times back in your face.
Using what you love against you…
Your family.
Your life. Your career preference. Your children. Your pets.
Your personal belongings.
Objects of sentiment.
Objects of worth — threatening to harm, destroy, or to vanish them. That’s the typical next step escalation for a gaslighter once caught. You catch them lying, they threaten you and your stuff.
As you spend more and more time with the Gaslighter, your sense of confidence in your own intellect and ability to determine what is and what is not true in the world around you will diminish. You will notice they are lying. They will deny it. If you stay and enable your own abuse and mistreatment, they will ultimately convince you to question your sanity unnecessarily.
Expect a street-savvy gaslighter to con everyone — not just you. Their words will seldom match their actions unless they are telling you about how much they hate, loathe, or want to socially or physically to harm you.
Expect a gaslighter to use Love Bombing tactics to win friends and to socially influence people. Once they have harmed those same people the first time or they get caught lying, if they see the person they misled or the group they conned as socially useful, expect the false apologies and the hoovering slew of excuses for dishonest behavior to come.
Expect the gaslighter to lie constantly about how they think and they feel. Know if they tell you they are angry, they are probably using the threat of their rage to manipulate other people while using compliments that are accurate or that they do not mean to emotionally manipulate and to destabilize other people concerning their logical processing capacity to detect they are being socially mistreated and misled.
“You are the only person who makes me act this way!” — the Social Predator is likely to gaslight you further and to claim once you catch them lying or spinning inaccurate tales. “You make me lie. If you were not so XYZ and ABC I would not have to do it…” they will try their dead-level best to get you to believe if and when they are caught — blaming the person victimized by them for being targeted to be socially lied to or about and misled.
Living with a gaslighter causes massive social anxiety and confusion energetically for everyone who they mislead. Your gut knows they are full of all things artificial and nefarious but they stand in your face and tell you that you are the person with psychological and emotional problems for noticing.
Expect the gaslighters to project onto other humans all of the qualities they themselves possess that the targets of their Machiavellian word choices do not.
“You’re just angry!”
“You’re just jealous!”
“You just don’t want me to be happy!”
“You just want to be in control of everything!”
Blah blah blah.
They want you to buy into the gaslighting assertion that abuse is not the problem. That their behavior choices are not the problem. That their betrayal of your hospitality and faith in their word is not the problem.
The Gaslighter — when caught — wants desperately to change the subject, to sweep reality under the rug, and to make you think your reaction to the abuse is the problem… and moreover, they want you to truly believe to the core that victims of gaslighters are to blame for forcing the Gaslighters to lie to and to mislead them for that person’s impression of gain.
A gaslighter won’t hesitate to tell you all about how they — not you — are a winner. They won’t hesitate to explain to you that they are the greatest thing that has ever happened to the planet, being born, and that you… and everyone unlike themselves… are totally blessed beyond measure to have the privilege in life of being mistreated and every day, day after day, lied to by them.
If you are feeling like you are not sure if the sun sets when it rains because a person who is close to you socially and emotionally tells you it doesn’t, know this.
First of all — you are not alone. You are likely to have something called Stockholm Syndrome that groomed you to behave like a codependent thinker since childhood. Reading up on it for 40 or so hours over the next several weeks or months should help wake the mind and help you realize when you are physically being led by the proverbial nose to believe things like lies or partial truths that place you at a social and emotional disadvantage in life while thinking and behaving in ways that allow people like Bullies and Gaslighters to have access to social and psychological power over others.
Second, get with the program. Self-help literature and Narcissistic Abuse videos piped daily into the brain for a period of no less than 36 months can help anyone improve their own NLP and learn how to break trauma bonds.
By realizing trauma bonding is never love and educating about what trauma bonding tactics used by Gaslighters to groom Codependent Enablers are, prospective targets and people being lied to daily already can take a moment to intellectually pause before deciding to believe Gaslighter’s assertions in life without even questioning.
Waking up and realizing the people who are in our circle of trust may or may not be honest is terrifying. It’s painful to live through before we realize who the social predators who have wormed their way into our lives and hearts are, but it does not have to be difficult for the future indefinite.
Identifying people who gaslight and going low to no contact with that person or group of socially racketeering peers is crucial for anyone interested in Narcissistic Abuse recovery. Getting such people out of our lives and our physical space as rapidly as we excise people who use credible threats or acts of violence to control or to intimidate us out of actively or passively engaging in pro-social behavior is the most expedient way to improve life and health.
But know this.
Telling the truth is always an inside job. If you mislead your body lying to it with your brain and encouraging it to believe something that is false is true, understand your body is likely to balk and rebel.
Stress illnesses form in bodies of victims who — for instance — know they are great people but their family members gaslight them into believing they are anything less than wonderful or perfect as is.
When making decisions about how to exit a Gaslighter from your life, remember… if one got to you and programmed bad NLP in your brain and emotional body along the way that you need to get the echo of them out of your life and mind as well.
People who gaslight lie and bend the truth. If you trust them more than yourself to interpret your own subjective impression of things like reality, understand they have you profoundly gaslit and are actively abusing your hospitality.
