You don't feel crazy. Your internal reference points were systematically dismantled by someone who repeatedly contradicted your lived experience. When someone tells you that what you saw, heard, or felt didn't happen—or happened differently than you remember—your mind starts to split. One part knows the truth. The other part learns that knowing the truth out loud is dangerous.
Gaslighting works by creating a gap between your reality and the reality you're told exists. At first, you push back. You insist on what you experienced. But when that insistence is met with denial, anger, or punishment, your nervous system learns that your perceptions are the problem. Over time, you stop checking in with yourself and start checking in with them. Your internal compass gets replaced by their version of events.
This doesn't just affect your memory of what happened in the relationship. It affects everything. You second-guess decisions. You question your feelings. You wonder if you're overreacting, being too sensitive, remembering things wrong. Your sense of reality becomes something you have to verify externally because you've been trained to believe your internal knowing is unreliable. And that's the point. Gaslighting doesn't just confuse you—it makes you dependent on the person doing it.
The Cost of Staying Unaware
When you can't trust your own thoughts, you can't trust yourself at all. Every decision becomes a source of anxiety because you have no reliable way to assess what's real. The erosion of self-trust extends beyond memories to include feelings, preferences, and boundaries—you begin to believe that you are simply wrong about everything. Your identity becomes fragmented as you organize yourself around what others have told you is true rather than what you know to be true.
The Shift
The shift is not about proving that you were right all along. It's about reclaiming the capacity to know what you know without needing someone else to confirm it. This happens through rebuilding internal reference points by honoring what you feel even when it contradicts what you've been told. It involves regulating the nervous system through somatic practices rather than seeking validation through others. Most importantly, it requires recognizing that the confusion was imposed upon you rather than originating from within you.
Your mind was not broken. It was trained to doubt itself. As you rebuild internal authority through lived experience rather than through others' interpretations, the fog lifts—not because someone gives you the answer, but because you remember that you always had the capacity to find it.