Gaslighting: When Doubt Becomes the Weapon

You’re not sure when it started, maybe it was the way they’d brush off your feelings, or how their version of events never quite matched yours. You began to question yourself, replaying conversations in your head, wondering if you were the one who got it wrong.

That slow erosion of trust in your own perception? That’s gaslighting.

What Is Gaslighting, Really?

Gaslighting isn’t just lying. It’s not simply disagreeing. It’s a deliberate (though not always conscious) pattern of manipulation designed to make you question your reality, your memory, and even your sanity.

The term comes from the 1944 film Gaslight, where a husband slowly convinces his wife she’s losing her mind by dimming the gaslights in their home and then denying it’s happening. She comes to doubt her senses, her instincts, and eventually, herself.

Modern gaslighting may not involve flickering lights, but the effect is just as disorienting.

The Subtle Mechanics of Gaslighting

Gaslighting works slowly. It’s not usually one explosive moment, it’s the accumulation of a thousand small ones:

• “You’re too sensitive.”

• “That never happened.”

• “You’re imagining things again.”

• “Why would you even think that? What’s wrong with you?”

Over time, the gaslighter shifts the ground beneath you. You stop trusting your memory. You hesitate before speaking. You second-guess your instincts. You begin to wonder if maybe they’re right. Maybe you are too sensitive, too emotional, too dramatic, too much.

But gaslighting isn't about the truth. It’s about power.

Why It Hurts So Much

Gaslighting doesn’t just confuse you, it disconnects you from yourself. From your intuition. From your internal compass. That’s what makes it so devastating.

And it doesn’t always happen in abusive relationships. It can occur in friendships, families, workplaces, and even in broader social systems. Anywhere there’s a power imbalance and a fear of being wrong, gaslighting can creep in.

It’s especially dangerous because it hides inside love, loyalty, and longing. You want to believe the other person has your best interests at heart. You want to keep the peace. You want to be fair. But gaslighting turns those very desires against you.

What It Can Sound Like

Gaslighting often shows up in language like:

• “You’re remembering it wrong.”

• “You always make everything about you.”

• “You’re being paranoid.”

• “You know I didn’t mean it like that.”

• “You’re blowing this out of proportion.”

Sometimes, it's more subtle. It’s a raised eyebrow, a dismissive shrug, a silent treatment that makes you feel like you're the problem for even bringing something up.

How to Recognize It

If you’re unsure whether you’re being gaslit, look for signs in yourself:

• You feel like you're walking on eggshells.

• You frequently second-guess your thoughts and feelings.

• You apologize constantly, even when you’re not sure what you did wrong.

• You feel confused, anxious, or “off,” but can’t explain why.

• You find yourself defending someone who hurts you.

These are not signs of weakness. They are signs that your nervous system is working overtime to make sense of something that doesn't make sense.

Healing From Gaslighting

Gaslighting isolates you from your truth. Healing means coming back home to yourself.

• Start by trusting your gut again. That uneasy feeling you keep pushing away? Listen to it.

• Keep a journal. Write things down so your reality has a place to live outside of someone else’s distortion.

• Talk to someone safe. A therapist. A friend. Someone who believes you, without twisting your words.

• Set boundaries. You don’t owe anyone unlimited access to your mind and emotions, especially someone who manipulates them.

Most importantly, remember this: if someone consistently makes you feel small, confused, or crazy, that is not love. That is control.

You Are Not Broken

Gaslighting doesn’t work because you’re weak. It works because you’re human. It works because you want connection, because you’re willing to self-reflect, because you care.

The antidote to gaslighting is not convincing the other person to see you clearly. It’s reclaiming your own clarity. Your voice. Your inner truth.

You don’t have to doubt yourself forever. The path back to trust, your trust, is still there. Waiting for you.

When Love Gets Tough, Liking Each Other Matters Most

Love is often painted as the glue that holds a couple together. And it is. But love can also be elusive in hard moments, when trust is frayed, when exhaustion outweighs affection, when the past barges into the present, uninvited. In those moments, it isn’t always love that carries you through. It’s something quieter, often overlooked, but no less vital:

Do you like each other?

