This Isn't Another Gaslighting Essay

What happens when you stop trusting your own reality, and how to find your way back.

Back in the 2010’s, I was sitting in my therapist’s office on the cusp of walking away from the only life I’d ever known. I knew what I wanted to do, but couldn’t quite pull the trigger.

“Have you ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome?” she asked.

I laughed. A real laugh because I knew this was crazy. Stockholm Syndrome was for hostages. For kidnapping victims. I was a woman who had been in a difficult marriage and had made a series of bad decisions. Surely there was a different category for me.

She waited.

I stopped laughing.

“I want you to go home and Google it,” she told me. “Then come back next week, and we can chat about it.”

Here’s what I’ve since come to understand: you don’t have to be held at gunpoint to be conditioned to doubt yourself. You just have to spend enough time in a relationship where your reality is consistently, methodically rewritten for you.

If you’ve been following ‘self-help’ trends for the past several years, you already know what gaslighting is.

This isn’t that essay. This is the one about what it actually feels like to live inside it — from someone who did.

It feels like this:

You stop trusting yourself.

It happens gradually, in increments that feel reasonable and rational in the moment. You have a reaction that seems outsized, so you learn to soften your reactions. You notice something that turns out to be nothing (or so you’re told), so you learn to question what you notice.

You express a need and are made to feel unreasonable for having it, so you learn to stop expressing needs. And eventually, you learn to stop having needs.

You become a person who is always slightly uncertain about what just happened - or rather, how you feel about what happened. The woman who replays conversations at 2am trying to figure out where you went wrong. You begin to believe you are the problem, and maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with you…

I did all of this. For years. And I genuinely believed it was just who I was.

When my first marriage ended, the relief I felt was mixed with a kind of destabilization I couldn’t explain. The story, for so long, had been that the problem was me. My reactions were too big. My needs were too much. My perspective was, at best, unreliable.

The narrative became, ‘well, you know how Sara is…’

I had spent so many years adjusting my version of events to fit someone else’s that I had lost genuine track of what I actually thought, felt, or knew to be true. Turns out that’s not how it happened - and that’s not how I meant it - can be more powerful than a drug.

I found I could no longer trust myself.

What took me longer to understand - and what I want to say directly, to you, if any of this is landing somewhere familiar - is that this is not a character flaw. It is a survival response.

When your perception of reality is repeatedly challenged (or dismissed) by someone you love and trust, your mind does what minds do: it adapts. It finds a way to function in its environment. The problem is that the adaptation doesn’t dissolve when the environment changes, because you have to change first.

The road back is not fast. But it starts in the same place every time: believing what you know and understanding that it’s ok to trust yourself over what someone else has told you to trust.

For years, I still had that nagging voice inside my head that tried to make me doubt myself - the voice that could find my faults before anyone else could.

I understand now that the voice was trying to protect me, though that protection wasn’t very healthy.

There were other parts of me that had been trying to get my attention for years, the part that noticed things and was trained to dismiss what it noticed.

Those parts hadn’t gone anywhere; they were just waiting on me to let them speak.

Maybe you understand this. If you do, the same probably goes for you, too.

If you’ve been in an environment that needed you to believe you were the problem, you are not crazy. You are someone whose self-trust got systematically undermined by someone else’s need to be right - and maybe control you.

I know this because it happened to me.

Have you ever had a moment when you realized you could trust yourself again after years of doubting your own instincts?

I’d love to hear what that moment looked like for you. Your story might be the reminder someone else needs today that healing—and self-trust—really are possible.

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Next week I want to tell you something else — about the moment I realized the knowing was never the problem. It was always the trusting.