Trump: Gaslighter-in-Chief. A personal response to the impeachment proceedings
When I was a child, I believed I was evil. I thought I was cursed. In a way I was, but I didn’t understand how until many years later.
The term ‘gaslighting’ is becoming more understood in the mainstream as the practice of distorting another’s reality. A person who has power (real or emotional) over another, such as parent, teacher or partner lies about what is happening to, or being experienced by the victim. The victim protests but they are powerless to change the narrative. When this happens consistently over time they can begin to disbelieve in their own experience and believe in the distorted version being forced upon them. It makes you feel insane.
If it’s never happened to you, it’s hard to understand the depth of trauma gaslighting creates. To those lucky enough never to have suffered it, gaslighting can seem rather odd. Why would you not simply brush off an obvious lie or misrepresentation? I’m going to try to help you understand what it’s like from my own experience.
My mother was an incredibly beautiful, charming and sociable person when I was young. Everyone who met her was enchanted by her stories and her kindness. She was also a narcissist who lapped up this attention and disliked anyone who might take it away from her. Like most narcissists, she wanted things her way and disliked feeling out of control. Also like most narcissists she had an immature emotional life and a naive, childlike relationship with reality — she never questioned the way she saw the world, never considered that it might not be the way she constructed it. Again, until you’ve seen this up close in an adult, it’s really hard to imagine someone being so deluded, but you have to be to promote a distorted version so consistently. Narcissists believe their lies. Not all gaslighters are narcissists, of course. Mine just happened to be one.
My mother’s fantasy of having a baby was challenged by reality. She was ill-equipped to comfort a crying baby and deal with an energetic and wilful toddler. Almost as soon as I could walk she would use physical punishment to control me. This escalated into daily beatings with a slipper or kitchen implement. As I got older, I began to keep a record on a wall calendar — a cross on every day I was hit. The were no days without crosses. She hit me daily until I was 10 or 11. That wasn’t the worst thing though.
The truly damaging thing my mother did was the way she spoke to me and about me. She called me names, described my actions in highly derogatory terms and talked about me to her friends in the same way — always while I was in the room. To me, she was vicious, angry, spiteful and violent. When I cried in my pillow at night, she would come in and shout at me, sometimes hitting me to get me to shut up. To her friends, she was charming and entertaining and her stories about me were framed with her as the victim and me as an evil perpetrator, eliciting sympathy for her burden of having such a difficult and abnormally bad child. She would talk about me as a baby, “she would scream all through the night and then during the day she would follow me around the room with her eyes, it was so intense, I felt frightened”. I grew to understand myself as a horror, an aggressor, and eventually, as evil.
I responded by trying to do everything I could to be good and show her that I was lovable. Of course, nothing worked. I remember formulating endless strategies to win her love and approval and I remember the shame and disappointment I felt when yet again I put the cross on my calendar at night. I can remember quite clearly at the age of 4 or 5 looking at her and thinking, there is nothing I can do to change her mind, and I can still feel the feeling of something inside me breaking. I sobbed in Pixar’s Inside Out when the ‘islands’ collapsed forever because it was so horribly accurate. It didn’t stop me trying way into adulthoodd, though.
The desire to be loved by your mother is absolutely primal and my almost psychotic optimism that I could eventually persuade her of my value and goodness took a very long time to fade. My attempts were at times masochistic, leading me again and again into her abusive rejections. When I became a mental health professional, I thought I could get her to accept what she’d done, talk it through and resolve it. I broached the subject of her physical violence towards me and she flatly denied she’d ever hit me. I hadn’t heard the term, gaslighting, in those days, but that’s she was doing. Everything I tried to bring up and discuss, she denied. Why couldn’t I remember all the lovely things she’d done for me? Why was I being so cruel? Why did I always have to be so aggressive?
The belief that I was evil and cursed was no doubt exacerbated by the voracious reading of fantasy books that I used to escape the violence and lies, but it persisted into my twenties. I can remember getting into someone’s car and when it wouldn’t start, I would be sure it was because I had jinxed it. Mechanical objects always seemed to go wrong around me. People would say, “this has never happened before” and I’d joke that it was me, except that I wasn’t entirely joking. When you are consistently told that you are bad by a parent, as a child you do not know enough to resist it even though there is always part of you objecting inside. I veered between being sullen and uncommunicative, and argumentative and oppositional. In the end, I more or less stopped talking to her.
I was extremely lucky to have found ways to grow out of the trauma. I am forever grateful to a therapist who said, “all babies do that” when I tried to convince her of my evilness. 30 years of Buddhist meditation helped me to manage and silence my internalised verbal abuse. Friends, so many wonderful friends, who kept pointing out my qualities and counteracting the lies. And discovering solution focused therapy, which so cleverly dismantles and reconstructs the world into something wholesome and affirming.
However, when you have been traumatised, it never fully leaves you and without warning you can find yourself triggered by a person or events. I am quite sure that I’m not the only person who has experienced Trump’s presidency and shameful attempts to destroy the election as intensely triggering. It took me a little while to understand the fear and boiling rage I felt as something beyond political disagreement. Having a personal experience of gaslighting and the trauma it causes also means that I feel a deep sense of compassion towards others like me who I know must be being triggered as well.
I thought I’d be pleased to see Trump being impeached, but I’ve found myself even more deeply triggered by reading coverage of the trial. I’ve been trying to work out why that is and I worked it out this morning. Worse even than the direct abuse from the gaslighter is the way they gather allies to protect them. My mother’s friends at various times approached me to try to get me to ‘stop being such a terrible person’, so convinced were they by her stories, which carried on well into my 50s. But the most heartbreaking ally was my father (whom I adored) who never intervened or counteracted anything my mother did or said. When I begged him to help me as a child, he said, “I won’t hear a word against your mother, your mother is a saint”. Just let that sink in. He must have heard my sobs at night, the sobs of a small child, and ignored them. At the time, I didn’t really blame him — I don’t know why — but when, as an adult with my own children, I fully understood what he must have done, the heartbreak was devastating.
It’s the Republicans who will actively or passively defend Trump who are making me feel those inchoate emotions right now. They quite literally do not care about the trauma and damage Trump caused on January 6th to Capitol staff and lawmakers. They are comfortable with overlooking the pain and suffering of their colleagues, let alone that of the US public. This is what fascists do. That they are complicit in the greatest treason in modern times is bad enough, but their lack of humanity and compassion towards others is genuinely frightening.
