Olalekan Adebumiti
Imagine you walk up to a mirror.
You expect to see yourself clearly. Not perfect, but real. Grounded. Whole.
Someone who knows what they feel, what they saw, what they experienced.
And for a second, that is exactly what you see.
But then someone stands beside you.
And they begin to speak.
“Look closer.”
“That’s not really you.”
“You’re not seeing it properly.”
At first, you resist it.
You trust what you see.
But they keep talking.
They point out things you did not notice. They question things you were sure about. They slowly introduce doubt that are not loud but consistent.
And over time, something unsettling begins to happen.
The mirror has not changed.
But your confidence in what you are seeing starts to fade.
That is what gaslighting does.
It does not need to break the mirror. It only needs to make you distrust it.
Let’s look at the lies it tries to plant in you.
1. “You can’t trust your own memory”
You remember things.
Conversations. Promises. Moments that mattered.
At first, you hold onto them.
But after being told repeatedly that you are remembering things wrong, something begins to shift.
You start replaying events, not to understand them, but to check if you are mistaken.
You hesitate before saying, “I remember…”
Because now, even your own memory feels like something that needs verification.
And the more you question it, the less solid it feels.
2. “Your feelings are too much”
You feel deeply.
That has always been a part of you.
But now, every strong emotion gets labelled.
Too sensitive. Too dramatic. Too reactive.
So you begin to adjust.
You tone things down. You hold things in. You try to present your feelings in a way that will be more acceptable.
Until one day, you are no longer sure what your natural emotional response even looks like.
3. “You are the problem”
This one settles slowly.
It does not come all at once.
It builds through moments where you raise a concern and somehow leave feeling responsible for the tension.
You start to think, “Maybe if I handled things better, this wouldn’t happen.”
You begin to carry the weight of fixing what you did not break.
And the more you try, the more it feels like it keeps coming back to you.
4. “You misunderstand everything”
You used to trust your understanding.
Now, you second-guess it.
You listen more carefully. You analyse more deeply. You try to interpret things “correctly.”
But somehow, you still end up being told you got it wrong.
So you begin to rely less on your own interpretation and more on theirs.
Even when something inside you quietly disagrees.
5. “You are too difficult to love”
This one does not always come directly.
Sometimes it is implied.
Through frustration. Through withdrawal. Through the way your needs are responded to.
You start to feel like loving you requires too much.
That your emotions, your thoughts, your reactions are burdensome.
So you try to become easier.
Less expressive. Less demanding. Less present.
But in doing that, you slowly move away from yourself.
6. “You need them to understand what’s real”
This is where the mirror becomes distant.
Instead of looking at yourself and trusting what you see, you start looking at them.
For confirmation.
For clarity.
For what is real.
You begin to check with them before trusting your own experience.
“What really happened?”
“Did I get that wrong?”
“Am I thinking about this the right way?”
And without realising it, your sense of reality starts depending on them.
7. “You are not who you think you are”
This is the deepest lie.
Because it reshapes your identity.
The person you see in the mirror no longer feels fully reliable.
You question your intentions. Your reactions. Your personality.
You start wondering if you have been wrong about yourself all along.
And that uncertainty can feel heavy.
Because when you lose clarity about who you are, everything else begins to feel unstable too.
When You Start Looking at the Mirror Again
The truth is, the mirror never changed.
You did not suddenly become unreliable, too much, or difficult.
What changed was the voice beside you.
The one that kept introducing doubt, over and over, until it began to sound like your own.
But here is something important.
Doubt can be planted.
It can grow.
But it can also be unlearned.
And the first step is recognising that those thoughts did not start with you.
A Quiet Realisation
If you have been standing in front of that mirror, unsure of what you are seeing, you are not alone.
And more importantly, you are not broken.
Your clarity may feel shaken, but it is still there.
It has just been talked over for a while.
And slowly, gently, you can begin to listen to yourself again.
Please go ahead to read the post that helps to shift from what gaslighting does to you… to how it actually works.
It’s the 7 Manipulation Tactics Gaslighters Use in Relationships.
Once you understand the pattern, it becomes much harder for it to control you.
