 Some of you may have noticed that my videos come replete with advertising. This is not my call. This is not my decision. YouTube forcibly is placing advertisements in and on my videos against my express settings and not sharing the revenue with me. This is another act of bullying by YouTube. A crass commercialization of what should have been an educational and social platform. There's nothing I can do about it. It's out of my hands. I apologize to all of you for this new fangled experience on my channel. I've kept it advertising free for well over 12 years. But now there's been a change in the terms of service of Google and now they can do whatever they want with my videos without any need for my permission and without sharing the income with me. So from YouTube to gaslighting. Very similar topic if you ask me. Today we're going to discuss, go deep into the topic of gaslighting. We're going to expose a series of techniques either to unmentioned anywhere on the internet and largely even in scholarly literature. It starts with an article published in the Washington Post. The article is titled Gaslighting. How to recognize gaslighting and respond to it. It was authored by Angela Haupt. And it says something that I've been saying over the past 10 years. It says gaslighting made the leap from psychological lingo to trendy buzzword with the 2016 presidential campaign. More recently it has morphed into what Ackerman calls a catch-all phrase often used incorrectly by people referring to simple disagreements over issues or interactions that don't meet gaslighting's historical definition. Some mental health experts continues the article, are concerned that overusing the term could obscure the abusive nature of gaslighting and reduce its power to help victims recognize ongoing manipulation. For them, for these mental health practitioners and myself included, it's important that gaslighting retain its original meaning. The experience of having your reality repeatedly challenged by someone who holds more power than you do. We're going to expound on this later in the video and I'm going to finish the video with a series of techniques you can use to fight back gaslighting. Gaslighting is exactly like extending a hand and reaching into your mind and then scrambling it. It's as bad as this and it uses a series of techniques. Some of them would be familiar to you but you probably had never associated these techniques with gaslighting. We start with déjà vu. Deja vu is when the strange looks or sounds familiar when the unprecedented or when something that hadn't happened yet, something that you're experiencing is perceived as a past experience. So when a present experience is perceived as a past experience. Now we can do it with words. For example, I keep using the word Schoeschanim or a very old German word which I've just invented. Geschlimpf, which means to destroy, devastate. Geschlimpf, the more often I use these words, at least Geschlimpf is an unsensical word, but the more often I use these words, the more familiar they become. It's when the strange begins to look familiar. Deja vu is a French word. It expresses the feeling that one has lived through a present situation before. Some people, of course, immediately interpret Deja vu as a kind of paranormal or supernatural experience, precognition or a prophecy. But in reality, it's an anomaly or memory. There's a strong sense of having been here, of a recollection, the time, the place, the smells, the tastes, the ambience, the sounds, everything, the practical context of the previous experience seems to apply to the current experience. But this is because of uncertainty, because of the impossibility of it all. I will come to it in a minute and I will explain how Deja vu is applied in gaslighting by abusers. Now, gaslighting is much more typical of psychopaths than narcissists. Narcissists believe their own lies. They confabulate. And so they adopt and appropriate their lies and then they defend their lies vehemently if you challenge them. Psychopaths are goal-oriented. They know exactly what they're doing. And the aim of gaslighting is to unsettle you, to destabilize you, and to allow the psychopath to introduce into your mind anything he wishes. Again, shortly we will discuss how this is done. There are two types of Deja vu. The pathological one, which is frequently associated with epilepsy. And it is usually prolonged or frequent. There's other symptoms involved. There are other symptoms like hallucinations. It's an indicator of a neurological or a psychiatric illness. That's not the kind of Deja vu I'm talking about. The Deja vu I'm talking about is non-pathological. It happens to healthy people. Actually, two-thirds of the population have had a Deja vu experience one or more. Now, we know the Deja vu happens when there is dislocation, when there is disorientation, and therefore there's a close affinity between Deja vu and dissociation. However, people who travel often or travel frequently have more Deja vu experiences than the normal population. People who watch movies, movie buffs, aficionados, addicted