Not in the heady, “we like all the same music” kind of way. But in the deeper, steadier sense. Do you like who your partner is when the romantic fog lifts? Do you like how they treat people, how they speak about their friends, how they respond when things don’t go their way? Do you like how they repair after hurting you, or try to?

Because here’s the truth: Love can survive for a time without liking. But a relationship can’t thrive that way.

In therapy, I often see couples who love each other deeply but are worn down by resentment, criticism, and chronic disappointment. They say things like, “Of course I love him… I just can’t stand being around him right now.” Or, “I know she loves me, but I don’t think she respects me anymore.” What they're describing isn’t a lack of love. It’s the absence of liking.

Liking makes room for playfulness when things feel heavy, and for patience when everything else is fraying. It’s what allows you to say, “I’m furious with you right now, and I still want to sit next to you on the couch.”

Liking someone means you still see their humanity, even when you're hurt. It means you remember what’s good about them, even when what's hard feels the loudest. It’s the thing that helps you reach for their hand not because everything is okay, but because you both want it to be.

So if you’re in a rough patch, ask yourself not just “Do I still love them?” but “Do I still like them?” And if the answer feels distant, don’t panic. That distance can be closed. Sometimes liking each other again is a process of rediscovery: learning how to laugh together again, how to listen without defensiveness, how to be curious about each other instead of critical.

Love may be the heart of the relationship. But liking is what lets that heart keep beating, even when it’s bruised.

Because when love gets hard, and it always will, it’s liking each other that reminds us why we ever wanted to try in the first place.

The Illusion of Fireworks: A MFT's Take on the Meaning of Independence

There’s a strange hollowness that can accompany holidays, especially the ones draped in symbols of triumph.

Every year on July 4th, we gather under exploding skies to celebrate our country’s independence. The rituals are familiar: red-white-and-blue paper plates, the smoky scent of barbecue, kids with sparklers, adults with beer. And, of course, the fireworks.

But what are we really celebrating?

From my perspective, the word “independence” doesn’t signal freedom in the way we often think. It’s not the clean severance, the heroic autonomy, the myth of the self-made individual. It’s something murkier. More painful. More intimate. And perhaps less celebratory than we’d like to admit.

Because real independence doesn’t come in a burst of light. It comes slowly, and with grief.

The Myth of Self-Mastery

Many of us are taught from a young age that independence is the goal. To not need, to not rely, to not feel beholden. We internalize the idea that the stronger I am, the less I need you. That to be free is to be disentangled. So we become high-functioning, high-achieving, self-contained… independent.

But in the therapy room, we often find that this “independence” is actually a defense, a shield against longing, vulnerability, dependency. Behind the self-sufficiency is often an ache. A child who learned that their needs were too much. A teen who couldn’t afford to rebel without losing safety. An adult who keeps everything and everyone together, all the while wondering why they feel so alone.

Dependence Is Not the Enemy

I want to invite us to reimagine dependence not as weakness, but as a necessary condition for growth. We never stop needing others, not as infants, not as adults. What changes is the way we relate to our need.

In therapy, independence is not an endpoint. It’s a process of differentiation that happens in the context of deep relationship. Not “I don’t need you,” but “I can be me while staying in connection with you.” That is a far more complicated kind of freedom. One that requires us to feel our dependency, to tolerate the anxiety of being known, to risk that our autonomy will not cost us love.

It is excruciating. And it is worth everything.

Legacy and Lineage

Then there’s the collective unconscious, the inherited emotional history we carry, especially in this country. Our national origin story is one of rebellion, conquest, and independence. But also one of disavowed trauma like colonization, genocide, slavery, and silenced grief. There is no true independence without reckoning. Without acknowledging who paid the price for our freedom.

