Someone recently told me that they sometimes feel gaslighted around me because I effortlessly make them question their beliefs and feelings. Hearing that didn’t sit well with me, especially since I’ve been pondering the question in the title for quite some time.
I’ve always been quite critical of myself and don’t consider myself a very nice person. When I discover that someone doesn’t enjoy being around me, I don’t blame them one bit. It’s not like I’m intentionally mean or abusive; quite the opposite, actually. I have very strong morals. However, this includes things like not lying, which means I always speak the truth, even if not everyone likes hearing it. I don’t conform to many social norms expected of me.
Despite all of this, I have deep relationships with several people and especially the elderly and for example the parents of my past girlfriends have all liked me a lot. But I can’t help but wonder why they don’t see me as I see myself. I worry that I’m hiding the true me so well that people don’t actually like me, but rather the facade I unknowingly maintain. Then again, a true psychopath probably wouldn’t be second-guessing themselves in this manner.
You should talk to a therapist.
Asking this question and being self critical is a good sign.
Being told you are gaslighting is NOT necessarily a sign you are a psychopath. They could be gas lighting you. Or you could just have some other blind spots about your own behavior.
People throw gaslighting around willy nilly now, so it could jest mean OP made them think about some opinion they had.
It’s very hard to say without knowing the person, but I think your advice is good.
You should talk to a therapist.
Definitely. This.
It’s really the only good answer OP is likely to get on the internet.
You sound like someone on the ASD spectrum - honest, principled, not confirming to social norms, overthinking. You had to mask to survive, yes, so obviously there is a facade, but that don’t make you a thief. You are thoughtful & intelligent, & capable of using logic to steer the conversation, but that don’t make you manipulative. You are honest man with morals, how can you not be kind? Why don’t you consider yourself a nice person?
For what it’s worth, ADHD folks tend not to fit social norms, either, and have blind spots about their behavior and how people perceive them.
I had ADHD but also read this as ASD.
There is a lot of overlap with ASD and ADHD symptoms/behaviors.
They might be a psychopath. Considering how they got this person on their side with like 3 paragraphs of text. My conclusion, I’m not ruling it out.
Why don’t you consider yourself a nice person?
I’m a bit arrogant at times and have very little patience with people I don’t find interesting. If I like my own company better than being around someone else they’ll probably going to notice. I also find most topics that “normies” talk about to be extremely uninteresting which is why for the most of the time I just remain silent and then when I do open my mouth it’s often something that goes against the common narrative or just otherwise is easy to misunderstand. Then there’s often this one guy in that group who later comes to me in private and tells me that they totally agree with what I said earlier. Those are the people I then bond with.
Yep, ASD. We are intelligent. We are perfectionists. We take our sweet time to learn about the world around us. Once we’ve learnt about something, we are quite sure of it, & hence we’re strongly opinioniated on things we know. Stupidity, and not being able to see things correctly may even ‘trigger’ us, & hence we can come across as arrogant. We can see the forest for the trees, but we lose our minds because the rest of the world only sees the trees for the trees.
Someone recently told me that they sometimes feel gaslighted around me
Are you sure that they know what that word means? Most of the time I see the word gaslighting, they actually mean something else.
What does it mean? It’s a relatively new term and I’ve seen it used to describe everything from accidental logical fallacies to being short-changed at the liquor store
I’m going to try to explain the origins from memory so someone who knows more will probably explain better.
It comes from an book or a movie, where a husband is planning something nefarious (don’t remember if it’s a murder or something) and he uses the attic of his house to do it. This is set back in the days when they used gas for lighting things and when he turns on the lighting in the attic, it causes the lights to change (probably get dimmer) in the rest of the house. His wife notices this and brings it up to him, since he obviously doesn’t want to reveal that he is the one causing it, he constantly convinces his wife that it’s all in her head and that she might be losing her mind.
From the wiki article describing the play/movie the phrase comes from:
“In the story, the husband secretly dims and brightens the indoor gas-powered lighting but insists his wife is imagining it, making her think she is going insane.”
Imo it’s when someone is deceived by a person who lies about the actual state of affairs/reality to make the other person question what they experienced as credible. I don’t think that’s the same as when someone helps question beliefs in general because skepticism is good to make sure we aren’t self deluding, but if that person is lying about reality to manipulate them it becomes bad/gaslighting.
Another example I think is from it’s always sunny in Philadelphia in the episode where Dennis and Mac go to live in the suburbs and Mac asks Dennis if he hears a beeping the audience can hear and Dennis says he can’t until he blows up saying of course he can when berating Mac. Dennis is angry at Mac and in retaliation he gaslights him about the annoying beeping sound to manipulate him into questioning if the beeping is real or an audio hallucination.
