Gaslighting as a Parenting Method

Wow, I've learned so much about "Gaslighting" in the last week. Gaslighting is an extreme form of emotional and psychological abuse. The term comes from a movie from way back when. A Gaslighter defines your reality to be what they want. They dismiss and invalidate your perceptions and emotions of your experiences of the world around you. They may cause a problem, then tell you that you are the cause of it and that your perceptions and feelings are invalid. They may either give a blanket invalidation of "if you feel hurt by anything done to you, you are mentally unstable", or go back and define each event invalidating you, telling you that you were wrong in each event. Here is the new learning this week: People can gaslight themselves. Wait, what? Yeah. An individual who comes to a point that they realize that they cannot handle the emotions they feel for the events they've endured, when they are finally overloaded may tell themselves that they themselves are invalid. Then they graduate to become a gaslighter themselves. If they can't handle their own emotions and perceptions they can't handle the emotions of perceptions of others. While we can often read about gaslighting in abusive adult relationships, gaslighting actually begins in early childhood, it begins with a crying child. When the child cries, do you address their concerns and resolve them, or command them to stop crying, or find ways to "make them stop crying"? When you merely invalidate a distressed child rather than showing empathy and understanding, you are in fact, gaslighting. A child may be told to "stop feeling sorry for yourself", or "stop being a baby", or "you're just spoiled". The gaslighter will just use more psychological abuse to stop the distressed child's behavior rather than showing empathy to the child. Souls are nuclear power plants. If you sit like Homer Simpson at the desk of a Nuclear Power Plant and just adjust a dial to get the desired readings without actually getting to the bottom of the problem events will not go as desired. You can perform every righteous act as defined in the gospel of Jesus Christ, but if you invalidate the experiences and feelings of others, you do not have empathy and therefore do not have charity. If you want to live the Gospel of Jesus Christ, you must have EMPATHY. that means respecting the experiences of a child and respecting the experiences of those around you. If you are invalidating others you are not a follower of Jesus Christ. Oh, and if you are gaslighting those you serve while you serve, yeah that's not going to go well. In homes where gaslighting is practiced, it is learned! The children in these homes will gaslight each other and never learn to respect the feelings and experiences of others.