For many clients, especially those from marginalized communities, July 4th doesn’t feel like a celebration. It feels like a rupture. A reminder of who was never invited into the dream. Therapy often becomes a space where people begin to untangle these intergenerational legacies, what it means to be “free” in a system that was never built for you. Or to carry the burden of ancestral survival while also trying to find space to rest, to soften, to become.

The Fireworks Inside

So maybe the question is not whether we feel proud or patriotic. Maybe the better question is: Where am I still trying to become free?

What internal colonizers still rule my psyche? What parts of me have been silenced, enslaved, exiled? Where have I declared independence prematurely, cutting off connection, numbing emotion, dissociating from need, in the name of “strength”?

And what would it mean, truly, to come home to myself?

Because sometimes, the path to freedom is not a declaration. It’s a quiet, painstaking journey back to the parts of us we left behind in order to survive.

This Independence Day, if the fireworks feel too loud, too bright, too performative, that’s okay. You’re not ungrateful. You might just be in touch with a deeper truth, that real liberation is internal. Slow. Messy. Full of contradiction. And absolutely worth the fight.

Even if no one’s watching.

Even if there are no fireworks.

The Ache to Be Alike: When the Threat of Differences Show Up in a Couple's Therapy Room

They sat on opposite ends of the couch, barely looking at each other.

He crossed his arms. She looked out the window.

I had asked a simple question, something about what made them feel safe with each other when things were good. She didn’t answer right away. He spoke first.

“I just want us to be on the same page, just like we used to be. We liked the same music, wanted the same things. Now everything’s a debate.”

She sighed. Not an eye-roll exactly, but the kind of sigh that carries years of trying to explain something that doesn’t translate.

“We weren’t the same,” she said quietly. “You just never noticed I was editing myself.”

That’s when I knew we weren’t just talking about conflict. We were brushing against something deeper… twinship.

He wasn’t trying to dominate her. In fact, he was tender in his own way, eager to repair, to fix, to understand. But underneath that urgency was a fear I could feel in the room. “If we’re different, maybe we’re not okay.”

And for her, that sameness he longed for didn’t feel like connection. It felt like annihilation.

Like being asked to disappear in order to stay loved.

In the language of self psychology, twinship lives in the ache to feel “like” someone else. Not similar in tastes or politics or morning routines, but in essence. In one’s emotional makeup. In what it means to be a person moving through this world.

When that need goes unmet in early life, we carry it with us. Some people try to recreate it in adult relationships. Not consciously, not manipulatively. But with a quiet desperation, “If you and I are the same, then I know I belong. Then I know I’m real.”

But when the other person starts to individuate, to assert difference, it stirs up something ancient. Panic. Threat.

Over time, he began to realize he wasn’t asking her to agree with him, he was asking her to make him feel safe.

And she began to see that underneath his need for sameness wasn’t entitlement, but vulnerability.

That shifted things.

He said one day, “I didn’t know that asking you to see things my way was really me asking, do you still see me at all?”

And she cried. Because she finally heard him, not as someone trying to control her, but as someone trying to not disappear.

This is what twinship does in couples, it whispers the lie that we have to be the same to be close. That if you are different from me, I might vanish.

And so often, that whisper is coming from an early wound, the child part of us that never quite felt mirrored, never quite felt like we belonged.

But in the therapy room, when we can name that fear, when a partner can say, “I don’t need you to be me, I just need to know you see me and you’re not leaving,” it creates room for a deeper kind of intimacy.

Not built on sameness, but on recognition. Recognition that different is not a threat. Different is simply different.

Now, they still don’t agree on everything. They still bump into difference. But something’s changed.

Less fear, more curiosity. Less performance, more presence. Less defensiveness, more openness.

And maybe that’s the gift of therapy, not to erase the differences between us, but to help us hold the differences in each of us, without feeling like we’re losing ourselves.

Because sometimes, the most healing thing in the world isn’t to be the same.

It’s to be seen as different, and loved anyway.

Why We Push Away the People We Love

If you’ve ever caught yourself shutting down, picking a fight, or pulling away from someone you deeply care about, you’re not alone.