to movies, they are much more likely to experience Deja vu than other people. So, detachment, dissociation are critical. And this is what the abuser does to you. What he does to you, he touches you from your own experiences, from your own reality. And this renders his reality familiar to you. Because you can't really compare his reality to your reality, you tend to lie to yourself, to deceive yourself into believing that his reality is normal, has always been there, is familiar. That's a very important point that you need to understand. What gaslighting involves is not only a divorce between you and your reality testing. It involves a substitution effect. The abuser provides you with an alternative to your own experience, to your own world, to your own reality, to your own universe. And because you had been detached from your roots, so to speak, because the abuser obliterates your own memory, challenges your own identity, his reality becomes like a life raft. You cling on to his reality because you have no alternative. The first stage in gaslighting is destroying who you are, destroying your trust in yourself, destroying your perception of reality and your reality testing, destroying your self-efficacy, your ability to operate in the environment in order to extract positive outcomes. You begin to disbelieve yourself. You begin to distance yourself from yourself, a process known as estrangement. And then the abuser comes into this picture, a anomalous picture of derealization, depersonalization and amnesia that he had induced in you. He had induced these dissociative states in you. So then he comes and says, well, I have a solution for you. I have a solution for you. You're very amnesiac, you're depersonalized, you realize I have a solution here. Let me give you my reality, my world, my universe, my perceptions, my experiences, my interpretation of what's happening. And because you don't have your own alternative anymore, you cling to his. People who tend to experience deja vu are often fragile and vulnerable. They are depressed, they're anxious, they're stressed, they're under high pressure. Research clearly shows that the experience of deja vu is associated with other mental health conditions, however transient. It also decreases with age. We are less amenable to such manipulation as we grow older because the weight of cumulative experience is too great, too big for a single abuser to undermine. Abuse via gaslighting therefore leverages, takes advantage of our vulnerability, our fragility, our brittleness, our anxiety and our depression in order to supplant our existence in one reality with another. It is a form of metaverse. It is a virtual reality. Gaslighting is about creating a virtual reality and then convincing you that it's the only reality in existence. And one of the main tools the abuser uses, however unknowingly, to accomplish his goal is entraining. I've mentioned entraining in several videos and in my dialogues with Richard Granon. Entraining is a process of coordinating brain waves. Now usually entraining clones brain waves via music. When people play the same music or listen to the same music, there's a total synchronization of their relevant brain waves. And this is entraining. I suggested, and I still do, that entraining can be accomplished with other sounds, not only music, for example verbal abuse. If verbal abuse has a refrain, if it has a rhythm, if it has a kind of embedded harmony, then one can conceive of verbal abuse as a form of music. And this leads to a phenomenon known as semantic satiation, semantic satiation. Semantic satiation is a psychological phenomenon where repetition causes word or phrase to lose meaning for the listener. If you repeat the same word thousands of times, ultimately you will discover to your shock and consternation that the word means nothing to you. We perceive repeated speech as meaningless sounds and this is exactly the power of entraining because verbal abuse, repeated ad nauseam, repeated constantly becomes sound. It becomes music, which essentially is meaningless and therefore it penetrates your linguistic defenses. It goes deep into your reptile brain, down to the brainstem. Music stimulates very ancient areas of the brain in addition to the neocortex and the prefrontal cortex, but very ancient parts of the brain. That's the power of music, that's why we react to music so profoundly and emotionally and the repetition of the verbal abuse renders it meaningless. So our linguistic centers disengage and instead we perceive these words as a form of wall of sound, as a kind of music. Extended inspection, extended analysis, for example staring at a word or looking at a phrase for a very long period of time has the same effect like repetition. It's exactly the same effect, semantic satiation. When we are exposed to written or verbal abuse repeatedly it loses its meaning and it becomes music and it entrains our brain, it coordinates our brain waves, the brain waves of our abuser. In the cortex verbal repetition arouses a specific neural pattern that corresponds to the meaning of the word. Rapid