Gaslighting: How ‘Nice Guys’ Maintain Control Over Women.

My Husband Persuaded My Teenage Daughter She Was Mentally Ill in Order To Alienate Me And Impress His New Girlfriend.

The term Gaslighting is understood well due to its’ use in popular culture. Gaslighting is more than ‘lying’ because, although it also involves falsehood, it is much deeper than just a lie. It involves systematically deconstructing and altering another persons perception of reality, in order to provide a false, but better (and more palatable) reality, within which the Gaslighter can exist. Some years after my divorce, I suddenly realised this is what my ‘kindly, nice guy’ ex husband had continually done to me during our marriage. Yet it took him Gaslighting my daughter into believing she was mentally ill — for me to finally see it.

I Divorced My Husband Because I Knew He Lied A Lot. About Everything.

My husband and I were already divorced by the time he tried to Gaslight my daughter — but we were divorced because we had already lost our home and our business because of his lying. I was that woman who suddenly found all the ‘final demand’ bills in a drawer when the bailiffs came by and repossessed our cars.

But him being simply ‘a liar’ would only have allowed him to change my perception of him and his behaviour. Yet, what he did throughout our marriage, was more insidious than just lying. Through a systematic and deliberate process of gaslighting, he sought to persuade me all that was ever wrong in our lives — in any given moment or at any given time (including his constant, dangerous dishonesty) was simply a matter of what was wrong with me.

He compassionately accepted all that was wrong with me, because he was the one who had fabricated these failings in the first place. My ex husband called this ‘love’. His support was performed persuasively, because my failings were just so innate — and my ex husband (a nice guy) did his best to manage me under difficult circumstances. Soldiering on with an air of resignation, he heroically navigated the landscape of my damaged psyche. But my ex husband was not so much of a hero after all, given the damaged psyche was not mine.

I Didn’t Realise He Was Gaslighting Until Years After We Separated

My ex husband had done such a terrific job of crafting a reality in our marriage, whereby the fault for everything was always mine (and he was just a nice guy trying to cope with it) I spent much of my time feeling inadequate as a mother, barely on the edge of sanity — and an abject failure as a good wife, constantly afraid to voice dissent because dissent was my problem. It was I who was broken after all, as I was reminded daily by him, and he was just ‘a nice guy’.

When we separated this narrative had become so ingrained it was I who moved out of our home, because I felt he must be the better parent. I couldn’t uproot him because he would be too devastated as he was — deep down — just a ‘nice guy’. Money was tight because it was I who wanted to separate from him which meant we would become two households. So, it was was I who focused on finding better paid work abroad, in order to better support our children (as well as him) back in the UK.

I found well-paid employment in the Middle East and it was during my time there, I returned home for a visit. I would come home as often as work permitted in order to see my children. My husband was at home taking care of them because it was important to keep school consistent.

This visit was both a disaster and an epiphany — the false narrative my husband had put forward since the divorce suddenly dropped from my understanding of these experiences like a stone and I clearly saw him actively Gaslighting my daughter into believing she was mentally ill.

He Tried to Gaslight My Daughter In Order To Impress A Woman

I took my 16 year-old son out for shopping, lunch and a nice day out. In the restaurant he explained he was really worried about his sister, and told me he thought his dad was trying to make my daughter develop a serious mental illness. As my son elaborated, several things became clear. My daughter had not been going to school regularly since I had left the UK and my ex husband had lied about that to me. My son explained she spent most days lying on the couch wearing pajamas and eating junk food. She had become withdrawn and uncommunicative.

Furthermore, my ex-husband had been telling everyone, including my daughter, she had a lot of mental health problems which were affecting her, so she was perhaps going to have to go on medication in order to cope. He had been suggesting my daughters’ mental health problems were caused by a combination of my move abroad to ‘start a new life on my own’, me not financially supporting the family. My abandonment. My son believed — in his own teenage way — that if it continued his sister would indeed ‘go mad’ because she had been so thoroughly persuaded she was suffering from a number of mental complaints. My ex husband was very supportive and sympathetic about her manifesting mental illness, so he allowed her to stay on the couch.

