Most People Aren’t Gaslighting You — They’re Lying to Themselves

The intentional gas lighting is much more uncommon than we're led to believe if you only look at Instagram and TikTok. When you look at what the data points are for classic narcissism in the total global population, most estimates are 1% having worked in the mental health field for 12 years. I am here to tell you, most commonly it is this type to possibly becoming a type three eventually 99% of gas lighting is purely by product of self-deception. Your brain is wired for deception, but here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen? Today's episode is about gas lighting. It's a term that is thrown around all of our social media, surely TikTok movies, you name it. And it's my opinion that the term gas lighting is misunderstood, but more importantly, the term itself is misused. Often whenever there is a misalignment or two people cannot co-reconcil reality, the term that gets thrown out is you're gas lighting me. So if you've ever been that person who's throwing out somebody else, you're gas lighting me, or you've been on the receiving end of feeling like you're taking crazy pills because someone else is telling you that you're gas lighting them. This episode is for you. This episode is what causes gas lighting, but also how you can learn to spot it. Gaslighting, as I mentioned, is a term that is thrown around haphazardly and often without understanding the real psychological mechanisms that play. Gaslighting is considered to be a manipulative tactic where someone makes another person doubt their own reality, memory or sanity, causing confusion, loss of self-worth, and often dependence on the person in the role of manipulator. It is considered to be a form of emotional abuse, and it is often used by narcissists or abusers. I want to pause here because often when we look at the term gaslighting and even in just reading the definition, there seems to be this underlying assumption that it is done with intention. Having worked in the mental health field now for 12 consecutive years, often seeing 10 to 12 clients per day, I can tell you with certainty, most people who actively gaslight another person have no idea that they're actually doing it. And this is the most dangerous type, honestly. I have been an abusive relationship, which we'll hear about later on in this episode, where there was somebody who was actively gaslighting. It was intentional. They knew that they were trying to manufacture something to make you doubt yourself. I want you to understand before we go into this episode, that is actually the minority by far. Much more common versions are going to come from these different types that I'm going to break down for you right now. So I went out and broke these into three different types of gas lighter so that we can all get into this mechanism together with a more practical understanding of how it plays out. So type one would be a person who is aware of objective reality, but they are manipulating the perception of another person intentionally either to cover up distract or confuse. So this is the most commonly known type. I think this is even if we look at the psychological definition, they are mostly describing type number one. And in the example that I gave of a previous narcissistically abusive relationship, number one was certainly the approach. They knew they were doing it. They knew that they were lying, but they were doing it intentionally to try to create either de-sabialization, confusion, or to make the person doubt themselves that they maintain control. As I mentioned, that is by far and away the minority. Then there is number two, a person who is unaware of objective reality and they are speaking through their distorted perception and they are convinced that their version is the same thing as objective reality. And a little bit we're going to get into objective versus objective reality, but for all intents and purposes, objective reality for now, meaning there is a factual, physical, evidentiary record rather than it being through my feelings or my interpretation. Example would be if I look down, I am looking at the floor, not the ceiling. If a person was maybe on mushrooms or on ketamine, now a therapist's favorite tool, I might really believe that the floor is the ceiling. And I would tell you, why are you lying down on the ceiling? And I might really believe that. So that person, as a very exaggerated example, could be number two. You could be sitting on the floor and they're freaking out telling you to get off the ceiling and you're like, what are you talking about? I'm on the floor, but they really believe it and they can't see the distortion. Very exaggerated example of number two, but take away hallucinogens. This still happens sadly all the time. Then we've got number three. Number three, I think, is actually the most common process. So number three, the person is unaware of objective reality and they are speaking through their disordered perception and they're convinced that their version is the same as objective reality. So essentially starting off as a type two, but when confronted with feedback or evidence, they doubled down on their previously held position, engaging now in intentional manipulation and deceit to cover up the inconsistency. So I'll give you an example of where this suddenly does not hold true for a number three because the key here is we're using this term in the second phase of it. They are intentionally doubling down. So it's like they're starting off as a type two and then they're becoming a type one. An example that I know we've been uncovering through previous episodes would be the example of somebody splitting either as a result of borderline personality disorder or covert narcissism or some other personality disorder like this where in the results of splitting, they are unable to receive the new incoming information. So either through projection deflection or splitting, they separate from it and they essentially create a false, a secondary false reality for themselves because confronting the objective record is too painful and as a form of self protection, they split and they cannot look at that. A great example of this would be my mom. I have watched this mechanism play out and I certainly watched it over the holidays. Unfortunately, we were face timing with my mom. She's not in a good place at the moment, sadly. And I would ask her question. And in real time and my kids and my husband were watching this, she would answer a completely different question that I didn't ask with us because of that splitting. And she would literally send herself off on a completely different tangent. And it happened multiple