Of Flickers and Flames

Silly Kame... He makes me smile, and helps me remember happier days.

Gaslighting was a term coined by a movie. The villain of the piece adjusted the gas lamps so that they flickered at intermittent intervals, but only when his wife was in the room. He would then tell her that she was imagining things, that there was nothing wrong with the lamps. Bit by bit, he drove her to question her own sanity, her own perception of reality. His end game was to have her committed to a mental institution so that he could seize her considerable fortune.

Gaslighting has passed into the regular lingo of counselors and psychologists, to describe the behavior of certain narcissistic personalities. While gaslighting might be as simple and straightforward as making comments like "you're so sensitive", or "you're too emotional", it's not always that obvious. Sometimes it's acting shocked when you respond appropriately to outrageous behavior. When you express hurt at his (or her) behavior, the response is "you made me do it"... and there's always a reasonable (seemingly) explanation. You didn't keep the house clean enough. You didn't do what I wanted in bed. I'm not happy.

There's a lot of water under the bridge I've been crossing over the past year. There's a lot more to come. A marriage is never truly dissolved when children are involved. Although it would suit me to simply make a clean break, and move on with my life, a little sadder, a little wiser, than I was, my kids don't have that option. Some relationships can't be severed, nor should they be, in the absence of abuse.

I am struggling with finding balance. For my own mental health, I need distance. I need to remain free of the influence that has been a part of my life for so long, it's difficult not to believe, when I see the lights flicker, that my eyes are not deceiving me. Even when a lie is outright and obvious, false outrage can make me doubt. I have learned to verify, to be certain, before making an assertion, that I know reality, that I know the situation, before I ask the question, because it's the only way to be certain of the lie, to see the flicker and know what I'm seeing is real.

I've learned that there are very few things more painful than to be on the receiving end of a lie. The wounds lies leave fester, like a burn. I hope that, if nothing else comes out of this, that I can teach my kids the skill of honesty. Although I make every effort to keep my own disappointment and hurt from coloring their world, I hope I can break a cycle, and teach them to relate in healthy ways. I hope they will be better people than either of their parents, and that they will go on to create something new, something beautiful, out of the ashes of this defeat.



Journey safe, friends. And keep your eye on the lights. If they look like they're flickering... they probably are.

~Mary

~*~*~

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”
~Friedrich Nietzsche

“You can't stop the future
You can't rewind the past
The only way to learn the secret
...is to press play.”
~Jay Asher