And you’re not broken.

In fact, I see this all the time in couples therapy:
People come in frustrated, confused, and hurt.
One says:

“I just want to feel close to them.”
The other responds:
“Then why does it feel like you’re always pushing me away?”

It’s one of the most painful and confusing things about relationships.
When we finally get the closeness, connection, and safety we want something inside us tightens instead of softening.

This Isn’t About Love. It’s About Protection.

What most people don’t realize is that when we push someone away, we’re usually not trying to hurt them.
We’re trying to protect something vulnerable inside ourselves.

The closer someone gets to our most tender parts like our fears, our needs, and our sense of worth, the more likely it is that old defenses come online.

Defenses aren’t always bad behavior to fix. They can be creative, protective strategies. They were built to survive emotional risk, and often, we are doing the best we can with what we learned early on.

Common Defenses in Relationships (That Don’t Always Look Like Defenses)

Here are a few protective strategies I see show up again and again in couples:

• Withdrawal / Emotional Detachment
  “I don’t want to fight, so I just go numb or disappear.”
  Often learned in homes where emotional intensity felt overwhelming or unsafe.

• Criticism / Control
  “If I can get them to do it right, then I’ll finally feel safe.”
  Underneath is often a fear of abandonment or emotional chaos.

• Sarcasm / Intellectualizing
  “If I can make a joke of this or analyze it to death, I won’t have to feel it.”
  Protects from vulnerability by staying in the head, not the heart.

• Shame-Based Self-Blame
  “If I’m the problem, then at least I have some control.”
  Learned when love felt conditional or tied to performance.

• Avoidance of Intimacy
  “I want connection, but when it starts to happen, I panic.”
  Often shows up in people with anxious-avoidant attachment histories.

And here's the thing: these strategies usually made perfect sense at some point in your life, and they actually worked.

They helped you survive emotional environments that didn’t feel fully safe, consistent, or attuned.
But in adult relationships, those same strategies can backfire, especially when both partners are protecting and neither feels truly seen.

Defenses Are Adaptive… Until They Aren’t

 Defenses are meaningful adaptations of where you had to find a workaround to stay in relationship.

But as we grow, defenses that once kept us safe can become walls that keep others out.

The very moment that calls for softness and closeness might be the moment your system says: “This is too risky.”

It’s not because you don’t love your partner.
It’s because your body remembers what it felt like to need and not receive.
To love and be disappointed.
To be vulnerable and unprotected.

In the Therapy Room, We Listen Differently

In relational psychotherapy, we’re not trying to strip away defenses or shame them into submission.

Instead, we get curious.

We wonder together:

• What part of you is trying to protect you right now?

• Where did this strategy first make sense?

• What is this defense afraid will happen if you let it go?

Often, the answer is incredibly tender.

“If I let myself need them, and they don’t come through, I’ll fall apart.”
“If I show them how much I care, and they leave, I won’t be alone.”
“If I stay quiet, I don’t have to risk hearing that I’m too much.”

Once we slow things down and hear the fear under the defense, the relationship starts to shift.

Defenses Begin in Relationship—And Heal There, Too

One of the hardest truths is also one of the most hopeful:
We learned to protect ourselves in relationship. And we can learn to trust again in relationship, too.

When couples begin to name and understand each other’s defenses, not as flaws, but as signs of old pain, something softens. There’s more room for compassion. Less blaming. More safety to show up with the raw stuff.

It’s not quick work. But it’s deeply human.

A Personal Note

If you find yourself pushing away the person you love, try offering yourself some gentleness first. That push isn’t cruelty, it’s caution.

It means something inside you still wants to be protected.

And if you’re the partner being pushed away, try to remember: the withdrawal, the anger, the shutting down, these are strategies, not the whole story.

There’s almost always something underneath.

 Want support decoding your defenses—together?

I work with couples and individuals who are tired of repeating the same painful patterns and ready to understand what’s happening underneath.

If you're ready to explore why you protect yourself the way you do, and what it might mean to feel safe with someone else, let’s talk.

