Spotlight on Gaslighting

You feel confused and crazy. You’re always apologizing, wondering if you are good enough, can’t understand why you feel so bad all the time, or know something is wrong but can’t put your finger on it. You thought one thing, they say another; you can’t figure out which is right.
~"How to Survive Gaslighting: When Manipulation Erases Your Reality" by Ariel Leve, The Guardian

I was the most selfish, self-centered child in the world. I never thought of anyone but myself. Those were the words my mother flung at me, often enough that I could recite them by heart. And often enough that they made their way into my heart and began to feel like truth. 
Once, at the age of 12 and coveting a pair of shiny black shoes like the popular girls wore, I went shopping with my best friend and her mother. My father had given me money to buy shoes. The ones I wanted were a bit more money. I called him and he gave me permission to get the ones I wanted. I returned home to a drunk mother who took one look at the shoes and began her mantra. "You are the most selfish, self-centered child in the world. You never think of anyone but yourself." I fought back, insisting that dad had said it was okay. She took the shoebox and hit me over the head with it. Those shoes that I had loved, that had felt like a key into a world of popular kids, became something else. Evidence of my shortcomings. An attempt to fit into a world that didn't want me. 
It didn't end there, of course. I would refer to an argument that had happened when my parents were drunk. "What are you talking about?" my mother would ask. "There was no argument." 
I would make mention of events that had taken place only to be told that I "had such an imagination." That I "loved to tell stories."
To complicate things, I did love to tell stories. I was a devoted reader and dreamed of being an author. Was I making things up? Did it happen like I remembered? Or was I a liar, so pathological that I couldn't discern between fact and fiction? 
I still struggle. Despite working as a journalist for three decades – including a stint as a fact-checker at a magazine where my job was to, literally, discern fact from fiction – I can easily mistrust myself. Not because I've often been wrong. But because my mother's gaslighting was so effective.
So effective that when I could see – it was obvious! – that my husband was hiding things, I still trusted his version of events over my own. 
It's crazy-making. And nobody felt crazier than I.
Or, perhaps, you.
"The term “gaslighting” refers to when someone manipulates you into questioning and second-guessing your reality," writes Ariel Leve in her story for The Guardian. Leve grew up with a narcissistic mother, classic training ground for gaslighting. 
It's a world where up is down, where black is white. You make a complaint, you're accused of being ungrateful. You ask for something, you're selfish. 
Lots of us subjected to gaslighting learn to become small, almost invisible. Easier to erase ourselves than draw attention.
Others fully absorb the message of our gaslighters. We are selfish. We are ungrateful. We aren't worthy of love. 
And still others, like me, cling like hell to our version of events. I suspect part of what saved me was that I kept a journal. And within those pages, lay the truth. Well, my truth based on objective facts. There had been a fight. These words had been spoken. These things had been thrown. Whatever my mother (or my father who mightn't have been a ringleader but was certainly complicit) said, I had documented what really happened. And I could reassure myself that I wasn't crazy. 
I survived though it took plenty of therapy to deprogram some of those internalized messages. And I still struggle. It has only been recently that I feel comfortable giving myself certain luxuries. I don't expect myself to "earn" nice things like I used to. It's okay to want things because I want them. It's okay to give myself what I need even before making sure that everyone else is taken care of. It's called self-care. And it don't come easy...
These days though, when my husband insists to our children that he wasn't late leaving to take them to school when to any one of us who can tell the time, he was, I tend to over-react. I've talked to my kids about refusing to accept another's version of events over their own but to rather look at objective facts. My husband's tendency to defend himself no matter what (thanks to his highly critical mother) met my tendency to question myself no matter what (thanks to my gaslighting mother) and created a marriage primed for conflict. But we've both worked hard to change those old scripts. I point out (sometimes rather loudly) when he's gaslighting. He points out (sometimes exasperatedly) when I'm over-reacting.
We're living in an upside-down world right now. Objective facts are called fake news or alternative facts. Truth is twisted more than ever, it seems.
But we can learn to trust ourselves and what's right in front of us. We can challenge those other versions of events, whether they're happening in our homes or on the front pages of newspapers.