repetition makes both the peripheral sensory motor activity and the central neural activation fire repeatedly and this causes what we know as reactive inhibition. This is a reduction in the intensity and sensitivity of the activity with each repetition. Habituation is like if you put pressure on your arm at first you feel the pressure but after a while you get used to it and it no longer registers. James Djokovic called it in 1962 experimental neurosemantics and there are numerous studies that have substantiated every single word I've just said. I'm referring you to Djokovic's early study but also Piloti, Antrogus and Daph in 1997 and Coenus in 2000 and numerous others. So this is a well-substantiated phenomenon. And so by entraining semantically satiating you the abuser creates a coordination, a synchronicity between his brain waves and yours which grants him total access to your mind and allows him to obliterate your previous identity, memories, experiences, perceptions and to substitute them with his own. A good description of gaslighting. And in this process the abuser acquires authority. We're going to empower asymmetry because of intermediary enforcement and trauma bonding. The abuser is on top. So there is a power gradient. We're going to discuss it later when we come to classic theories of gaslighting. So the first mechanism is déjà vu. The second mechanism used in gaslighting is exactly the opposite. Jamais vu, never saw. The familiar is made to look or to sound strange. Again it's a French phrase. I don't know why the French, why French, why they caught on to all these techniques and mechanisms but it's a fact. It means never seen. It's experiencing a situation that one recognises in some fashion but that nonetheless seems novel, unsettling, unfamiliar, anxiety inducing. It is the opposite of déjà vu. Jamais vu involves a sense of eeriness, creepiness. There's an impression of experiencing something for the first time despite knowing rationally that you had experienced it before, several times. Jamais vu also is associated with aphasia, amnesia, epilepsy. So it's a dissociative state, exactly like déjà vu. And like déjà vu, the abuser induces in you jamais vu. It is precisely the abuser's ability to produce conflicting states of mind, conflicting dissociations that gives him his immense power over you. Jamais vu is commonly experienced when a person momentarily does not recognise a word, a sound, a sight, a place, a time that they know that they know. They just don't feel that they know. So there's a divorce between cognition and perception of emotion, perception of sense up. On the one hand, you know that you've been here before. You know you've done that before. You know you've experienced it before, but you don't feel that you had. So this creates a divorce between you and reality. And it is this daylight between your perception of yourself and your perception of reality, this crack, this abyss that allows the abuser to get through and enter your mind. Anyone repeatedly writing or saying a specific word out loud has this notion. It begins to feel like no way is this a real word. No way I've heard it before. This is an example of jamais vu. Jamais vu is associated with the delirious disorder, intoxication, substance abuse, delusions such as the cupgrass delusion and so on and so forth. So it has its place in the pantheon of pathologies of the human mind. It also induces the imposter syndrome. You begin to feel so unreal that you begin to experience yourself as an actor, as an imposter. In other words, the abuser had exported to you his own self-perception. Most abusers are dissociative, many of them are narcissistic, and they perceive themselves as spectators, as observers of a movie. They perceive their lives as a kind of film or flick that they are watching or observing with some mild interest. They don't really inhabit, abusers don't really inhabit their lives. They're from the outside, their lives are like theater productions. They're like directors or actors. So by inducing in your combination of déjà vu and jamais vu, they make you feel the same. This is the initial phase of narcissistic contagion when the narcissist infects you with a virus of narcissism. When you're beginning to see the world through his eyes, you're beginning to perceive yourself as unreal as he perceives himself. You're beginning to adopt his cognitive distortions. You're beginning, for example, to adulate him because you had accepted his grandiosity as a realistic assessment of the world. It's very similar to deep personalization. The very reality of reality is doubted, derealization. Abuses also use, in order to gaslight, déjà vu. Deja vu means I had already lived. It's an intense but false wrong feeling of having already lived through the present situation. It's a form of déjà vu but much more intense. It's very akin psychologically to a true flashback. There's no such thing as emotional flashback. It is nonsensical hype but there is such thing as flashback or revividness. Flashback or revividness are the outcomes of