times because the question that I was asking was calling into consideration her having to face some objective pieces that she wasn't ready to confront. So her brain instead of she wasn't consciously trying to ignore my question, that is that mechanism where her brain crafted an alternate version of what I said and then answered that as a way to protect herself. When someone is engaged in a more personality disorder driven mechanism like that, they no longer fall into this type three because that is not intentional. My mom isn't in that moment being like, I can't answer that question. I have to answer, I have to pretend that I made up this other question instead. I can pretty much guarantee you, I mean, surely addiction is also involved here. So that adds obviously another layer. But if my mom were to take a lie detector test, I'm sure she really believed that I said the other thing. I just didn't. So when we're talking about some of these personality disorders, we can't say that they are intentionally doing it because they often have no idea. It's like self-deception leading to a deeper level of self-deception. So we're going to go more into breaking down the different clusters of disorders and how they tend to correspond over to gaslighting. But for now, just to kind of tie it up with a bow, type one would be more that classic narcissist that you're used to seeing as a character in movies. In some cases, maybe even like crossing over to psychopathy, more like a serial killer, where they are doing it on purpose to some extent they're getting off on doing it and they're doing it to control manipulant confuse you. Oh, I just thought of the best example for this. Who's ever, and I know you can't answer me because you're out there and I'm here, but who's ever seen the girl on the train? In fact, we haven't watched a movie together as a collective podcasting group. So I think this is a great episode to throw that out there. That is officially your homework. Watch the girl on the train. We'll pick up detailing that on the next episode. And I'm about to ruin it right now. So if you are going to watch it and you haven't yet watched it, maybe pause this episode because you don't want to hear me ruin it. In three, two, in the movie, you see the woman's perspective most of the time, right? So you just see this broken down alcoholic woman who's like bitter and upset that the husband has kind of moved on with this other woman, right? And in a way, she's kind of portrayed as this psychostocker. Eventually you get into the movie and you realize actually her husband is the full blown psycho and he gaslit her into believing a narrative so much that then her whole life kind of crumbled and then as a result she became an alcoholic, etc, etc. And part of I think what leads you as a character eventually at the end to feeling obviously immense sympathy for her, whereas prior, you're like, oh god, like stop stocking. This is painful to watch. At the end, you realize in a way, the stocking behavior was like a fixation because her brain couldn't figure out what was wrong, but she knew something was wrong. So it was like her brain wouldn't let it, it wouldn't let her let it go. So she kept fixating on this family and like almost like a message, something's wrong, something's wrong, but she couldn't quite put all the pieces together because she had been very intentionally gaslit by her husband who full blown psycho. Side note, I'm pretty sure this is the same guy that Jennifer Aniston was dating or married to for a while and I just want to go on record here and say, I know this is the character not the actor, but the second I saw them together in a tabloid, I was like, I don't know, this guy, he ain't right. And then when you see this movie, you're like, well, maybe this guy really is this guy. Anyways, I digress. So that would be a type one example. Type two example, this is extremely common and going back into the previous two episodes, we did the one episode on power and projection, the episode after that was digging into how people like that can make people communities or businesses and idle. Those two episodes certainly are detailing a person who would experience a whole boatload of this number two behavior, but they have would have no idea. They would pass a lie detector test most likely believing their own self deception, right? Unfortunately for all of us, that is the way self deception works. And often what ends up happening is that the more they get confronted with evidence that counteracts their perspective or their version, eventually many of these people turn to becoming that type three, where in order to protect their identity or protect what they've built or the attention, maybe even that they're getting from being that sort of victim centric person, they then carry on life as this type three because they want to maintain what they've created as a byproduct of acting out the type two behavior. So type three, I think is the most common, but type three happens as a byproduct of type two type one. If for sure happens, don't come me wrong. It does, but it's far less common than you would believe if only relying on Instagram or TikTok. So type two and type three involve a mechanism called self deception, which you know we talk about all the time on this show. Self deception is a psychological process by which somebody convinces themselves of information or belief contrary to the objective record. This is often a byproduct protection or an assumption based style of thinking. So essentially deciding this is what it is or this is what they mean or this was their motive without actually having collected the evidence or talking to the person, they just decide and then based on what they decide, even if that decision or assumption is at odds with the objective record, they act as if it's perfectly true. In many of these episodes, we have talked about something that in my work, we call the neurocognitive funnel. The neurocognitive funnel shows us that behavior is actually downstream of our emotional response and emotional response is downstream of our perception of reality. For this reason, it is my belief and hypothesis in my work that all mental illness is a byproduct of a disordered perception of reality. If you can correct the distortion, the perception of reality, often that person stops behaving as though they are mentally ill. The behavior mechanisms that would garner that diagnosis can be reversed by correcting the distortion and the perception of reality. So in this podcast, in all of my work, much of what we talk about has to do with brain patterns. A brain pattern is a result of your repetitive childhood inputs and how they create rules or