 And the last thing we want to talk about that happens when we're dealing with someone who's toxic is gaslighting. Yes. And I know we mentioned it last week. Let's talk about what we mean by gaslighting. And gaslighting is a term that was actually coined from a 1940s film entitled Gaslight. And essentially it's when one person tries to make you doubt your own sense of reality. Yes. Through changing the facts, blurring your memories, trying to make you feel like you're in the wrong. Well, even from this movie, what the husband would do to the wife would... I had a feeling you had seen this one. Your time period. Well, I believe that she would turn on the gaslights of the lamps that were gas-fueled and he would go and turn them off. And she would go, well, I thought I turned that on. And he said, no, I think you're getting crazy. But here's what's interesting about this. And this is where people don't see it. And the gaslight is not only on you. It's also on the people around you, against you. Because it has to appear that you're the insane one, that you're going crazy. So everyone else has to be in on... Gaslighting typically happens in a group fashion. Yes. So what ends up happening and the reason that you get so confused and have so much self-doubt is you're not just hearing it from one place. This toxic person is sharing this narrative with other people in your sphere of influence in your peer group. And all of a sudden that doubt grows and grows until you no longer understand what truly happened in those past events. Now, there are some common gaslighting techniques that we want to look out for. And again, this is going to help us when we're trying to decipher what's going on with this toxic person in our group. The first one is called withholding. This is when they just pretend not to understand what you're saying or what you mean. They might even refuse to listen to you as you speak, cutting you off at every turn, pulling out their phone, going on social media. Oh, I got to answer this email. Oh, I got this other meaning. They're just going to try as best as they can to withhold information from you that's going to help you make sense of what just happened. Yeah. And it's frustrating. It is frustrating. And when it comes to some of these things, I think all of us have been in situations where withholding would benefit us or the situation. But as you can see, as a tactic that is happening all the time, you're not going to be able to make the decisions that are best for you without that information. Right. Remember, gaslighting is about altering your sense of reality. So if you're trying to make sense of reality and you're asking your peers and you're asking this toxic person for some help and they're just refusing to answer you, ignoring what you're saying, misunderstanding what you mean. Well, of course, that's going to be a roadblock to you regaining your sanity. The second tactic they'll use is countering. And with this move, what they're actually going to do is they're just going to make you flat out doubt your memory. Yep. They're going to tell you that something else happened and they're going to continue to do it over and over again until it's implanted and that becomes your new memory. And science has shown, even in courtroom settings, that our memory is pretty faulty. Oh, yeah. We like to think of our memory as photogenic and exactly how things happen. But over time, those memories are really pliable. So the toxic person is using this to their advantage. Well, how many times have you questioned yourself and when just facts of a meeting last week with everything that, for instance, everything that we have going on here. If we don't get a meeting notes and remember how difficult it was to even remember accurately if you're having an hour long meeting of everything that was said and everything that everyone is doing, it's extremely difficult. This is why documentation is so important. And we're going to be discussing documentation a little bit later because that's going to be your number one aim in helping you get out of this mess. Yeah, especially with coworkers. The third tactic they're going to use is just blocking. They're going to stop that conversation before it starts, literally redirecting your legitimate grievances down a blind alley. They'll also just pretend to not understand why you're raising the issue in the first place. Right? They're going to try to downplay it. It's like, this is so meaningless. Why are we even concerned about what we had for lunch? Well, no, this is a part of you altering my reality. I want to know what I had for lunch. I no longer feel safe around you. And remember last week we discussed the pathological lying and even lying about things that don't matter because that helps you start second guessing everything. And so if it was the five bucks or if it was the light was on, right? If you're questioning these small little things, then then it's easier for them to shift your larger reality. Exactly. And this is why once again it is important to hold when you start wondering if you're going crazy here, you need to start looking around. And following along with blocking, they're just going to generally trivialize it. Like, again, as I was saying, why does this matter to you? They're going to make you feel completely insignificant. Like all of your concerns have no relevance to the