post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. Deja vu is a mild, mild, faint form of flashback because for a minute there you lose the distinction between reality and delusion. For a minute there you're really into the alternative reality, preferred to you and imposed on you by the abuser. Unlike déjà vu, déjà vu has behavioral consequences because people act in the environment as if it were some other reality than what it is. It compels you to abandon reality and to enter a virtual reality, a second life, a metaverse. There's an intense feeling of familiarity and so you prefer to withdraw from real life events or activities and inhabit this fantastic space known as paracocin. And patients who have déjà vu justify their feelings of familiarity with beliefs that are essentially delusional. The abuser induces in you déjà vu by penalizing you if you refuse to adhere to his reality, if you refuse to enter the reality space that he had created for both of you. It's a cult-like setting, you're like an account and if you oppose the cult leader, which is the abuser or especially the narcissistic abuser, then you're penalized. On the other hand, in addition to the stick, there's a carrot. If you do accept the abuser's reality and act accordingly, if your acceptance of his reality has behavioral manifestations which he can monitor and witness, he rewards you, he gives you a prize, he praises you, he elevates you, he renders you his favorite, etc. So there are very strong incentives with intermittent reinforcement involved. There are very strong incentives to let go of real reality and to adopt the fake reality, which is the abuser's reality. Thereby experiencing periods of déjà vu. And so these are the mechanisms that are used in Gaslight. There's another much less known mechanism, which is what Foucault, Michel Foucault, the famous social theorist and critic, Michel Foucault called it déjà la. In madness and civilization, a history of insanity in the age of reason, which is a book he had written and published in 1961, Folie des raisons, Histoires de la Folie, a large classic. So in 1961, Michel Foucault examined the evolution of the meaning of madness in culture, law, politics, philosophy and medicine, especially in Europe. From the Middle Ages until the end of the 18th century. And Foucault being Foucault, it's a bit of a complex thing. But I will read to you a segment, an excerpt from this book. And remember, we are discussing Gaslight. And one of the mechanisms, which are very, very not known, obscure, stealth, ambient, under the radar, surreptitious, very pernicious, nefarious mechanism used by the abuser is déjà la. So Michel Foucault described déjà la this way. He said, up until the end of the 15th century, or perhaps slightly beyond it, the death theme, the theme of death, reigns supreme. The end of mankind and the end of time are seen in war and the plagues. Hanging over human existence is an order and an end that no man can escape, menacing presence from within the world itself. Suddenly as the 15th century drew to a close, that great uncertainty spun on its axis. And the derision of madness took over from the seriousness of death. From the knowledge of that fatal necessity that reduces men to dust, we pass to a contemptuous contemplation of the nothingness that is life itself. The fear before the absolute limit of death becomes interiorized in the continual process of ironization. Fear was disarmed in advance, made derisory by being tamed and rendered banal and constantly paraded in the spectacle of life. Suddenly it was there to be discerned in the mannerisms, failings and vices of normal people. Death as a destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a justice cap and bells. The death's head showed itself to be a vessel already empty, for madness was the being already there of death. Death's conquered presence, sketched out in these everyday signs, showed not only that its reign had already begun, but also that its prize was a bigger one. Death unmasked the mask of life and nothing more. So, this is typical Foucault, and this is a translation of Halpha and Murphy in 2000. It's a typical Foucault. I'll try to translate Foucault into normal language. What Foucault says is, in the 15th century, western civilization transitioned from having a preoccupation with death to having a preoccupation or an obsession with mental illness. Foucault says it makes sense because to be crazy, to be mad is similar to being dead, mentally dead. And so mad, crazy people and dead people are no longer functional, they are no longer able to participate in reality. One could say that they are no longer in society. Foucault says that this cultural transition from the emphasis on death to the obsession with madness happened when western society realized this similarity between being crazy and being dead and realized that madness is just as bad as death. It's essentially a form of death before the physiological form. It seems that there is a notion of death before death, and this is deja vu. Now, how does this fit into gaslighting? Gaslighting involves a process of killing