formulas that distort how you perceive reality. And unfortunately for all of us, that distortion is often what we call gaslighting. If we are aware of objective reality and we're talking to somebody who is seemingly ignoring what's happening in objective reality and they're saying something that is contrary to that record, and you note the term gaslighting is, you are probably going to receive that as being gaslight. But as I mentioned previously, that is most likely a type two person who has no idea they are doing it. To drive this point home, we have to conceptual understand the distinction between objective and subjective reality. Objective reality is the world of facts and existence of those facts independent of an individual's consciousness, their beliefs, their feelings, or their perceptions. So an example would be like objectively speaking, this is a light. This is a microphone. But again, if any of you have ever done any hallucinogens, you've probably seen things and objects turn into things that they are most certainly not. I recall a time once tripping on mushrooms in Hawaii in one of my favorite places called Waipu Ovali, and whilst tripping on mushrooms, the whole landscape around me became like a whole fairy wonderland with like little kingdoms and things. And then in the morning when you're not tripping anymore, you wake up and you look around and there's like sun-apedes and dirt and garbage and like rotted tree trunks and you're like, wait, what? You were a fairy wonderland last night. You were so good to me. I am by the way, side note, petrified of sun-apedes. If you ever, I lived in Hawaii for a long time, I've probably lost many, many, many days, maybe even years of sleep being afraid of sun-apedes. And then all of a sudden, you're tripping on mushrooms and you're like laying on the dirt and being like, oh, is this the most comfortable dirt I've ever laid on in my life? Do I wonder how many sun-apedes were just slithering around me, not a care in the world? Because I was tripping. I was not living an objective reality. I was living in a hallucination. So I keep going back to this because often we don't treat self-disruption with the weight or gravity that we need to treat it to understand what's actually at stake here. When self-disruption is running the show, that person might as well be on mushrooms because what they're going to hear, what they're going to see, how they're going to interpret your behavior, interpret your motives, it could be completely at odds with the objective and let me tell you, as a person who grew up with a parent who was deep in their personality disorder, constantly doing this, it is exhausting. And as I mentioned at the end of last week's episode, often if you experience this as a child, you have two options. You either accidentally repeat the cycle, often having a personality disorder yourself and repeating sort of the same fractured sense of reality, or you become an arbiter for every single moment and often end up developing a photographic memory. This was the case for me. I, in every single moment, had to be completely aware and sober to make sure I understood how my mom's version of things were not quite matching with reality. Because I knew I have to stay, even as a child, I have to stay deeply rooted in reality, otherwise I am going to slip off the edge into the abyss with my mother. And this is the case for many children who grew up in a situation like this. So objective reality, again, are often physically concrete, provable things. Then subjectivity by nature is a world filtered through emotions, feelings, judgments, and belief. And if you just caught my note about the neurocognitive funnel, that basically means that for most of us, everything that we receive in our world, how we're looking out at our world, is going to have a lens of subjectivity to it. We cannot get out of that as human beings, unfortunately. There are certain brain patterns on the brain pattern spectrum. We talked about last week how summer more oriented toward metacognition, and they're able to think about their thinking and almost have an out-of-body experience where they're incredibly situational aware. Those types are much more likely to see the world objectively, rather than subjectively, although it's still not going to be 100%, that is not possible. Because number one, to some extent, they probably had some childhood trauma that has made them step into the role of kind of being the arbiter for reality. Number one, but number two, there's no, their personal feelings and emotions are typically not leading. They, in fact, are perceived likely as unsafe. Example would be, like, throughout my life, and I've shared this on the podcast before. I don't think I really cried until I was like, I don't like, early to mid-20s. I was not a cryer, I really couldn't. In fact, I know I've shared this on the podcast before. When I was 18 or 19, I went to go see Passion of the Christ in Colorado in a place where it was very Christian conservative. And when we walked out of the movie theater and everyone, of course, rightfully so, was bawling, crying, I wasn't ever almost at me like, you monster. But what you don't realize is that for a child growing up in a high trauma situation like this, you, your brain may decide it is unsafe to have emotions and needs because they will not get met. And if you have a need and you have the desire for a parent to meet that need, you're not only going to not get that need met, but you could actually cause some sort of conflict or escalation that makes you unsafe. So you learn to push that down and just not have any needs. And often, if you're not letting emotions run the show, what heightens as a result is that metacognition, because then you can kind of see the whole picture. And to keep yourself and others in loved one safe, you become more that top down vision rather than being led by feelings. So as I mentioned, there are people on the brain pattern spectrum who are less inclined towards seeing things in a overly skewed subjective way because they're not driven by emotion and feeling, but that is still not 100%. There's no human being on the planet that will ever be able to articulate objective reality 100% of the time. It's easier when it's tangible concrete through dimensional objects. Most of us could look at this mic flag and say, and this is white with a little bit of black on it. But one of the things that I always share in my break method lectures is you only know what you know until you know something else. If we were all raised in some like cults in the mountains and from day one, we were taught that this is the color orange. And eventually we went to college every time we