relationship to reality. All of a sudden, you're going to have this great sense of doubt and they're going to use that to their advantage. The last one, and this one is the most frustrating of all, right? The last one, they will pretend to just not remember the events. Nope. Oh, I don't even remember. I was blacked out. I can't tell you. I'm so busy. I'm so busy. I was a favorite one, right? And they will deny that events even happened in the first place. Nope. I'm glad we went over this list because you might be thinking, okay, well, it's going to be easy to find that person or to wall that person off. The problem with about this as we stated earlier is that that toxicity contaminates everyone in that office. Some people use the saying poison the well. Right. And you have to realize that everyone else is trying to put pieces together because it's a shell game for everybody. And if you have everyone in the room guessing that no one can pinpoint where the problem is, right? And a lot of this is occurring in back channeling, right? Yes. It's going and running to tell someone else to reinforce this gaslighting of, hey, this is actually how the events happen. So if AJ asks you about this, let him know that this is how it went down. And now that other person is roped in on the reality that the person who's gaslighting who's a toxic person is trying to help them to try to create. So now he has allies in the altered reality that he tried to create for you. And so now you're asking some questions about other people and they're like, whoa, yeah, I thought it was this way. And you're like, right, it's a hall of mirrors. You're look everywhere you look. You're like, well, wait a second. I don't remember this being the reality, but they said it's the reality. My coworker said it's reality. Even my girlfriend said it's the reality. Oh, it must be how it happened. And now you might be thinking, OK, well, I think I can still weave my way out of that. What happens to the coworkers? If they've already been, they've already been told that AJ here is having some problems remembering things and he's having some problems. And because of this, he's been incompetent work. So, you know, he might start asking some questions. So now when AJ starts asking his question like, holy cow, he is losing it. He is slipping. Right. And it reinforces everything that the toxic person has been devising. So the toxic person has now enlisted your coworkers to create this reality. And the harder you try to get them out of it, the harder it looks like AJ now is the toxic person. And the toxic person can point to AJ going, he's trying to gaslight me. He's trying to say this. He's going to come up to you and start asking questions about what's going on here. And that's him trying to mess you up. Right. The toxic people who are really good at gaslighting actually allow themselves to play the hero role. Yes. When they involve all these other people in this story, in this fallacy. And here's the difficult part about it. Listen, in the attention economy, how many of us are paying close attention to all these details? We're farting around on social media. We're looking at our phone. We're in meeting. We're not paying attention to all the little details. And the gaslighter knows this and is now able to use our lack of attention to details against us. I want to, there's that. And I want to add another point to that as well. If you work in a, in an office where the corporate ladder sort of thing. There is a lot of people in that room who are just trying to go from whistle to whistle, clock in, clock out. And with the least amount of trouble every day. And because of that, they're not looking to make any waves. They're just looking to do their work. And they can be easily manipulated because they don't want to have to deal with any issues. They are the perfect target to, to, for the toxic person to make an ally. Because the toxic person is generally going to find work on the strongest person in the room. Because that's the person they're going to get the most fuel from. The people who are just trying to get through the day, they're not interesting enough to the toxic person. He's got to take down higher ups because that's what he's looking to do. So in the recruitment of these people who are just going along with the flow, it's very easy for all of us to be gaslit. And that's what we want to point out. Like I've been there, Johnny's been there. This has happened countless times. It does not mean that you're going to be immune from it. What we're trying to do is point out the tactics so that when you start to feel, hey, something isn't right here. You can tease apart all these different strategies that were used to create this altered reality around you and stop them in their tracks. But we want to let you know this is not a place to beat yourself up. No. A lot of times when we're trying to be cooperative, we open ourselves up to new relationships. We open ourselves up for connection. There's going to be some vulnerability tied to it. There's going to be opportunities where toxic people rear their ugly heads. And gaslighting is a very common technique that they're going to use. That's why we want to be adept at spotting it and understanding where it's coming from. Because when we're no longer in tune with our sense of reality, it can be a very traumatic experience. Thanks for watching.