Feel free to reach out, and schedule a free consultation.

You don’t have to keep pushing love away.

The Myth of the Perfect Fit: Why Healthy Relationships Need Friction

I cant tell you how many times I’ve heard couples say something like this:

“Why is this relationship so hard!”

“Why can’t they just meet my need without me telling them?”

“If they could just understand me…”

I get it. We all grow up with some version of the idea that the “right” relationship should feel effortless. That we are supposed to find “the person,” to fall in love with, and everything just works.

But the truth of it is, healthy love needs friction.

Friction is not necessarily a sign that things are broken or wrong. It’s often the substance that creates relationships to grow.

Where the “Perfect Fit” Fantasy Comes From

Many of us enter relationships carrying hopes that we are not even fully aware of. Deep down, we might be longing for someone who just “gets us” without us needing to explain. Someone who will soothe our fears, meet our needs without asking, and understands us.

That hope often comes from very early experiences, like the times we were held, and the times we were let down. There are experiences from childhood that tell us, “Maybe this time, it will different. Maybe this time, I’ll get what I didn’t get.”

It’s tender. It’s human. And it’s also a fantasy. No partner, no matter how loving and connected they are, can fully meet our needs. But every fantasy tells a story of deep meaning and longing.

Friction is Where Growth Happens

What looks like “we are not a perfect match,” is often just two people bumping into each other’s stories. One person might pull away when they feel overwhelmed. The other might reach for closeness when they are scared. Both reactions make sense in context, but without understanding, they can feel like rejection or attack.

That bump, what we often call conflict or misalignment, isn’t a flaw in the relationship. It’s the start of a deeper conversation. It’s the chance to ask:

What is this really about?

When couples can get curious instead of reactive, friction becomes an opportunity not a threat.

Letting Go of the Fantasy

Loving someone means you’re going to hurt each other sometimes. Not intentionally hurt each other, but because you are human, and you are two different people, with two different stories, and you both have lived through pain, it’s inevitable.

But it also means you have the chance to show up in ways that maybe no one has before. To listen more deeply. To slow down. To stay emotionally present when things get hard.

And over time, that kind of love can start to rewrite old stories, not by being perfect, but by being willing to stay connected, present, and open.

Love That Includes Friction

The kind of love that really changes us isn’t about seamless compatibility. Let’s be honest eventually that would get boring and dull. It’s about having the courage to stay connected even when it’s messy. Especially when it’s messy.

The rub is where your story meet’s your partner’s story. Where old wounds collide. Where something vulnerable longs to be seen.

And when you both choose to stay open, curious, and kind, you are not just building a relationship. You are building something deep and healthy.

Ready to Grow Through the Friction

If you and your partner are stuck in a loop, or feel like you keep hitting a wall, you are not alone and you are not broken. This might actually be the doorway into something deeper and more meaningful.

I specialize in helping couples navigate these turning points with compassion and depth. If you are ready to explore the emotional undercurrents in your relationship and reconnect in a more meaningful way, I am here to help.

Feel free to reach out for a free consultation.

You don’t need a perfect fit, you just need two willing hearts and a safe space to do the work.

13 Things You Do Because of Anxiety

I came across this video the other day and thought it briefly summed up common symptoms of anxiety. After #5 they do a short advertisement for their sponsor, so make sure to stay with it for #6-13.

We all experience a little anxiety from time to time, however, those who struggle with anxiety can feel exhausted, overwhelmed, and it can be debilitating. There is help. Seeking a therapist or counselor who specializes in anxiety, can help you manage and cope with anxiety. If you or a loved one has anxiety please feel free to contact me. 

Dustin Shultz, LMFT. I am a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, speaker, and adjunct faculty at Azusa Pacific University. I have experience working with teens, men, women, and couples, and have had success with people who are experiencing depression, anxiety, trauma, sexuality, divorce, affairs, cutting, grief, shame, stress, and life transitions. I help people live more authentically and embrace life