You are in an abusive relationship when you are in doubt about what your red line is, what your tolerance limit is., about how much you can give up yourself in the name of another's desires and moods without running the risk of losing your own identity.
You are in an abusive relationship when the other becomes the reference for your life and for your conduct in everything you can imagine, including the way you dress, how you speak, in your personal affairs and so on...
You are in an abusive relationship when you look at your abuser and always fail yourself for something you imagine he wouldn't accept. When you feel that you are being watched millimetrically at all times.
You're in an abusive relationship when your abuser no longer needs to be physically in front of you, ascribing emotional moods in the midst of his mood swings and orders. You are in an abusive relationship when he already has his residence inside you, functioning like a soldier and with the ability to rob you of the power to think independently in your privacy. Anyway, you are in an abusive relationship when you lose physical strength, energy and discernment to take pleasure in life, in your personal achievements and start to function like a real depressed and scared automaton.
You are in an abusive relationship when you lose reference to what would be abuse and start to trivialize situations that you should not let happen to yourself or anyone else. You are in an abusive relationship when you are emotionally and visibly devastated, when you perceive yourself as a hostage to this other, you know you are not well and yet you doubt what is happening, you doubt if your abuser is in fact an abuser.
You are in an abusive relationship when you start to excuse all the abuse you receive because in the midst of it you receive crumbs that you imagine are affection when you are in Stockholm syndrome.
One of the best known weapons nowadays as a macabre tool that such abusers make use of is what is nowadays called gaslighting. The term is used to highlight a cunning form of psychological abuse where information is distorted or selectively withheld in order to favor the abuser with the intention of making the victim doubt their own memory, perception and sanity.
The 1938 play “Gaslight” and its film adaptations, released in 1940 and 1944, motivated the origin of the term because of the systematic psychological manipulation used by the main character against a victim. The plot concerns a husband who tries to convince his wife and others that she is crazy by manipulating small elements of her environment and later insisting that she is wrong or that he remembers things incorrectly when she points out such changes. The original title stems from the dimming of the gas-powered lights in the couple's home, which happened when the husband was using the lights in the attic while searching for a hidden treasure. The wife accurately notices the dimming of the lights and discusses the phenomenon, but the husband insists she is just imagining a change in the lighting level. The term “Gaslighting” has been used since the 1960s to describe the manipulation of someone's sense of reality (Wikipedia, free web encyclopedia). Nowadays, more and more psychologists are understanding the scope of this kind of perverse manipulation. and, even more, they are able to perceive that much of what patients go through today does not come only from their internal worlds, as was previously observed. External, sequential and adverse situations of this order exist and can be devastating in people's lives. Even what made them attract these types of abusers is still an extremely delicate matter to deal with and deal with. Such abusers are extremely cunning, fall on the spectrum of perverse narcissists/psychopaths, and yes, they can target people who are totally unaware and have no internal tendency to go through such predatory involvement.
In this type of relationship where gaslighting prevails, information about reality is hidden and in exchange, only what is false is what is offered to victims. Emotional damage occurs when people gradually become anxious, confused and less able to trust their own memories and perceptions. Manipulation induces the victim to disbelieve that he has innate abilities to deal with life. They induce them to no longer trust their senses, ultimately leaving them emotionally fragile and powerless. One of the worst stages occurs when they come to believe that their strengths never existed.
This is a form of violence that apparently could be characterized more in the action of men by the abuse of power and authority that many exercise, but do not be carried away by these arguments because women can be equally, and even to the same extent, perverse.
Gaslighting can impact victims' emotions in a very disturbing way., and there may be sequelae that need to be treated psychologically and not infrequently with psychiatrists. Sometimes the damage even causes physical illness. Many of the victims develop anxiety attacks, panic attacks, slow thinking, and various other symptoms. In the recovery phase, the tip is the famous zero contact, that is, cut off any and all sources of access to the abuser on social networks, stop answering phones and under no circumstances see him face to face. Because this type of relationship is toxic, distance is one of the biggest ways to recover.
It is not easy to get out of an abusive relationship without seeking outside information and help, as the self-perceptive doubt installed by the exercise of Gaslighting and other manipulations leaves the victim stunned, as if he were living inside a prison. After effectively conquering the end of this type of relationship, the majority who free themselves say that despite the need for psychological help for this new beginning, that the feeling of relief generated ends up accelerating the feeling of well-being for knowing that they are winning back. . Many people manage not to stay in these relationships for too long and soon they realize that they are getting into some kind of trap, they hear their emotional noises and the evidence that tries to come in a camouflaged way in the phase that these predators are making use of their seduction tactics and conquest. Even these still go through moments of doubt, but soon they enter an escape route and confess the immediate relief they felt at the end of such relationships, even when they could still be in doubt, they say that it was the best they did and that very quickly they could see the terrible dimension to which they might have gone if they had not stopped the situation from the start.
Many of the victims have great difficulty considering themselves abused, even though they know all the harm they have suffered, they lose the notion of the harm they went through, although they recognize that they were much better before such relationships. When they undergo psychotherapeutic treatment, only years later do they have the real dimension of what happened to them.
Gaslighting is possible in any type of relationship, whether between straight couples or not, between parents and children, friends and in work situations.
It is very difficult for an outsider to notice that another is going through an abusive relationship. There is a sophistication of behaviors that are not usually externalized, but even so it is not totally impossible to perceive this state in some people. This is an extremely sensitive subject because many of the victims are not even aware of what they are going through. They end up invalidating the mistreatment even if they are visibly torn apart. Some realize that something is not going well, but cannot clearly identify it. In these cases, the help, union and cunning of friends and psychological help to wake up the victims is worth a life.
