Get Your Dose of Gaslighting Here...

It is 2/11/14, and I've allowed these circumstances to rule my emotions. NO MORE...

I get sucked into it more common than I thought...

Perpetrators of emotional/psychological abuse often consciously employ a strategy called, “gaslighting”  in which they present an alternate reality to their victims, police, therapists and judges. 

Gaslighting involves denying what occurred, offering plausible but untrue accounts of what occurred, or suggesting the victim is imagining things, exaggerating or lying. 

 Gaslighting strategies leave victims doubting their own perceptions, memory or sanity and serve to confuse police, judges and therapists into inaction or worse, supporting the abuser, while leaving the victims feeling helpless and alone against the abuse.

      ...I recognize it now and know it is definitely not me!!

 Monopolization of perceptions is often part of the abuser’s brainwashing-like tactics whereas the victim believes what he/she says is true and that they’re perceptions, opinions or ideas are mistaken or unworthy. 

Constant criticism, demeaning behaviors, threats, withholding affection or threatening abandonment for non-compliance with abuser’s demands and personal humiliation are further consistent, on-going tactics of the emotional/psychological abuser....

The continuous and unrelenting pattern of emotional abuse is often interspersed with warmth and kindness to create an “in and out” of bonding , “crazy making” experience.
 
Do they think this is LOVE????

 Fear, isolation, withdrawal, feelings of abandonment and helplessness, overly compliant/submissive behavior, self-blaming, and humiliation are common responses. T?

NOT ANYMORE...

What I thought to be LOVE?

Abusers use a variety of tactics to manipulate you and exert their power:

Dominance – Abusive individuals need to feel in charge of the relationship. They will make decisions for you and the family, tell you what to do, and expect you to obey without question. Your abuser may treat you like a servant, child, or even as his or her possession.

Humiliation – An abuser will do everything he or she can to make you feel bad about yourself or defective in some way. After all, if you believe you're worthless and that no one else will want you, you're less likely to leave. Insults, name-calling, shaming, and public put-downs are all weapons of abuse designed to erode your self-esteem and make you feel powerless.

Isolation – In order to increase your dependence on him or her, an abusive partner will cut you off from the outside world. He or she may keep you from seeing family or friends, or even prevent you from going to work or school. You may have to ask permission to do anything, go anywhere, or see anyone.

Threats – Abusers commonly use threats to keep their partners from leaving or to scare them into dropping charges. Your abuser may threaten to hurt or kill you, your children, other family members, or even pets. He or she may also threaten to commit suicide, file false charges against you, or report you to child services.

Intimidation – Your abuser may use a variety of intimidation tactics designed to scare you into submission. Such tactics include making threatening looks or gestures, smashing things in front of you, destroying property, hurting your pets, or putting weapons on display. The clear message is that if you don't obey, there will be violent consequences.

Denial and blame – Abusers are very good at making excuses for the inexcusable. They will blame their abusive and violent behavior on a bad childhood, a bad day, and even on the victims of their abuse. Your abusive partner may minimize the abuse or deny that it occurred. He or she will commonly shift the responsibility on to you: Somehow, his or her violent and abusive behavior is your fault.

Abusers are able to control their behavior—they do it all the time

Abusers pick and choose whom to abuse. They don’t insult, threaten, or assault everyone in their life who gives them grief. Usually, they save their abuse for the people closest to them, the ones they claim to love.

Abusers carefully choose when and where to abuse. They control themselves until no one else is around to see their abusive behavior. They may act like everything is fine in public, but lash out instantly as soon as you’re alone.Abusers are able to stop their abusive behavior when it benefits them.

Most abusers are not out of control. In fact, they’re able to immediately stop their abusive behavior when it’s to their advantage to do so (for example, when the police show up or their boss calls).

Violent abusers usually direct their blows where they won’t show. Rather than acting out in a mindless rage, many physically violent abusers carefully aim their kicks and punches where the bruises and marks won’t show. (In your mind!!!!)

Are You Abusive to Yourself?

Often we allow people into our lives who treat us as we expect to be treated. If we feel contempt for ourselves or think very little of ourselves, we may pick partners or significant others who reflect this image back to us.

