When You Don’t Have the Words: My First Encounter with Gaslighting - June 2025

A long time ago, in a city not so far away, I experienced a kind of devastation I never could have imagined. It wasn’t the kind of loss you can easily explain — the kind that leaves a clear before-and-after. It was quiet, internal, and deeply disorienting.

When the relationship ended, the people I had grown distant from during those years — the ones I had unknowingly pushed away — came back into my life. They surrounded me with love, concern, and questions. So many questions. Why hadn’t I said anything? What had I gone through? Why did I seem like a shell of the person they once knew?

I didn’t have the words to answer them. I tried, but everything came out in fragments. I couldn’t explain how my reality had slowly been rewritten, how I had stopped trusting myself, or why I no longer felt connected to the world around me. I only knew something had gone terribly wrong.

Together, we searched for language — for metaphors, analogies, anything that could help me express what I’d endured. I remember saying something like: “It’s like I would say the sky is blue, and he’d insist it was green. And after hours of being told I was crazy, I’d begin to wonder if maybe… he was right. Maybe there was something wrong with my eyes.”

That confusion — that slow erosion of trust in your own senses — is a hallmark of a tactic I hadn’t yet learned the name for: gaslighting.

At the time, I couldn’t name it. But I could feel it in my bones. I began to question everything — my perceptions, my memories, even my intuition. If I couldn’t trust what I saw or heard, how could I trust myself at all? It was like living in a house of mirrors, with no clear path out.

When I finally stumbled across the term gaslighting, everything shifted. Suddenly, I had language. And with that language came validation — and a sense of community. I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t imagining things. There were others who had experienced this too. The more I learned, the more I could finally articulate what had once felt unspeakable. I shared it with friends and family, and slowly, they began to understand.

The world has changed a lot since 2011. Today, terms like covert narcissist, trauma bonding, and emotional abuse are making their way into mainstream awareness. People are beginning to recognize these patterns, sometimes even sensing when a narcissistic personality is in the room. Still, this area of psychology is rapidly evolving. Definitions are emerging. Research is growing. But in many circles, narcissism is still mistaken for confidence, leadership, or charisma.

Only when the mask slips do people begin to see what lies beneath: deep insecurity, rage, and an obsessive need for control. And that’s where language becomes our lifeline. It helps us clarify our experiences, share our stories, and reconnect to ourselves and one another.

In the Resources section of my site, you’ll find a glossary of helpful terms. Maybe one of them will light up something in you — a moment of recognition, a yes, that’s it. When that happens, I encourage you to share your story with someone you trust. Because sometimes, those we love can help remind us of who we were before the fog rolled in.

And who we still are underneath it all.