went, oh yeah, can you pass me that orange cup? People will be like, what do you mean orange cup? We have that one right there, that orange cup. They would really believe that was an orange cup. But for you on the receiving end, you're like, what are you talking about? That's the white cup and they'd be like, no, that's orange. So it is also important for us to understand that some people, what they have actually gained as acquired knowledge throughout their life by way of culture or religion, there's this added level of subjectivity too because they might have actually been taught something different. So the way we're even labeling things and using language can also be its own form of gaslighting. And for what it's worth, I think this is why language is so under attack in 2026 and has been for the last especially seven years. It's like they're trying to twist and contort all these words and definitions not to go, you know, political here. But an example of something that, you know, let's go back 20 years, it would not have been hard to define a woman 20 years ago. And now the device of subject, what's technically changed, nothing, really nothing has changed. It's subjective. But when you manipulate language, you're manipulating our ability to describe objective reality and then you cause another form of gaslighting, which I believe is incredibly intentional if you look at what's happening to us sociopolitically. I want to pause for a second because this episode matters to me on so many levels personally. As you know, if you've been following along with my podcast, I did not get into the peptide space for human optimization. I got into them because my body was completely broken down. I was having autoimmune flares, hormonal weight gain that was not responding to any of my strong will power or time spent in the gym. The only thing that actually made a change was adding peptides to my daily routine. When I did that, I started to understand bioavailability, dosing, stacking, and that is everything we are covering in today's episode with one of the leading experts in the peptide space. As you know, I am partnered with LEMD so that you don't have to guess where your products are coming from, whether they're a black market from China. You can find all of my recommended stacks at LEMD forward slash busy gold. And LEMD is ELL IEMD.com forward slash busy gold. And I go deeper into all of my protocols and offer support on my telegram group, which is also going to be linked in the show notes. Now back to the show. So let's go back to the breakdown because I'm going to kind of pull this thread to make sure that we're all understanding it. So when we're now thinking about those type one, type two, type three, now we understand more concretely objective versus objective reality. We have those type ones that remember are aware of objective reality, but they're intentionally manipulating to confuse, cover, upper distract, right? That's that sort of more classic narcissist person. Then we've got the type two. They're unaware of objective reality, and they believe that they're speaking about objective reality, but they're actually speaking through their distortion. Then type three, as the reminder, they start off in position two, and then eventually they go back to being more of the type one. So that type one is more the classic narcissist. The type two is more aligned with a covert narcissist, but also other personality disorder like symptoms, including borderline and histrionic. We aren't going to go too deeply into personality disorders, but I am going to give you an overview of cluster A, B and C because I think it's helpful because we're going to be adding on to this over the coming episodes. Cluster A disorders are considered categorized as odd and eccentric. They include paranoid personality, skitzoid and skitzo type one. Cluster B disorders are considered dramatic emotional and erratic, and those are considered narcissism, vulnerable narcissism, which is another word for covert narcissism, borderline, histrionic, and antisocial. Then we've got the cluster C disorders, which are considered to be anxious and fearful oriented, and they include OCD dependent and avoidant. Let's dig a little bit deeper on the cluster A, autorexcentric disorders. These types are often obviously afflicted, and they're not reconciling the same reality as those around them. And as a result, the likelihood someone feeling successfully gaslit by this type is extremely rare. In other words, without sounding like a total jerk, often these types, their behavior is so erratic and off the walls that you're not going to be confused by whether they are delusional or not. You will know. So their ability to successfully gaslit you is very slim because you're likely going to observe this person and be like something I'm right here. When I worked in a therapeutic residential program, this is absolutely not true. All bets are off because now you're dealing with many people who all have similar disorders. So I would watch them all gaslit each other because they all have an equally challenging time navigating the line between objective and subjective reality or objective reality and delusion. So if you go into a more therapeutic or clinical environment, certainly if you have a bunch of people with diagnosed disorders, then maybe a cluster A person could accurately or successfully gaslit somebody else, but I think in the general population, this is very unlikely to be the case. And now that I'm saying it out loud, the caveat to this is once you dip your toe in the spiritual community, all bets are off there too. Because then you have people presenting like they're hearing from God or they're somehow ordained by God, etc. And they're coming from maybe a paranoid personality skitzoid or skitzoid type of personality disorder, but now they're elevated into this role where everything they're telling you is now like ordained by God or because they'd channeled it from blueble blah blah alien culture. So then potentially you're able to be accurately gaslit because maybe you want to be on some level, maybe you want there to be some truth to what they're saying. So you become effectively gaslit by a person like that. But in general, in your general day-to-day life going to get to coffee at Starbucks, very unlikely to happen to you. Cluster B is the primary gaslighting culprit. And this is going to follow as squares to rectangles rationale. All rectangles are squares, but not all squares are rectangles. In other words, not all who gaslight have cluster B disorders, but pretty much all cluster B disorders will gaslight you. And again, they won't necessarily know it. This mechanism of gaslighting is