Edit: just realized it’s possible it’s always sunny was doing an homage to Gaslight in that episode as they’ve done similar things in the past with other older movies and TV shows
Hey, thanks for taking the time to reply to my hasty, poorly put together message. The point I was trying to make was that the original meaning has been lost when the word became popular. It is a somewhat obscure word with a loose definition based on an obscure reference and it describes something for which the language was more than ready to describe anyway. I think that instead of telling people to try and use the word correctly, one should tell then to not use it at all.
Gaslighting is the process of making someone question their own beliefs. It’s usually seen in the context of abusive relationships, but any person can gaslight any other person in whatever context (i.e., politics, etc).
No, that is exactly the over-broad, willy-nilly, tossed-around definition they were talking about. Gaslighting has a much more insidious context than simply making someone question themselves. It means doing it on purpose; intentionally lying to someone and trying to convince them that they’re crazy. Like if I said I was going to the grocery and then when I came back with nothing, I insisted I never said that. Or if i borrowed $50 and when it came time to pay you back, I try to tell you I only borrowed $25. It’s inherently deceptive and cruel.
It’s not really beliefs in the general sense, it’s making them question reality, their memory, their reasons for doing things.
Plus with the context of malicious intent and lying.
Getting a racist to question their racist beliefs isn’t gaslighting, but would fit the vague definition of getting someone to question their reality, their memory, and their reason for doing things when they have fallen into racist dogma.
Not to be an armchair psychologist over here (you should probably see a therapist) but it sounds more like autism, not psychopathy.
You’re probably right - or atleast less wrong. I don’t really think it’s psychopathy either.
“To be autistic is to be misunderstood”
I have ASD and I have historically worried about the same thing, as has my sister. From the outside ASD and psychopathy can look similar to untrained eyes. The biggest “tell” is how you feel (or dont feel) inside.
I recommend looking into Autistic Masking to see if that explains the “alter ego” you seemed to describe earlier.
While you’re researching this, I will tell you that autism is probably the one thing where you will have better luck listening/talking to other autistic people than to just read data from something like the DSM-5. There are a lot of YouTube people with various profiles of autism and I have had far better luck learning from them and an autistic friend than anything clinical.
There are also different profiles of ASD. The main ones are:
- Classic Autism
- Asperger’s (now called HFA or High Functioning Autism, but there is still a LOT of info out there from when it was still called Asperger’s)
- PDA or Pathological Demand Avoidance So be sure to check out all of them before thinking you aren’t just because one doesn’t fit. I thought I wasn’t autistic for YEARS because I did not know the right profile.
Long story short, ASD is HUGE and largely not understood. If you have questions, shoot me a message. As you look around, I’m sure you’ll learn about Autistic Special Interests. Psychology and especially ASD are mine, so I’m happy to
rantteach about it forever.Good luck in your journey!
It doesn’t seem like you’re a sociopath, it seems like you have ASD. That kind of analytical, no nonsense approach to socialization is typical of high functioning ASD.
It might be worth looking into, of for no other reason than to better understand yourself
Sounds like the absolute worst version of imposter syndrome. You doubt everything you are and believe, because you might have some sort of mental illness. Not knowing what that mental illness is you assume the worst possible one.
Oof. Don’t worry. You’re just who you are. All your accomplishments are real. All your values are valid. Anyone can feel gaslit, honestly memory itself is very shaky. For example tell me exactly what you did 12 days ago. Tell me what you had for lunch that day.
If it’s still bugging you just go talk to a therapist. Every person, mentally well or not should see a therapist at least once. There is no shame in exploring your pysche.
Well I wasn’t going to comment because I thought everyone here was going to say “you’re describing everyone we all feel that way” but I guess not haha
Everything you said in your original post is something I’ve said when describing myself to my SO or friends. I’ve been called condescending and I’ve worked very hard to not be that way. Sometimes when I start hanging out with someone new or get a new coworker I can tell by first impressions they aren’t going to like me. Nowadays I can usually turn it around but in the past I would just try not to bother them. People will say “why do you hate me?” and it will catch me off guard because I dont feel that way at all.
I’m also told I can be very argumentative. I get that less now as I am more aware of it, but people who know me know that I am passionate about my opinions.
I don’t have any advice besides thank people who give you feedback. Being yourself doesn’t mean not working on your social skills, they can be trained like anything else. I’ve definitely learned better habits, I have more and closer friends through years of work and introspection.
Also you are not a psychopath and there isn’t anything wrong with you. Most likely your social type isn’t the majority and you have to work a bit harder to gel with the mainstream. Its just something to be aware of. I often feel like my '“true self” is hidden from others, so I try to be as real as possible with my SO and my closest friends.