If we are willing to tolerate negative treatment from others, or treat others in negative ways, it is possible that we also treat ourselves similarly.

If you are an abuser or a recipient, you may want to consider how you treat yourself. What sorts of things do you say to yourself? Do thoughts such as “I’m stupid” or “I never do anything right” dominate your thinking? Learning to love and care for ourselves increases self-esteem and makes it more likely that we will have healthy, intimate relationships.

      Basic Rights in a Relationship

If you have been involved in emotionally abusive relationships, you may not have a clear idea of what a healthy relationship is like.

The right to good will from the other.

The right to emotional support.

The right to be heard by the other and to be responded to with courtesy.

The right to have your own view, even if your partner has a different view.

.The right to have your feelings and experience acknowledged as real.

The right to receive a sincere apology for any jokes you may find offensive.

The right to clear and informative answers to questions that concern what is legitimately your business.

The right to live free from accusation and blame.

The right to live free from criticism and judgment.

The right to have your work and your interests spoken of with respect.

The right to encouragement.

The right to live free from emotional and physical threat.

The right to live free from angry outbursts and rage.

The right to be called by no name that devalues you.

The right to be respectfully asked rather than ordered.

Understanding Values and Belief Systems

If anything, I've attempted, in many ways, to explain this to people in understanding why hypnotherapy IS THE ONLY THING that can change beliefs that no longer serve us.

This article explains it best...may we all rid ourselves from the "hurt people HURT people" syndrome....
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What are core values and belief systems and how are they created???

 You might respond with something like my job, my husband/wife/mate, my car and so on. Let’s for a moment think of values as something that is not a material thing but more so an intrinsic thing. An intrinsic vale is something that has worth to us, but we can’t necessarily quantify that in terms of material items or even numbers.

Now when we talk about values, words might come to mind like freedom, trust, respect, love, compassion and so on. You can easily see the difference, but noting that these things do really mean something to us. As all things go, each person will not only have different values, they will have a different ordering or priority of what’s important. Taking one more step beyond that and probably the most important difference - is what that value actually means or translates to in real life.

For instance one woman’s version of love might include getting flowers on a regular basis, while another doesn’t like flowers receiving flowers and things it’s a bribe or sorts. For the first woman getting flowers from her husband shows to her, in her value system, that he loves her. If the second woman was to receive flowers, it could be suspect or even painful.

This is a simple example, but I think you get the picture. In any given value, for any given person there will be different reason on how that values translates to their real world situation. These reasons or guidelines for a given value are often referred to as “the rules” behind the value. The rules for the first woman may have developed when she was young as she witness her father bring flowers home to her mother and noticing further how happy that made her mother. She then adopted that rule as her own.

The second woman may have witnessed her father bring home flowers to her mother after he did something not in her mother’s best interest and was his attempt to sooth ruffled feathers. The second woman’s rule might say to her, that getting flowers means that the giver was hiding something or did something she wouldn’t like.

Again simple examples, but you can see how they differ. Magnify that by all the possibilities, situations and people, you can begin to see that there are many different meanings around a given value. You can also begin to see, why people are so different. People also tend to find other people with similar or complimentary values and you can easily see how that would work as well.

Now for the interesting part. The flowers in the above example are events or reference that these two woman remember. We can say that these events the shaped the rules that further created and shaped the value(s). In this case the flower events were something they remembered but in many cases these events become something that is not actually remembered. It can often be a simple thing like a statement a child makes when angry about something. For instance a child may say I never going to talk to you again. This event begins shaping how that child turned adolescent turned adult deals with things. Repeated iterations of said pattern re-enforces it as a child and this child turned woman becomes someone who often doesn’t communicate when something doesn’t go her way. She has built a pattern into herself that at some points she doesn’t remember and has to go to counseling to ;learn how to communicate when things don’t go her way.

Again a simple example, but you begin to see how behaviors and more so forgotton behaviors shape the way we think as we get older. I will also clarify that some of those behaviors adopted as a child were necessary as a defense mechanism against something that might be more painful. The problem however shows up when we continue to use those long after that behavior pattern stopped working for us.

How do you go about identifying and changing these unwanted patterns that no longer serve you? …more (coming soon)