most commonly self-deception driven. So they don't realize that they are skewing or disordering reality. And unfortunately, they also don't realize often that there's some sort of fixation obsession or projection element. And in my opinion, projection is the number one cause of gaslighting. And people who struggle with this often have no idea they're doing it consciously. Then we've got the cluster see types. I'm going to break these up separately because unlike the others, yes, these have some things in common, but they're actually all fairly different. And often these words are used in different, different mental health settings. So example would be like, I don't want you to confuse avoidant in terms of a cluster see disorder with like an avoidant attachment style because they are not the same. So I'm going to further define these three just so that we can all be operating with common language. So the dependent disorder is a pervasive and excessive need to be taken care of leading to submissive and clinging behavior and fears of separation. So like a separation anxiety, they have difficulty making every day decisions without excessive advice or reassurance from others. And they need others to assume responsibility for most areas of their life. So they end up becoming as the title of the disorder claims they become dependent. Then we have the avoidant feelings of inadequacy and hypersensitivity to negative evaluation leads them to avoid occupational activities that might involve more significant interpersonal contact because they're afraid of being criticized or having somebody disapprove of them or just flat out be rejected. So this could be an example of somebody who may actually present like a wall flower and they won't go in because they're afraid of being rejected. So they just again, thus the term avoidant, they start to avoid situations. In many cases, I see this quite a bit in break method often if left to their devices for too long, eventually this could be the type of person who stops leaving their house at all and won't even go outside. So once they avoid so much, then everything becomes too fearful and they can lose their way and eventually become afraid to even leave their home. Then we also have obsessive compulsive personality disorder. So this is a different thing than the other type of OCD. So this is a personality disorder version where there's a preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control often at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency. This condition does differ from OCD the way you would typically know it and that it involves personality traits rather than specific obsessions or compulsions. So this is not necessarily like I have to wash my hands on your times. This can actually show up with needing to look perfect or not be able to go somewhere unless they've done all of these things to control their how they are being perceived. So it's more obsessive about how you are presenting out in the world. So I guess the question becomes we've gone through the personality disorders. What about everybody else who gas lights? Because again, we've already gone through this. Not everybody who gas lights has a personality disorder, right? Not everyone who gas lights is mentally ill. So what about everybody else? You don't have to have a diagnosed personality disorder to gas light people. It honestly happens all day long and in many of your relationships. And sometimes it's more simple and ardent of the radar than you would even consider. So I put together a few under the radar examples of how you may be being gas lit or gas lighting somebody else without even knowing it. So let's look at number one. You think you hear someone say something that they didn't say and you won't back down on what you think you heard. I have had this experience with my husband many, many, many times. And if I tell you how many times I wish I'd just be like, God, can you roll back the tape on that one? It's frustrating. And if somebody from the brain pattern perspective, if somebody is already feeling insecure about something or they are assuming that you are thinking something about them, they might hear you say something that you did not say. So is that person intentionally trying to gas light me? Of course not. Absolutely not. But does that mean that technically it's not gas lighting? Also not. It's still gas lighting. But they have no idea. That would be an example of that number two. Then we've got receiving feedback that doesn't feel aligned with effort you put into something. And without knowing it, you start projecting. You respond back to the person in a combative or retaliatory way. And you start denying the feedback that was given. This has certainly happened. I mean, if you have kids, you've watched this happen with your kids as they try to circumvent the process of having to take ownership of what they did. And they do this ping pong or leapfrog game where all of a sudden as you're trying to land the point on what they did and try to help them take ownership of responsibility, suddenly they've gotten you confused. And now you're talking about something else and you're like, wait, what was they even trying to discipline you about? Sometimes that doesn't go away in adults. And I think we've uncovered that in recent episodes. What happens there? But honestly, for some people, you're not doing that on purpose. You have no idea. You're doing that. But if you could go back and watch it as a recording, would you still be mortified and be like, oh my god, I can't believe I did that. Yeah, you still could. And for this reason, it's one of the things I love most about break method because all of our sessions are recorded. And I can't tell you how often when I run into a situation like this, I will say to the client, let's take a beat. I'm going to send you the recording of this session. And after you've watched it, let's reconvene. And then I want to have a conversation about this. And nine times out of 10, when we meet again, they're like, oh my god, I'm so embarrassed. And I'm like, it's okay, you don't have to feel embarrassed. Sometimes, and I, again, it's why I wish we could just do the God. Can you roll back the tape? Often when people are able to see themselves recorded and they go back, something they swear happened or they swear they experienced when they go back and they watch it, it didn't happen. And that can be really hard to confront in break method. I called this moment reality vertigo. Because as you're trying to kind of match your version with objective reality, if you're not deep in self-disruption and going to split or project and you're actually going to face it, there's going to be a