I relate to this. People who know me know that my thoughts and the things I say can be quite challenging. I’ve never been one to simply accept what’s considered acceptable. I always question everything, I’m always thinking about how things can change and be different.
I’m always hoping to help people see what can improve their lives, but sometimes it’s not our place to say things or do things to help other people like that. A lot of people don’t want someone who can see their weakness and try to show them a way to improve, it’s demeaning and insulting to most people.
I’ve always tried to have a positive outlook on constructive criticism, but what constitutes constructive criticism and something further is a lot different for one person than it is for the next.
Also, I should clarify that sometimes what we think is the right path to solving an issue isn’t always the right path for someone at all. It’s a huge presumption to think that we can analyze a person’s life and make the best choices for them. Heck, I can hardly even do that with my own life, let alone someone else’s.
Hey, not diagnosing or anything, but maybe give my other comment a once-over and see if it resonates at all.
It’s almost a guarantee that I have some form of ADHD.
Hey, not diagnosing or anything, but maybe give my other comment a once-over and see if it resonates at all.
are you sure it isn’t autism
Or complex PTSD. That’s what I have and the two have a TON of behavioral overlap. My therapist and I spent a good amount of time determining if I was autistic or not.
Is there a name for that kind of PTSD?
cPTSD or ‘complex PTSD’ is literally the name for it. Here’s more info from people smarter than me: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24881-cptsd-complex-ptsd
im interested in that. I have every symptom of every type of removedation
There’s a great book called Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. It’s mostly a primer on how CPTSD works but does have content on what to do about it. Just putting a name to things is huge.
I started with the audiobook, primarily listening to it on my drive home. I knew it had nailed it for me when I realized I had spent an entire week’s worth of commutes home rage crying.
<3
I was about to say the same thing, I have literally had this exact thought process and last year got diagnosed…
Maybe it’s maybelline maybe it’s ASD.
Feel free to message me if you have questions, I’m dealing with it all at the moment :/
Are you capable of feeling guilt or remorse? If so you are probably not a psychopath. If not you might have some traits. In any case you might want to see a professional.
Also autism is often mistaken for some degree of psychopathy. As an autist I have personal experience with this.
Oh definitely. I just had a spider get stuck on a glue trap meant for thrips and I felt bad the whole day.
From the comfort and authority of my armchair, as a (fake) psychologist, I declare that you can’t be a psychopath if you feel guilty about a spider (and other beings, especially humans).
I think of gaslighting as manipulation of a victim by an abusive person by causing the victim to doubt their own feelings and perceptions, thereby gaining control over them. They do this by convincing the victim that what they are feeling and observing is false and the fault of the victim rather than the abuser.
This has a better explanation and some clear examples:
https://www.newportinstitute.com/resources/mental-health/what_is_gaslighting_abuse/
Psychopathy is a popular catch-all term. “Low-empathy” is better, but I think you’re just a critical person and most people don’t like criticism or self-reflection.
I’ve had similar concerns about myself. I’ve started therapy and found out that I’m suffering from toxic shame - something originating in childhood, developing as you age, and comprehensively modifying behavior in adulthood to include masking, dissociation, lack of emotional connection, inhumanly strong moral guidelines/standards, etc. I’d suggest at least looking up the concept of toxic shame. Also, give yourself some credit and some love; whatever the cause, it’s almost certain that your behavioral patterns were set by forces outside of your control and it sounds like you’ve managed it well
To add on: questioning and reflecting on your behaviors is the first step.
I’m definitely guilty of some of this too and being more mindful of it has been… a process… that isn’t easy but helps me a lot.
Just out of curiosity: When you say you always speak the truth, is that truth you speak always something negative?
Yeah, there’s an important distinction between genuine honesty and an asshole who “just tells it like it is”.
Also a difference between “always tells the truth” and “always says all of what’s on their mind”.
Like if someone asks if they look good in an outfit , there’s a very large range of truthful replies. Some are more hurtful than others.
No, it means I don’t say things that are untrue. If I can without lying avoid saying what I know someone doesn’t want to hear I prefer to do that. But if you ask for my opinion you’re going to get it.
Username checks out?
Yes. But then I remember I’m not smart enough to do that.
Well if you’re capable of worrying about it that means you’re not a psychopath. Sounds more like you think critically about subjects and raise points that they never considered.
Now you may not be bringing those points up nicely, or maybe abruptly, or lack of grace. That you’ll have to explore yourself. It really depends on the nature of your conversations/debates/attitude.
Life advice for everyone, read “How to win friends and influence people”.
No of course not. If I’m a psychobath I wouldn’t worry about it.
