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Gaslighting is a manipulative tactic to make you doubt your own memory, feelings, and even sense of reality.

Gaslighters do not take accountability for what they did, deny facts and reality, and shift the blame to you.

They will bury your concerns with lengthy, unrelated responses, use misdirection, and minimize your feelings.

They may discredit and isolate you, and make you feel like you're walking on eggshells.

Yes, gaslighting is real—a really manipulative tactic that's a buffet of lying, denial, and misdirection to essentially warp reality. It's also a real problem dealing with gaslighters. If you are not really on top of what gaslighters are doing, you may even start to question your own thoughts, feelings, reality, and even sanity. So, it's really important to recognize what gaslighters do as soon as possible and then step on the gas to get away from them.

The term "gaslighting" comes from the 1944 movie Gaslight, where a husband manipulated the gas lights in his and his wife's home so that they would flicker. But whenever the wife would ask about the flickering, he would deny that anything was happening. Over time, this, in combination with other deceptive tactics, helped convince his wife that she was going insane.

Society is certainly not light on such gaslighting. Plenty of people use similar deception to get what they want instead of more legitimate approaches—like, you know, earning things. Let's go through an episode of gaslighting that I experienced and review the signs that soon prompted me to shine a light on what was happening.

Here's the backstory. Soon after........

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