moment of instability where you're like, oh my god, reality's melting right in front of me, am I a crazy person? And to be honest, I think if whatever healing work you are doing doesn't involve some precipice threshold moment of that, I would argue maybe you're not doing the right work. Because for us to heal and rewire, we have to be able to confront these distortions or inaccuracies head on. And it is destabilizing. It does make you feel like you're going crazy temporarily. But if you have the right tools and the right structure and process to navigate through that threshold moment, your life has changed forever. Right? That's literally what I do all day long. But it's not easy and it is confronting for everybody because we all have some type of self-disruption. Let's look at number three. Number three is an example of a intimate relationship pattern. A spouse questions you about something and you know they won't be able to handle the truth. So you spin up a white lie to settle them down because you just have to keep the peace for the kids. Tell me if you are married with kids that you haven't done this before. Technically, it's gaslighting. And even worse, the one that really might hurt a little bit more is even though in your mind, you're like, I have to do this for the kids. Guess what? You technically fall into that type one category because you know the truth. You're just not saying it. Yeah. That one hurts a little bit. So let's go back to what we were talking about a little while ago about kind of the childhood trauma roots of being subjected to gaslighting and what that would mean for you as an adult. So if you were raised by a parent or caregiver who gaslights, you're likely to do one of two things. Option number one, this will cause the child to question themselves and self-trust wounds will start to develop. And this is especially prevalent in a child who seeks co-regulation. So they're seeking love, validation, attention, or affection from the person who is actively gaslighting. Option number two, is it causes the child to develop a more adult perspective, including metacognition. And this is what's going to happen when the child already saw cracks in the parent or caregivers' trustworthiness. And they actually decide to take care of their own needs and they in effect actually increase their self-trust. So you can, this goes 50-50 either way. If you are dealing with a parent who gaslights your primary caregiver, depending on your relationship to them in terms of love, attention, and validation, you are either setting yourself up to decrease your self-trust and be therefore more likely to repeat the gaslighting behavior as an adult. Or option two, you already didn't trust them. So you're able to kind of now anchor even more into objective reality. You increase your metacognition and you become more self-efficacious as a result. This is very common. And in fact, in the brain pattern spectrum with the work that we've done often when I work with kind of that top 1% high achievers, entrepreneurs, subset, you see a lot of this where they had pretty intense childhood trauma that developed high self-trust, strong situational awareness and metacognition, and a high level of self-accuracy, efficacy, but also flexibility and adaptability in the face of fear. When you have a parent who is emotionally unstable and they are actively gaslighting you, you have to be flexible and adaptable in order to survive. Because being logical and thinking five steps and wanting to walk out those five steps doesn't happen with a parent who's irrational and emotionally dysregulated. You can't control that extra the kid. In the power dynamic, you have to kind of roll with the punches proverbially. So what ends up happening is that you also, as an added bonus of your trauma, developed the ability to be adaptable and creative and think on your toes in the face of danger or fear. All of those things typically equate to being a really strong, successful entrepreneur or business person. So this is just something that I have found, especially over the last three years of digging more deeply into the data. This is by far and away the majority of the top performers in the world. They typically all have some level of child's in trauma. So is this an invitation to traumatize your children? I don't know. No, it's not. Don't traumatize your children. There are other ways to help create emotional resilience and this adaptability in your kids without intentionally traumatizing them. Maybe I'll do an episode about that soon. Let's look at the adult outputs. So we talked about what the two options are for a child experiencing this, but the adult outputs are going to look like this. You're either going to become highly observant and detail oriented with strong memory recall, possibly even developing a photographic like memory because of your trauma experiences. Another thing that can happen is that you start narrating what you're doing. I am so guilty of this. You actually start to talk to yourself. This is often because your brain realized if I don't say what I'm doing as I'm doing it, somebody else is going to try to manipulate me into thinking something else because of what happened to me as a child. So I often without thinking about this, I will just narrate what I'm doing all the time. One of the things I thought was really interesting is I was scrolling on the gram and I found it was a study that had been conducted. I wish I could remember the precise details, but I'm going to summarize it here and probably butcher some of the specific details, but I've got the general themes right. So they did an experiment. I'm pretty sure it was a military run experiment and they put three different people into a completely dark soundproof room. So completely dark, no light whatsoever. And I think they were there for something like three days. Two people out of the three came out not okay, right? They really broke cognitively and mentally when they were in there and they came out in a really bad shape. A third person came out totally fine. And when they figured out what led this third person to come out like unscathed and fine is that he told them the way that he anchored in his sanity for the three days or however long it was was that he narrated everything that he did. So he'd put his hand on the wall and say, this is a wall. He'd put his hand on the floor. This is the floor. I am in a room. This room has a wall and a floor. This is my foot. This is my knee. So what he was doing is he was training his brain to align with objective reality even though that was ripped away from him, right? When you lose the light and you lose your senses, it makes things feel very unseeable