Growing Up With Gaslighting Affects You. Here’s How to Spot It
When gaslighting occurs repeatedly in childhood, it disrupts your ability to connect to yourself and develop self-trust. Why does this matter? When your self-trust is distorted, your understanding of what trust looks like in important relationships become confusing and can lead to repetition of these harmful patterns in later relationships. It can also make it difficult to feel confident and secure.
Let’s dig into a few signs of what pervasive gaslighting looks like—both signs within childhood and signals you notice in adulthood.
How People Pleasing Shows up with Internalized Oppression
The story in your head goes, “I’m the problem. And since I’m the problem, I better make sure everyone else is always at ease. Because of me. The way I move. The things I do. The way my very being threatens others.”
This story has been embedded in you. Not because you truly own it, but because the world around you has made you feel unwelcome in your body and skin. So it’s just easier. Just make them comfortable, right?
But where does that leave you?
What Makes People-Pleasing a Sign of Parentification?
Parentification is a role reversal in which the child accelerates into adulthood and becomes the parent, assuming adult responsibilities and parenting their parents/caretakers.
Maybe you think, “So what?”
On the one hand, you may say, well everyone has to contribute in the household and your parents/caregivers were struggling.
On the other hand, your childhood was…sacrificed. During your youngest years of play, delight, when all you asked for was someone to focus unconditionally on you…you spent that time turning everything around, focusing on everyone else. Operating out of stress. Out of obligation.
So what are some signals that you were parentified?
How Does Internal Family Systems Therapy Help You Heal?
IFS (Internal Family Systems)-based trauma therapy offers an approach that goes a little deeper than “just talking.” But what does that actually mean? It’s kind of like looking at you as a story with several tangled characters: your characters have had to relate to each other in a certain, intricate way to make the incredible story you are today. But how does it unfold?
Every part of you is welcome, exactly as you are.
In the real world, you’re successful, perfect, taking care of everyone else, on top of the world. In secret, you’re having meltdowns. You want to scream and cry. You feel intolerable. You don’t want anyone else to see your anger and sadness.
What Exactly is People-Pleasing? Let’s Get Into it.
People pleasing is a threat/survival response called the fawn response. Just like fight, flight, and freeze, fawn helps you to survive when you feel threatened. You usually use this response to placate a threat, make the threat feel calm and happy, to diminish the threat and to preserve yourself.