You are not always a victim of other people, you often unknowingly hurt yourself by doing emotional abuse which is often called self gaslighting.
Yes, self gaslighting is a form of violence against yourself by continuously pressing and assuming all the feelings you feel are a form of untruth. The initial form of gaslighting such as holding back, lying and even blaming yourself, forms new thoughts in which you reject the reality of your own life.
Given the harmful effects of gaslighting on an ongoing basis, it is important for you to know the signs of self-gaslighting so that it is treated appropriately. Here we have summarized 5 behaviors that refer to the act of gaslighting oneself.
You Often Doubt Yourself
Even though it's a natural feeling, hiding too long in doubts about personal abilities can lead to self-gaslighting. Often you don't realize that a desire that should be able to come true has to just stop because there is too much doubt about whatever you do.
As quoted from the Medium page, the more you look down on and keep blaming all your decisions and abilities, the further you will lie to yourself. Along with the impact, gaslighting behavior will destroy self-confidence and make you continue to feel unworthy of everything.
Always Trying to Satisfy Others
Instead of acknowledging what you feel, you just keep making new stories so that those around you are not burdened by what happened to you. You will always convince yourself that the hurt or sad feelings you feel are just an exaggerated emotional response, even though it is actually caused by someone else's fault.
Starting from the desire to continue to please those around you, it becomes a boomerang for yourself, because you are constantly burdened by emotional violence and fake plays that you do yourself.
Faking What You Feel
Sometimes closing yourself off from others for what you feel is natural. However, this habit can turn into gaslighting when you constantly fake your true feelings.
Launching from the Bolde page, gaslighting actors try to minimize bad feelings by continuing to say that you are fine. It's not enough to just evade, you will make every effort to suppress all emotions and even eliminate these feelings, arguing that they are not valid to feel.
Too Hard to Criticize Yourself
Damage to self-confidence due to gaslighting behavior is also caused by the emergence of bad habits in looking at oneself or what is often called inner criticism.
Quoting from the Pop Sugar page, a psychotherapist from Austin, Grace Down said that self gaslighting evokes inner critic in a person so that everything he does will look low.
No matter how hard you try, you will still blame yourself and find it difficult to admit the magnitude of the achievements you have achieved.
Questioning the Reality of the Life You Live
Too long to avoid the truth becomes an opening for all the bad thoughts in your head, to deceive your stance on what you believe. All the perceptions and values of life that you originally held began to look gray, so you often questioned the truth as a result of the doubts and lies you had been doing.
Prolonged exposure to gaslighting forces you to look for proof of everything so that in the end you find it difficult to sort out which things are good and bad for your own life.