Reclaiming My Reality

Breaking Free from Gaslighting

Looking back at a past relationship, the most damaging part wasn’t just the lies—it was the way my reality was twisted, leaving me to doubt my own experiences and emotions.

Gaslighting is a term that gets thrown around a lot, but until you’ve lived through it, you can’t fully grasp how disorienting and corrosive it is. It’s now a word people roll their eyes out when they hear it, passively dismissing it. But it is serious.

People literally gaslight us into thinking we are not being gaslit.

Gaslighting is not just about someone denying what you know to be true—it’s about the slow, steady erosion of your confidence in yourself.

My ex-fiance had this pattern down to an art form.

Whenever I confronted him about his behavior, he’d immediately invalidate me: “That didn’t happen” or “You’re just perceiving things wrong,” he’d say, as though his version of events was the only one that mattered. And after hearing that over and over, I began to question myself. Am I really seeing things clearly? I found myself second-guessing everything: maybe I am actually an asshole.

This is the mind game that gaslighting creates—it’s not just a denial of reality, it’s a deliberate distortion designed to make you lose trust in yourself and question things NO ONE IN YOUR LIFE would question about you.

And in my case, that’s exactly what he needed to stay in control. Today, I am going to share some more of this story in hopes it validates what you are experiencing.