Subscriber chat: Your experiences with gaslighting
Tell me about your experiences with gaslighting. Discuss anything else on your mind, and let me know what you want most from this newsletter.
Welcome to this month’s subscriber chat! The comments are open to all subscribers to discuss whatever is on your mind. What’s going on in your relationship? What questions do you have for me? What would you like to see more of in this newsletter?
I’m also including a poll about future newsletters at the end of this one. Please vote! You are my community, and I want to know how to best serve my community!
This month, I’m encouraging subscribers to talk about gaslighting in our chat, with an emphasis on how men gaslight women. If there are specific examples of gaslighting you would like for me to talk about, please leave those in the comments!
Gaslighting has become a popular synonym for abuse. And while gaslighting can be a tool of abusers, it refers to a very specific behavior: making a person question their own reality.
In heterosexual relationships, some common tools for gaslighting include:
telling a woman that she’s actually being abusive for demanding changes in her relationship
implying that a woman only seeks changes in household labor because she’s OCD, anxious, or unreasonable
telling a woman that there’s not really inequality; the couple just has different standards
How has gaslighting shown up in your relationships?
Subscriber Poll
This newsletter has grown exponentially over the last three months, and I’m thinking about future directions. Social media continues to be a problem for feminist creators. We get banned suddenly, or censored, or punished by the algorithm. I’ve been thinking about ways to expand my social media presence to Substack, as well as some ways I can offer more in this newsletter.
One thing I’m strongly considering is posting much more frequently. Imagine seeing what you see on Facebook, but in a space where your mother in law doesn’t see what you post. I might work up to posting similar content to what I post on Facebook daily, but in longer form. This would free me up to offer a lot more—answer more subscriber questions, do more frequent advice columns, just generally make Substack a more active place. But I don’t want to clutter anyone’s inboxes.
So is this something you would be interested in?
Most of my content will ALWAYS be free, so please don’t be alarmed by the next question. I’m just trying to get a feel for what offers the most value to my paid subscribers.
My favorite example of gaslighting was my STBXH telling me I abused him by “not communicating enough” when I would and he would call the communication stupid or pretend to not understand what was said. According to him that’s the equal offense to him trying to kill me at 24 weeks pregnancy.
- I’m so controlling and won’t let him do anything (“anything” being hurting our kids, calling them names, and generally enforcing “authority”).
- He didn’t mean anything by the hurtful things he said, I’m just too sensitive. Same goes for me calling out his mother’s narcissistic controlling emotional abuse - that didn’t happen, I’m just too sensitive, it’s just her way and I’m over reacting.
- I go from 0-100 (I don’t, it’s just that he doesn’t listen to any of my boundaries or requests repeatedly and eventually I say it loud enough)
- It’s not gaslighting, I just read too much on Instagram. (Despite the many psychology books I have in the house, and have actually read)
- also definitely the “we just have different standards” re. inequality. This also comes through as weaponised false incompetence but turned back on me that he always “does it wrong” or I don’t let him have a say. Typically in household matters this would stem from a situation similar to this: (for example) rather than putting the laundry I folded away in the respective rooms, he got annoyed that it was stacked up somewhere he doesn’t like seeing it because it looks messy. So then he moved a pot from a different part of the house, to the shelf I fold laundry onto, making it impossible to put the laundry there. And when I questioned him about it, he reacted in a big way that he’s never allowed to put things in the house where he wants them to be, that I dictate everything.