Gaslighting Myself

Gaslighting Myself

I began writing this piece a couple of years ago now, when I was feeling frustrated that I was starting EMDR and still in counselling for issues I had been working on in therapy for almost two decades. Being a chronic overthinker, counselling can be a double edged sword for me. In my attempt to identify patterns of behaviour there seems to be no end to the tricks I play in my mind in order to reinforce a negative view of myself. Just when I think I have a handle on something logically, a lifetime of emotional suppression hits like a tidal wave and I am unable to feel my way through the muck I have uncovered. In schema therapy, which is a subset of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) you attack the ingrained negative beliefs that you either succumb to, reinforce, or counterattack. The first bit was written about a year after I was intensely suicidal. 

July 27, 2022

On Defectiveness

I contain multitudes. How can I be simultaneously counterattacking and succumbing to defectiveness?! It’s enough to make a person batshit crazy.

Counterattacking means invulnerability. It means sex with strangers, it means the second someone shows you emotion you run because you don’t need that shit. It means you act like nothing can touch you ever because secretly everything touches you so deeply that it’s physically unbearable and you can’t walk around feeling like your insides have been eviscerated and still manage to get anything accomplished. And boy oh boy, do you ever need to accomplish shit. Because it makes you feel somewhat worthwhile as a human to achieve, accomplish, help, DO STUFF at any expense because sitting still and listening to that inner critic gone wild (nice tits haha) is enough to make you plan an escape that would devastate your loved ones.  

Compliments hurt. They feel like mockery. No amount of therapy has managed to shift this. A deep sense of defectiveness feels insurmountable, but I can’t help but wonder if I would be more defective without it?!

March 3, 2024

Nearly two years later, I feel compelled to share this because I keep feeling like I have “failed” therapy. Despite countless hours of work on these ingrained beliefs about myself, they still surface with a vengeance at the strangest times. If someone compliments me, it still feels like a threat and mockery because deep down inside I know that ridiculous things have happened to me because I am wrong as a person. I think that I am far too attached to this feeling of defectiveness. It has driven me when nothing else could. Attempting to prove my worth to my own self has been useful, or has it?!

These sorts of mental gymnastics have both sustained and exhausted me. I used to carry this defectiveness as a secret source of shame, but lately I find myself thinking that I can not possibly be the only one who can’t seem to overcome it. I have learned that even the most mind boggling crap is relatable to others, rendering it less powerful than I gave it credit for. Many therapists have told me that the path out of all of this is self-compassion, which feels like the antithesis of the defectiveness that has often sustained me. Interrobang.

One of the basics of self-compassion as defined by Neff is common humanity.  Everyone suffers, and we are never as alone as we think we are. Feelings of defectiveness must be universal, but when you carry the secret shame of being wrong as a human being, you feel as though others are getting by with much more ease. Keeping things like this secret, rather than divulging our true feelings, gives them power over us. I research impostor syndrome as often as I can, because it seems pretty common and connected, but I always think that for others it is a false perception and for me it is the truth. Then I see how hubristic this is, to think that I could possibly be the only one who is the TRUE impostor, and it both shames me and gives me pause. 

Recently, I considered quitting therapy. My psychologist is excellent and I am no longer suicidal, so I wonder if this sense of defectiveness is just something I will have to carry with me always. Someone I love recently suggested that it may never go away, and my inner reaction to that was “NO! It has to go!” rather than the usual comfort I get from feeling low. When I was at my lowest point and planning my exit from the world, a moment of imagining what life might be like if my thoughts weren’t so consumed with suicide gave me a moment of relief that I wanted to chase. Imagine, life without a heavy burden dragging you down?! I have decided that rather than “acting as if” I am not defective, the next step for me is to imagine what my life could be like if I didn’t have a panic attack every time someone is nice to me or pays me a compliment. What could life be like if I weren’t pretending?

One of the things I have learned in CBT is that our schemas fight very hard for survival. Negative views of ourselves can become so ingrained that they feel like home. I look back at how hard I have tried to overcome adversity and I feel deep empathy for my past self, which used to be impossible. The self-critic would pipe up and tell me that only a psycho loser would still be struggling despite years of therapy, but lately I am able to see that I truly have been doing the best I could at the time with the resources (both emotional and material) available to me. 

Someone I loved once told me that I had destroyed them by being a terrible person. I believed it. Developing compassion for myself, and past versions of myself, seems to be the only light out of the murky emotional darkness that has kept me trapped in self-blame and shame. I want to enjoy connection and love; I want to believe people when they tell me how kick-ass I am at my job. I have seen a meme several times that has made me laugh really hard. It talks about how CBT is really just “gaslighting yourself” or tricking yourself out of believing the horrible things about yourself that you cling to. This seemingly silly meme has actually reminded me that if I could be gaslighted into believing awful things about myself (by myself and others), then I can probably intentionally gaslight myself into believing that I am a good and worthy person who doesn’t deserve to be treated horribly by anyone, least of all myself.