Gaslighting

[janea]

I think one of the most harmful things done to me as a child was gaslighting, more than one person participated, but it was mostly my mother. She spent a good portion of childhood (basically as long as I can remember, I don't know when it started) trying to make me believe that I was mentally ill and that I had been sexually abused (though she didn't know when or by whom). She also tried to make the rest of the family believe these things as well as other people. With the family, she succeeded, they believed I was mentally ill and although I thought they had realized it wasn't true, last year I found out they all still believe me to be mentally ill, though they do not know which mental illness it is. This also made it much easier for all of them to scapegoat me for everything, and that has also been going on as long as I can remember. And sometimes it didn't even make sense, but it was still my fault. My brother started having problems in his early teens and this was considered my fault. Sometimes things that happened before I was born were my fault.

Getting back to the main topic, to facilitate her charges of mental illness, she took me to therapists, and though I did not understand this at the time, she told them that I was sexually abused and had some kind of mental illness before I even saw them. Unlike the family, they usually caught on after a while and then she would fire them. There was a psychiatrist she took me to, in order to get him to prescribe me a bunch of psychiatric medications, none of which did anything but cause nasty side effects, and the last time I saw him (she was also in the room), he said that he thought it was a family problem and we needed family therapy and I did not need medications. I never saw him again, and when I asked she told me some lie about the reason why. I guess it's harder to comvince professionals like this than it was family and friends and other random people. I never even ended up with a diagnosis.

She never really managed to convince me that I was mentally ill. And I'm not saying I was doing great, I was living in an abusive environment. I did "act up", but what she wanted to convince me was different, she was going for something unspecified, but serious and that it involved psychosis. I think that's what stopped me from believing, no matter what she did (and she did things like lie about the past to make me doubt my memory), because she took it a too far, and that made it unbelievable for me (and ultimately for all the doctors and therapists she took me to). She institutionalized me for several months and there I still never believed, but after a while I realized the only way to get out, is it to pretend to go along with it and appear to take their medication and play their manipulative games. I refused at first, but then they put in me in an isolation room, and eventually I was there all day, every day, unless I was seeing a doctor or therapist, I slept in the room, I ate in the room, I was not allowed any books or newspapers, the staff did not speak to me, but they could watch me and never let me forget that. I managed several weeks, but then I couldn't take it anymore and agreed to take the medication. I realize the irony here is that they would say that refusal to recognize mental illness is a sign of mental illness. But other than realizing my mother had this power to put me in places like that, and it was absolutely horrible. But I met other people there who did have serious mental illnesses and some who had major problems, but probably didn't belong in that place, almost everyone had an abusive family. That was the very end of the time when insurance companies would pay for people to spend months or even longer in these types of places. I never had a firm diagnosis of anything and it seemed like they were trying to diagnose me by seeing which drug would work, but none did, only gave me side effects. The next time she did that to me, I had run away and got caught and the insurance company would only pay for a few days short of evidence a longer stay was necessary, so that time I was out in less than a week and most people seemed to stay 2 weeks at most. So she never managed to convince me, and it didn't help that I occasionally caught her lies, by finding someone else and asking them what happened, but for a period of time, she did manage to convince me that I had been sexually abused, even though I don't have any memories of that. It took me a long time to figure out that never happened, because in order to figure that out I first had to figure out that my mother tried to make me believe these things on purpose, and that meant she was much worse than I was prepared to admit. I understood both my parents to be abusive around 11-12, but I didn't understand the degree of my mothers manipulations and how calculated that must have been for a long time.

I don't know if this makes a difference, but in our household there were sometimes no rules, and then sometimes there were, but what they were changed frequently and no one told me until I was punished for breaking a rule, and then other times I could stay out all night and no one would even notice, or maybe they did and it was part of some screwed up thing I don't understand. Like I'm pretty sure now that the year that everyone forgot my birthday, that's not what really happened, they instead chose to ignore it perhaps to show me how unimportant I was.

I'm still not sure on the trigger warning thing for this.

[recover]

hi janea,
rushing to work so not many words but this is HORRIFIC. your mother is SICK. really really sick.
hope that is ok to say. i am so sorry for all you went through.
warmly,
recover

[janea]

recover,
It's ok to say, I came to the same conclusion myself eventially. Thank you for responding.
janea

[honeybera]

Gaslighting...well put! And I'm glad that you didn't buy too deeply into that nonsense and even diabolical scheming any more than you did. You have helped me to see (from my own experiences) that, although the physical abuse was punishing in both a physical and emotional way, the mind manipulations of a child can be the ultimate abuse. Mommy Dearest was really skilled at this, too, similar to your mother sans the psychiatrists and institutions. Nightmarish!

One question: Where was your father in all this? You said at 11-12 yo that you realized that both parents were abusers. My father was what is called a passive abuser, one who enables the abuser to do her thing. Sometimes fathers aren't the protectors they should be. Sadly.

I hope you are alright now, and getting past the horrors of your childhood. You express yourself very well through your writings. I hear you.

{{{{{{{{{{{janea}}}}}}}}}}}}}}

Honeybera

[janea]

honeybera, thank you for your response and I'm sorry you had to deal with this sort thing as well. I think it would be plenty horrible even without the psychiatrists and institutions.

I found it hard to really get some of this stuff, it can take a while, and I had to take off blinders. I think catching her (and my father too, he's probably even more of a compulsive liar than she is) in enough lies started to make it easier. My mother was really concerned that other people would think about her, and wanted to be perceived as someone who helps the the community, the world, as a good mother, as a martyr who always put herself last. Of course none of that is true, but many people believed (and still believe) it.

My father was not around, my parents divorced (and then lived thousands of miles apart) when I was pretty young, but he wasn't around much before the divorce. He was abusive when I had contact with him, usually in a much more overt way. He didn't do anything to stop her or change anything, he generally made it very clear that when he cared he had children (I think we were inconvenient) that there was only one he cared about and that was not me.

I'm trying to get past it, I've told a few friends, I've told a therapist and the pain psychologist, and that was hard, because I have a lot of trust issues with mental health professionals because of what happened to me. I used to just try to not think about or talk about my childhood, I moved far away, my friends knew I had had an unhappy childhood, but not any details, I really didn't let people get too close; and I really only understood how intentional and probably premeditated what my mother did must have been in the past couple years, and that's because to a lesser extent some of the abuse started again, not this exactly, smaller things, but definitely abuse (I think because I'm in a vulnerable position due to disability and poverty) and that's sort of forced me to see (plus all this research about abuse and chronic pain) that I really do need to start trying to get past it rather than just ignore it.

[honeybera]

Wow. As I read your post I found myself constantly rolling my eyes ( ) and slowly shaking my head in awe. The stories are so familiar. Some differences, but "intentional and probably premeditated" pretty much sums up Mommy Dearest as well. I call it trying to make me feel like "less than", and it can really make me feel like an outcast if I let it.

Recent example: without telling me anything, she had my brother come over to her nursing home and take her to the doctor last Tuesday, which is quite a ways from where they both live, for a "cancer surgery" (which was simply a small biopsy on a suspicious area on her nose), but she finagled my brother to spend an entire day with her. I had called her to let her know that I'd found a well-thought-of powdered hair "thickener" on Amazon and was wondering if she'd like to try it on her wispy thin white hair to enable her to hide the showing scalp. She's very vain. I volunteered to help her order it online, but instead she insisted that, "Your brother can help me with that. What was the name of the product?"

My "crime" to be dealt with (when I was little up until even now) was obesity. I was "fat" while you were "insane". Neither charge was true, and she compared me to my cousins who were raw-boned thin and looked like the kids in other foreign countries that I was warned were starving and so we should not waste food and should clean our plates, but next to my emaciated cousins, I looked merely healthy and strong, which I was. I was forced to take acrobats, tumbling, tap, and hula, to help with my "fat", you see.

I am obese now (morbidly so), but since talking with all of you, I am beginning to get a new perspective on life. I have been successfully dieting since May 20th, and the lbs. are coming off, slowly but surely. Mommy Dearest asked last Tuesday that I come see her sometime soon, but although I said I would, I KNOW her tricks: she just wants me close enough to smack me down yet again, not physically this time, but MENTALLY! To discourage me. To undercut all my efforts. And nuts to that!!!!

So I'm not going! Only recently have I begun to see and feel that my dreadful childhood experiences have a flip side to them, almost an affirmation that I am strong and ok and tough enough to survive practically anything, and I am actually grateful to have survived and to have learned from it. Honestly, you have more power than you realize, too.

Take care,
Sorry this is so long, but with me it always is...

Honeybera

[janea]

Honeybera, thank you again.

I also try to limit contact, because of continued abuse, I think it's healthy for us to limit or even have no contact. It's easier because I live so far away from her, I try to limit it to texts when possible, I don't know if that's possible with your mother, if she texts, but it's so much easier for me and harder for them to be abusive. Though if there's a visit it ends up with way too much contact (I can't afford to stay somewhere else, rent a car etc, and my disability makes things more difficult).