because your brain can't anchor to reality anymore. So his way of anchoring to reality was to describe what he could physically feel verbally. This is in essence what happens as a byproduct of being raised with a parent that gas lights you. You end up narrating so that you don't lose your tether to objective reality. Another thing that can happen and this is seriously an Achilles heel I know in my life. Empathy and patience for those who are operating in deception is too high. You have too much empathy, too much understanding. You feel for people. Even when they're operating in a type of deception that could be harmful and I mean honestly, harmful, vicious, intentional, malicious, throw in any of those words, you still feel for the person. And instead of putting up strong boundaries, you accidentally start placating, making excuses for them and you walk on eggshells. They can't handle this right now. I'm going to pray for them. I hope they get better. I'm hoping for the best here. Meanwhile, you're giving them proximity to try to destroy you. So this can become your Achilles heel because if you were raised with it, you have empathy for it and you understand it and you often as a result don't protect yourself from it properly. The child who developed metacognition and empathy or forgiveness often has too much forgiveness for the gas lighter and they often end up attracting them as an adult. The child who develops a self-trust wound as a result of the gas lighter often ends up repeating the gas lighter behavior. And can you see here why we never really get rid of each other? We just replace the actors. Having been somebody who was raised by somebody who was emotionally unstable, erratic, punishing all those things, struggling with addiction and having to again take more that position of metacognition being the arbiter of objective reality, you better believe I landed myself right into a toxic narcissistic abusive relationship. Because I know how to navigate it. I can make excuses for them. I want to see people break through. Right? I'm like that fixer. But as a result, if I don't do my brain pattern work, I risk continually putting myself in a position with those type of people and vice versa. So this lands us back in the concept that we talked about last time on the idolatry episode where in general, people who are more self-contained or self-regulated end up attracting people who are more that sort of anxious, needy co-regulating type because they need the self-assured, self-contained self-regulator as their anchor point. So we attract each other like mouths to a flame. And if we don't learn how to stop letting our empathy make excuses to give somebody proximity, we're honestly just as guilty. We brought up earlier that the intentional gaslighting is, in my opinion, much more uncommon than we're led to believe if you only look at Instagram and TikTok. And I want to just give you some data points to back this up. When you look at what the data points are for classic narcissism in the total global population, we're looking at most estimates are 1%, so 1% of 8 billion, or up to 6%, depending on what study you're looking at. So if you fan that out, it is extremely rare. And having looked and worked in the mental health field for 12 years extensively, I am here to tell you, most commonly, it is this type to possibly becoming a type 3 eventually. And there's really no exception to that. And from where I sit, the only solution is to help people, number one, see their patterns of self-deception, learn how to see their blind spots, and learn how to rewire those because I do believe everyone is capable of it. I see it every day in the work that I do. I've done it with 15,000 clients, so I know it's possible. But it's not going to be possible if you keep living in a world or in a bubble or an echo chamber where everyone either tip toes around your mental illness, or in fact feeds into your mental illness because they all have the same mental illness, which you see often happen in like spiritual communities and other communities. You just you end up attracting other people that are like, yeah, yeah. And then you have this whole like mob mentality where it's really all people that may suffer from the same sort of self-deception patterns, all essentially reinforcing the pattern for each other. So it is truly my position that 99% of gaslighting is purely by product of self-deception. And do you know it's not effective with helping a person confront a dismantle gaslighting, saying you're gaslighting me. Where's part? More often than not, a person who throws around the term, plot twist is actually the one doing the gaslighting. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Most likely when somebody is acting this out, it's because they are acting on assumptions, which we talked about. They're reading into body language, they're filling in gaps, they're not taking people with their actual words or through their distorted perception, they're hearing things that were just point blank, not said. They're deciding someone else's motive and intent as if they can somehow do that playing God or they're projecting deflecting, blame shifting, or even just because you're distracted. Every single one of those can cause someone to gaslight somebody else. And I just want you to be honest with yourself for a second. Have you ever done any of those? Probably. So what do we do and where do we go from here? I think number one, we have to stop throwing around the term gaslighting because we are misusing it, and I think most people fundamentally don't understand it. I'm giving you two options right now of what you can do instead. Option number one, it doesn't seem like our perspectives are aligned right now and discussing this only seems to be creating more division. Perhaps we want to take a break and revisit this later on. And the key here is that most often we know from my work and break method that people have a four-part behavior cycle. So you've got early sage transitional and late stage behavior that's all driven biochemically from emotion, but we know because the neurocognitive funnel is actually driven by perception. And that perception changes. And when our perception changes, our chemicals change and then our behavior changes. So the reason number one is so effective is that if you can get a person out of that emotional state and into one of their later stage behaviors, they might be more likely to be able to see things more accurately or objectively and come background and be like, you know what? I thought about it and it's actually a little bit ridiculous. I realized I was maybe overreacting. That is what we want in an ideal world. I'll tell you when