The School Believed His Story That I Abandoned My Family

I contacted both the children’s school and our doctor immediately after the conversation with my son, in order to find out what was going on. I remained incredibly calm and reasonable — carefully not demonstrating any emotion at all about what was going on. As I had come to realise, my ex-husband would use any negative expression of emotion from me towards him or any of his as further evidence of my inherent madness. I had been conditioned to only ever show positive emotions such as joy and happiness at all times. Otherwise I was ‘mad’.

During our school meeting, I was informed that my daughter had a 68% absenteeism rate. The school had become concerned some months back, and after several warnings had asked my ex-husband to sign a Parenting Contract. This was supposed to guarantee he would send my daughter to school, and yet she still did not attend. Now they had let social services know, in order for him to get family support. Having been a child cared for by social services for some time myself, this was like a journey into hell. I calmly explained to them that I am an academic with a Doctorate and a job as a university professor. I asked them at what point did we become a family that needed intervention by social services?

I asked the school why I had not been contacted at any time about this. My ex-husband informed the school I had disappeared from the family to work abroad. I had abandoned my family and therefore had no further parental rights. He instructed them to remove me from the parents contact list, and exclude me from any emails. He explained our daughter was suffering from various mental illness as a result of my actions, could not go to school and needed proper mental health support. My ex husband stated I had done this because I had a very bad childhood, which had left me quite mentally unstable, and this was something he had always tried his best to cope with — and protect our children from.

The Mental Illness(es) Which Simply Did Not Exist: Gaslighting

I telephoned the family doctor. She was baffled because she had not seen my daughter at all ever about these mental health issues, and her records demonstrated that my daughter had visited six months earlier — but for painful periods. No mental health issues were mentioned, and there had never been a suggestion my daughter had to be on medication or was suffering in any way. We agreed that I would bring my daughter into the surgery and the doctor would meet her and find out what was going. I suggested to my daughter that she speak privately with the doctor and be as honest and forthright as possible about any issues that had arisen.

My daughter had some blood tests which showed she was malnourished — but she did not appear to be mentally distressed or unwell. However, she did explain my ex husband had, in recent months met a new partner, who had three autistic and challenging children who suffered from a mix of quite severe mental health and behavioural issues. As a result of this new romantic attachment, my ex husband had become interested in mental health. What is also perhaps significant is his new partner herself had actually been abandoned, when her ex husband left both her and their children, and moved back to the USA with his lover to start a new family. It seemed evident my ex-husband was trying to creative a (false) narrative around his situation — in order to find common ground with his new partner.

I met with the school again, hired a solicitor, and both children were under my full-time care in less than two days. In a meeting with the school they informed me my ex husband had told them I had suffered from a lot of mental health issues myself, due to having been in local authority care and children’s home as a child. This narrative was a familiar one — he had frequently used my troubled past as leverage to fracture my sense of self with self doubt and anxiety over my role as a mother.

A Positive Outcome And The Restoration Of My Sense of Self

My children moved abroad with me, and this is where they have happily remained for a number of years. I realise my husband used the technique of Gaslighting as a way of deliberately controlling me throughout our entire married life. This story is just one example of one time, but he Gaslighted me in many ways. The most dangerous occasions however, were when he did it about my physical health, my mental health (and that of our children), and also quite catastrophically — our financial health.

I will write about what he did — because these occasions were equally as damaging, crushing and devastating as what happened to my daughter. During the years of our marriage, it had gradually dawned on me he pathologically lied about literally anything, the consequences of which eventually led to divorce. But he was not simply lying and lying is not Gaslighting. Understanding this took an awful lot longer, and it was only clear to me when he did it to my daughter.

The ‘Good Guy’ Who Gaslights To Control Those Around Him

My husband set about creating false narratives around our lives with such conviction, I lost track of what was real — and what was not. These were not just examples of lies, because he did not only lie about himself, but he lied to me about me and my perception of reality, and it took me years to recover my sense of self as a result. It became clear when I faced the false narratives he spun to health professionals, his new partner, our children and the school.

The difficulty was, it was impossible for me to stand up for myself against a ‘nice guy’ like him — when my own background was just so broken. When you carry ‘a hard childhood’ it can be hard to assess what is normal in terms of how people relate to you and indeed how you relate to them. You are very vulnerable to the distortion of reality that Gaslighting brings. But I could never allow him to Gaslight my children and I saw it and this was when I said ‘enough’.

I realised from this experience I had never have been crazy. And my ex husband well — he was never really ‘a nice guy’ after all.