Gaslighting and the Loss of Self-Trust: What It Really Does to You—and How to Heal
The word gaslighting gets thrown around a lot these days — sometimes too easily. It’s become a catch-all for lying, forgetting, or avoiding hard conversations. But gaslighting, in its true form, is something much darker. It’s not just dishonesty — it’s a form of psychological abuse that dismantles a person’s trust in their own perception.
The term comes from the 1938 play Gas Light and its 1944 film adaptation Gaslight, where a husband manipulates his wife into thinking she’s losing her mind. He secretly dims the lights, hides her belongings, and insists she’s imagining things. Over time, she starts to question her sanity. That story became the metaphor we still use today — a way of describing what happens when someone systematically convinces you that your reality is wrong.
Two Intentions, Two Very Different Kinds of Harm
Not every lie or contradiction is gaslighting. Sometimes people lie or deflect to avoid conflict. Their goal isn’t control — it’s safety. For some, that pattern started young. If you grew up in a volatile household, confrontation might have meant danger. So you learned to avoid it at all costs, even if that meant hiding, deflecting, or bending the truth.
That kind of lying still causes pain — it confuses your partner and erodes trust — but it’s repairable with awareness and emotional safety.
Gaslighting, though, is different. It’s not about safety. It’s about power and control. The goal is to make you question your own mind until you stop trusting it altogether.
Here’s how I often explain the difference:
The avoidant person steals a cookie and lies because they don’t want you to be mad.
The gaslighter steals the cookie, lies about it, and then makes you feel ridiculous for asking if they took it — until you start wondering if the cookie ever existed at all.
Both cause harm, but for different reasons. The first can be healed through repair and nervous-system work. The second thrives on keeping you unmoored from yourself.
The Real Damage
The most painful part of gaslighting isn’t confusion — it’s self-abandonment. Over time, you stop trusting your own inner signals. Instead of asking, How am I feeling? Am I okay? — your nervous system starts scanning them. Are they mad? Am I in trouble? What do I need to say to make this stop?
Gaslighting rewires your sense of safety until you lose connection with your internal compass. I often describe it as a kind of psychological parasite — it tricks you into diverting emotional nutrients away from yourself to feed the person hurting you.
When that happens, your body keeps sounding alarms that your mind has learned to ignore. The result is chronic dysregulation, hypervigilance, and a deep collapse of self-trust.
For children who grow up with gaslighting parents, the wound goes even deeper. It’s a betrayal of the first bond that’s supposed to teach them safety. They learn early that it’s not safe to believe their own experience — and that survival means abandoning themselves for connection.
Rebuilding Self-Trust
The way back starts small. For most people who’ve lived through gaslighting, the body becomes the first safe place to return to — long before the mind can trust again. When your reality has been chronically denied, logic can’t save you — but presence can.
You can’t argue with what’s true in your body: the tightness in your chest, the lump in your throat, the tears that come before the words. That’s where you begin to find your way back.
Early healing often looks like this:
Noticing sensations without explaining them. “My chest feels tight.”
Naming emotions without defending them. “I feel angry.”
Practicing self-validation. “Of course I feel anxious — this used to mean danger.”
People who’ve been chronically invalidated often carry a deep sense that their feelings are wrong or dangerous. Somewhere along the way, the people who were supposed to see and soothe them instead denied or dismissed what they felt. That’s the first wound.
I often hear clients say, “I know I shouldn’t feel this way.” And what they really mean is, I was taught my feelings weren’t welcome.
Emotions are part of being human — like weather moving through the sky. They don’t need to be judged or fixed. But when you grow up hearing “don’t cry,” “you’re overreacting,” or “that didn’t happen,” you learn that certain emotions threaten connection. You start trying to control them — to “should” them away.
It’s like the sky getting upset that it’s raining — believing it shouldn’t be cloudy when clouds are part of its nature. Healing means remembering that your internal weather isn’t wrong. It just is.
It’s not about making feelings rational — it’s about rebuilding the muscle of self-permission. Sometimes I’ll invite someone to imagine how they’d respond if a close friend were feeling what they’re feeling. People who’ve learned to survive by self-abandoning are often the most compassionate toward others. The work is turning that compassion inward, one small act at a time.
Healing Is Remembering Yourself
Recovering from gaslighting isn’t just about cutting contact or identifying red flags. It’s about coming home to your own perception — to that quiet, trustworthy awareness that’s always been there beneath the noise. That’s where safety begins to rebuild.
That’s where the parasite finally loses its grip.
If you’re starting to realize how chronic invalidation or psychological abuse has shaped your relationship with yourself, therapy can help you find your way back to that inner compass.
Learn more about Healing from Relational Trauma.
If you’re a North Carolina resident looking for support, schedule a free consultation with me.