this goes south. And I've seen this firsthand way too many times. You see somebody do that and it works. And they're like, oh, yep, okay, I just had to sit with I had to work through that. Great. Where this doesn't work is if you've built up an echo chamber of people around you who are frankly as mentally ill as you are and they jump on the bandwagon and make you double down on your previous delusion instead of walking yourself out of it. Because I've seen people who were capable of walking themselves out of it suddenly go back and double down on the all the delusion. So number one should work for most people if they're not surrounded by people that are actively trying to reinforce their pattern of self-disruption, which sadly is also common. Another thing that works is option number two, that was not my experience. This is what I observed. And then you list the very without any sort of emotionality, without sort of any additional feelings. You list out the facts of what you observed. You keep it really simple. And if that escalates the person, which honestly for some people it will, you go back to number one. This doesn't seem like we're aligned right now and discussing this is only adding more division. Perhaps we want to take a break and discuss this later on. Another thing that can be effective is something that you see float around on Instagram called gray rocking. Gray rocking is a common tactic that is said to work with narcissists. However, I will tell you from experience both in the field and in my personal life. This actually in many cases actively agitates narcissists even more. So I am personally not on board with the gray rocking thing. I can understand why it may work for a period of time, but it doesn't work in the long run. So with gray rocking, there's a variety of different aspects to it, but it's essentially not giving the narcissist any sort of stimulus. So you're kind of making yourself a pure more boring or gray or neutral. And you're just you're literally not giving them anything to work with, which like I said, that can work up into a point. But many people both covert narcissists and classic narcissists also borderline personality disorder. The reality is if they want to get something from you that you are not giving them, they will push and push and push and sadly, they might even push to the point of trying to like publicly destroy you and create up, you know, whatever sort of false narratives make them feel like they're getting their fix. So gray rocking might work in an intimate relationship setting, for example, for a short period, but it's not a long-term strategy. If you are in a relationship where you feel like you're being gaslit or maybe after watching this episode, you're maybe facing that perhaps you are the one accidentally gaslighting people, brain pattern mapping is the easiest way to understand what your patterns of self-deception are, how your brain is distorting reality, and how that is influencing your behavior in a way that's creating some sort of chaos or conflict in your life. It only takes 20 minutes, and what you're going to learn about yourself has the ability to help you prevent toxic cycles for the rest of your life. I highly recommend it. The link will be in the show notes. You can also go to predictivemind.io, it only takes 20 minutes. You'll meet with somebody on our team or get the results online, depending on what option you pick, and what it will end up teaching you about who you are and how you see the world, literally profoundly life changing forever and ever. The most common thing we hear is you can't unsee what you see and break, because as soon as you start to see that distortion, it literally for many people's like seeing objective reality for the first time. If this episode helped you understand gaslighting and how people might not even realize they're doing it, I highly encourage you to share this episode, go hit the like button, subscribe on YouTube, write a comment, anything that engages with it because it helps us get the word out. And just remember, I'm so grateful. We are, I think last week we were number two in mental health through all the podcasts in the country. It's super exciting. Keep sharing. Keep telling people about it. My number one goal for this year is just to help as many people as possible. Break free mentally, emotionally. I also have a new program that is launching on, I think it's launching on the 20th. It's free until the 26th. I'm going to be putting it on my Instagram. It's called Renew your mind and it is a biblical, biblical approach to neuroscience and re-riring. And it's completely free until the 26th after the 26th of January. It'll be $119. I'm going to put those links on my Instagram. You can sign up there. It's going to be a 20 module course. So we're going to be in it for a while. We're going deep. And you know, it as it mentions, it's a biblical based approach. So you will need to whip out those bibles and have a little bit of trust that we're going somewhere, even if maybe you are someone who is triggered by religion. I totally got it. It's not going to be a Bible thumping, gilting and shaming program, but it is going to be something that helped people who are believers or are curious, understand the biblical roots of self-deception and what the Bible tells us. We should be doing two set ourselves free emotionally. I am also putting a discount code in the show notes for brain pattern mapping, which you can use on either the break method site or predictive binding. It will give you 20% off of our break method program. The code is bgheal as it is for all of our offers on the website. So 20% off of the online only version of our program, which usually is $8.99. It will now be 20% off. Just go ahead and grab those show notes. Break method takes about 20 weeks to complete. Some people complete it in 12. Some people complete it in like three years, jk, but also it's true. So we don't kick you out. You're there until you're done. And it's the work that I know I'm here to do. I love doing it and I hope to see you in one of those programs or at a minimum, at least figuring out what your brain pattern type is. I hope you enjoyed this brief episode on gaslighting and I will see you next week. Bye. Your brain isn't broken. It's running an old code. Break method is a system that maps your neurological patterns, decodes your emotional distortions, and rewires your behavior fast. No talk therapy spiral, no getting stuck in your feelings, just logic based rewiring in 20 weeks or less. Head to break method.com and see what your brain is really up to. Your brain is wired for deception, but here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen?