“I think I do it to distract myself.”
I was telling a friend about my newly acquired habit of plucking split ends from my waist-length hair.
“From what?”
“Anger.” I thought about that. “I’m angry all the time.”
“with whom?”
My eyes darted around the room. I was afraid to admit it. “my dear.”
I was so petty. The words came back from my subconscious. How could I be so petty as to resent someone who never yelled at me or physically hurt me, and who I loved and wanted to get along with more than anything else?
But all the arguments that seemed to be over every time he dropped me off at my apartment kept creeping back up. Once I realized these issues weren’t solved, I rewatched Friends and grabbed my hair to forget about it, red ends pooling on my white sheets. It doesn’t matter anyway. I was just overreacting. He was so loving and kind in so many ways. I couldn’t let things go, could I?
I couldn’t. The memories will resurface after days and weeks.
One time I refused to lend him money because he hadn’t paid me the last time, and he sarcastically replied that if I wanted to treat our relationship as a set of transactions, we’d better take everything seriously. A spreadsheet and they don’t get each other gifts.
selfishness. greedy. View relationships as transactions. That was me. Very trivial. This is an underserved friend.
The cut hairs fell out one by one, cutting off the half of me that was still angry that he never paid me.
“I remember again that I was not trustworthy,” he asked, making me justify my decision.
“You never read my thesis.” He said he would do it “later tonight” someday in January; It was March.
“Of course, I’ll read it. I just haven’t been able to yet. It hurts that you don’t believe in me.”
I was hurting him. I didn’t believe in my friend.
Don’t care about the money. Don’t bother with the thesis. What was my problem?
This was the man who surprised me by arriving at my apartment with newly purchased ingredients and cooking dinner for me. Who patiently reassured me about all my body image concerns even though I looked ridiculous.
But I was so mad. It’s crazy that he won’t pay me the money he owes. Crazy that he didn’t keep his promises. This turned me crazy on me. Angry at him for making me angry at myself, and angry at myself for making me angry at him. She picked up one hair after another, getting lost in the hypnotic strands. My mind was as split as the ends of my hair. I couldn’t tell which half of me was right.
While I was stuck in this cacophony of conflicting thoughts, I went to a book fair with my friend and a title caught my eye: The Verbally Abusive Relationship by Patricia Evans. I thought this should be interesting. I am interested in psychology. I stuffed it in my paper bag, whatever you can spare for five bucks. It was only during that fleeting moment between the goodbye kiss and my friends’ reply that I admitted to myself why I had bought this book.
The next day, I opened it instead of my computer. As I expected, I saw myself – no, myself – scattered across the pages. And amid those pages, I learned that gaslighting — my partner’s method of making me doubt my thoughts, feelings, and perceptions — was an abusive tactic of manipulation. For the first time, I saw why his behavior terrified me. And it wasn’t because I was a bad partner.
Related: 5 Painful Signs Your Toxic Relationship Gave You PTSD
If you can identify any of these six styles in your relationship, you might not be a bad partner either. Perhaps you have simply been manipulated into believing that you are in a toxic relationship. If you find yourself in this situation, I hope this list helps you in the same way that The Verbally Abusive Relationship book helped me: by explaining your problem other than your incompetence.
- Conflicts are never resolved
If disagreements that occurred days, weeks, or months ago still bother you even though you discussed them with your partner, he or she may have manipulated you into believing that the discussion was over before it was over.
My partner accomplished this manipulation by blaming me. Even if the action being discussed was his, I was looking at it from the wrong angle. He would tell me what the right angle was, and I would feel guilty for not seeing things that way in the first place.
When our arguments were “resolved”, the solution was usually that I had to work on myself because I was overreacting or my expectations were unreasonable.
Making someone feel overly sensitive and unreasonable is gaslighting.
For example, one night, I was drawing a tool he made. After he told me what to draw and hovered over me complaining that I was doing everything wrong, I got angry and left the room. When he asked me what was wrong, I shouted in frustration: “You are so ignorant!” (Admittedly, I could have handled this better, too.) Then he talked to me about how I needed to stop calling him names like “ignorant” to back him into a corner with no choice but to apologize. I was terrified. Could I be a manipulative person? Will he break up with me?
I went to the bathroom, and when I came out, I was relieved to find him standing there holding his cat. We stood together and petted her as if nothing had ever happened. I forget my anger towards him. I was relieved that he wasn’t mad at me, so I dropped it.
Our fights continued like this for months, with me getting hurt and then repressing that pain so he wouldn’t get angry with me. When things started to get worse, a friend encouraged me to end the relationship. “But you’re fighting with your friend,” I pointed out.
“But our arguments end,” she said.
Finally, I realized why I had never been able to put our arguments out of my mind: none of my concerns had ever been addressed. They simply turned towards me. I stopped objecting to his actions because I wasn’t allowed to, not because I felt better.
In a healthy relationship, your partner hears you if you’re upset, and his goal is to avoid annoying you in the future, not to discuss whether you should be upset in the first place.
- When your partner hurts you, you end up apologizing
It was repeatedly highlighted that I believed my feelings were wrong, and I felt remorse for feeling them. Conversations would start with me thinking he had hurt me and end with him apologizing for being hurt. He convinced me that I was not only being cruel to him but that I was short-sighted. He used to say: “Life is too short to be angry.” “Can’t we enjoy this beautiful day together?”
I was crying and thinking about how much I loved him and I hated messing up our precious time together and thanking him for reminding me what is important in life and hugging him and apologizing for being so petty. I would come home ecstatic, feeling like I had figured out how to pick my battles, though the euphoria would fade once I realized the conflict wasn’t resolved.
My fears became the result of my pettiness. It didn’t matter, I was very sensitive, after all. I can’t be trusted. Feeling like your feelings can’t be trusted to the point of apologizing for them is also a sign that you’re being gaslighted.