I'm sorry you were fat shamed. It's not ok to do to someone who is overweight or obese and doing it to a healthy child is just sick. I only got that for a short time (and from my father only) after being put on a medication that caused weight gain which also coincided with puberty weight gain. But the thing was that I was way too thin before that (probably like your cousins), and some people (not family, but friends) thought I looked better and healthier with the weight gain, and I don't think it even got to the point that I was actually medically overweight and I lost it all (except the puberty stuff) when I went off the medication, and people (not family) used to regularly question whether I was anorexic or tell me I looked like a cancer patient and stuff like that, but that low weight was natural for me, though it's not my best look. My father actually did it again a couple years ago when I again gained weight because of medication side effects, and I think medically I was about 5 lbs overweight at the highest weight, and then when I lost it (after going off the medication), I lost too much and did not look good or healthy and he complimented me. I'm sorry your mother did that so much, but congratulations on losing weight and making your own choices about this.

I think with the familiarity, since I started looking online to connect with other abuse survivors and just googling things, I found that a lot of the things I thought were so bizarre and crazy are common in abusive and dysfunctional families, even down to specific things she said (like I love you, but I don't like you). It's like they go to a school to learn how to be abusers. But, googling things sometimes doesn't lead to good places. I googled something about what my mother did yesterday with the mental illness stuff and what came out of that search (most of the results) were pages about munchausen by proxy, which (and I didn't know this before) can involve mental as well as physical illness. I went down the rabbit hole to see what the sites said and there isn't a lot of information about the mental illness type and apparently it's much harder to prove, and it does fit what happened, but I really don't know if I'm ready to think about that.

And in terms of the feeling like outcast thing, I never feel like I fit in anywhere. And I did always connect that to my childhood, but not the abuse, to other aspects of it. I remember most of my friends came from abusive families, though it wasn't something we talked about a lot, so I had never really considered that as part of the reason.

[silentlistener]

Hi Jennya,

It's nice to meet you.
I think I share this experience.
I'm not quite sure though.
She used to ask if she'd ever hit me when I'd get scared.
One time she told me a different story about something that happened when the body as little. Later I found this was not true but a way to cover up her knowledge and participation.

I don't think i can write more just now but maybe this fits?

I understand the crazy-making this causes.

Empathetically,
sl

[janea]

Hi sl,

It's nice to meet you too.

I'm sure it can manifest in different ways. If I talk about something from the past, my mother would tell me, no x didn't happen, it was y. But I remembered x, and of course I would question myself and wonder if I was remembering wrong. But it didn't happen at school, it didn't happen with my friends, it didn't happen with more distant relatives, only my immediate family, especially my mother. I used to be told stories about things that happened when I was too young to remember, and once I met a guy who wasn't family, wasn't even friend of family, but was around one of these stories, and what he said was quite different than what actually both of my parents said (which didn't match up that well and changed). And that involved how I got a scar that required stitches. He didn't know what happene to cause that, but could tell me that the story they told me (which involved his workplace) wasn't true, and he had no reason to lie. That last one with the other guy really opened my eyes about my parents and telling me stories that were lies. And that made it easier to believe what I remembered instead of what they told me. I continued to try to find people who could confirm things or not, and I wouldn't suggest a story, I just asked questions, and it was always their (or really usually her) lie and not my memory that was faulty. I have other scars that I also don't know how I got, but none as severe as that one.

And she still does this, usually it's only about small, unimportant things, but often things that occurred five minutes before, and after I realized that arguing was pointless, I used to just say whatever. The last time she did it, I looked at her and she was enjoying herself, I let her know I knew what was going on but was not going to continue arguing with her about it. My brother has even done it to me, also about small, unimportant things. But it hasn't ever happened with a friend or acquaintance, not as a child and not now, of course memories don't always match exactly, but they match mostly and it's nothing like my family.

If she was asked if she abused me, she would say no. She would deny the emotional abuse (and blame on me being "mentally ill") and she would deny physical abuse. She would probably still insists that I was sexually abuser at some unknown time by some unknown person. I don't bother trying to talk to her about things like this. I know I'd just hear a lot of lies.

janea

[silentlistener]

Hi Jennya,

Yes, I see what you mean. there are differences but it sounds like our experiences are similar.
Of course our memories don't match exactly but enough should be there to confirm things. It's important that we survivors trust ourselves.

Thank you for posting this.