I stumbled across this with perfect timing. A buddy of mine had just texted me that this week was rough and was a “test week”. Just sent it to him, which might not help his situation, but certainly made me feel better.
The concept of gaslighting has been diluted beyond recognition. It used to mean lying to someone with the goal of making them question their own sanity. Now, it just means lying.
You’re just making that up.
How can you be sure I’m making it up when your judgment is so unreliable?
You shouldn’t concern yourself with that, you know that you have a tendency to ask too many meaningless questions.
Right. If the advice was “tell yourself it’s not happening and you’re just being paranoid” I’d think it was gaslighting yourself.
but that’s what it says, the text in the picture is literally telling you to tell yourself it’s not happening, it’s something else.
No, it’s telling me that it is happening and it’s for my betterment and it will give me strength. Gaslighting myself would be saying it’s not happening and there’s nothing there, I’m just paranoid. What the picture is suggesting is that I console myself.
Hey if I’m going to be gaslit I might as well make it work in my favor sometimes too.
It’s called “change the way you think”, not gaslight(manipulate in the way that make the victim question their own sanity).
Lie to yourself until you believe it.
Ah, the Costanza method
I like to think of it as unlocking new thought technologies. Like a tech tree in a 4x game. Sometimes you have mental breakthroughs that legitimately open up new options. I recommend getting really stoned and talking to yourself in a mirror. Also, Disco Elysium.
It’s okay to be weak. But don’t dwell on it. Reflect on it and be awesome instead.
True story.
That’s how CBT works!
I often use stuff like that to deal with inability of getting a romantic partner. I just gaslight myself into believing “this ship has sailed for me, it’s better to accept it, I cannot be lucky with everything”. This usually works well, except I still tend to develop a crush on some person (usually a VTuber - they’re not normal people, and neither I am), which then pushes me into instant despair.
I was thinking about selling this tip to incels in some form, under the name “nirvana-pill”, but I don’t think they’d listen to it.
Someone from the CIA came up with that wikihow article.
I don’t actually know that for a fact, but it wouldn’t surprise me. We know that the CIA and FBI tried to get MLK to kill himself, and we know they introduced black people to crack in the 1980s
Why wouldn’t they try to accomplish a goal like what you see above?
We’ve pretty well created the conditions for abject desperation and criminalized despair, not to mention spending taxpayer dollars on stupid stuff instead of food, shelter, healthcare, education and infrastructure and made calling 911 for any reason deadly a lot of the time so yeah.
Since you brought it up, I’m unconvinced the introducing crack to black neighborhoods thing is entirely related. Pretty sure the CIA already had their hands full with a couple war(s) to take a huge interest in MLK when he was rallying against racism, it was more until he started speaking out for unions and against unchecked capitalism. During the social justice years they only smeared him with the out-of-context details of his extramarital affair to media outlets (TMZ level bullshit) in order to try to discredit him. Don’t get me wrong, he was a nuisance to them for exposing injustice but as soon as you get in the way of the dynastic wealth of very powerful families though, it’s a whole new ballgame. That’s when the assassination talks probably kicked into high gear.