you, mentally. It involves a process of driving you crazy. Madness. The abuser introduces madness into your system. He chaoticizes it, crazy-making. He makes you doubt your own existence. To all practical purposes, you die, and then he offers you, the abuser offers you a resurrection. He gives you the option to be reborn a second life, a second chance, but the condition is that you accept his reality. You will never die, tells you the abuser, as long as you're with me, as long as you occupy and cohabit with me in the same space, as long as you become an internal object, an extension of me, without will, without degrees of freedom, without challenge or criticism. And this is deja vu. Okay. Back to Angela Hout of The Washington Post. Do you remember the article published in The Washington Post a few days ago? Here's what she says about gaslighting. Gaslighting is a manipulative form of communication, where a power differential exists, said Angela Korbo, an associate professor and chair of communication studies at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania. Gaslighting can occur in romantic relationships or friendships between parents and children when seeking medical care or at work. I see it as one party distorting information and preying upon another's vulnerability, said Korbo. She likened it to a more sophisticated way of looking at bullying. Medical gaslighting, by the way, is very trendy right now. It's when a medical professional downplays a patient's concerns, tries to persuade the patient that their symptoms are imaginary or the result of mental instability. Back to the article. Gaslighting continues, Hout. Gaslighting is a devastating psychological tactic, combining elements of manipulation, control, and exploitation of trust. Naomi Torres-McKee, a psychologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and head of research at the Mental Health Coalition. Torres-McKee continues, those things, manipulation, control, exploitation of trust, those things are the building blocks of gaslighting. Gaslighting is also a pattern of behavior that occurs over a long duration and not on a one-off basis. A gaslighter will repeatedly twist events to shift blame to someone else, and this emotional abuse can result in victims questioning their sanity. Experts previously believed that gaslighting was always intentional, but they now think that it's possible that some gaslighters are not aware of their manipulative behavior, which is something I've been saying for well over 15 years. Even when the narcissist gaslights, he is not aware that he is gaslighting. His gaslighting is not intentional. He fully believes in his alternative, extended, augmented virtual reality. Psychopaths gaslight intentionally. The article continues, over the long term, being on the receiving end of gaslighting can lead to lowered self-worth, feelings of insecurity, depression, and anxiety. It can also cause someone to be consumed with self-doubt, said Torres-McKee, who has worked with many patients who have experienced gaslighting. It can be difficult to trust people in the future or to connect with people, she said. Plus, you often feel very disconnected from yourself because of this experience of feeling out of touch with what's real and what's not. The article lists a series of signs that you're being gaslit and connects gaslighting to toxic relationships, wish to control someone, and losing grip over the partner, so it's a desperate attempt to regain control over the partner. And the signs listed are invalidation of your emotions. People who gaslight often trivialize or invalidate their victim's feelings. Very undermining comments. A common Torres-McKee said, for example, someone might say, you're just being dramatic. Why do you care about this so much? Other common phrases include, you're too sensitive, you're crazy, you're imagining things, and don't get so worked up. I can add to this a long list, like your paranoid. And so invalidation is an integral part of gaslighting. It is very disorienting, and you begin to question how you feel. Question yourself, question your reality because of this invalidation, especially when the abuser is in a position of authority or when you admire the abuser, which is the common cult-like setting with narcissists. Another hallmark of gaslighting is the twisting of reality. The article says, people who gaslight will flip things and twist them back on you, Torres-McKee said. They will be adamant that you did or that you said things. You know you did not. Torres-McKee describes the situation. One partner calling the other stupid. Then that person says, hey, you called me stupid. Projection. The person who initially made the derogatory comment might then say, I didn't call you stupid. You called me stupid, et cetera, et cetera. So these are lies intended to distort reality and control the situation. But in the case of many narcissists, they don't realize it's a lie. Owing to very powerful mechanisms of reaction, defense mechanisms like reaction formation, projection and splitting. Same with borderline. Very often they don't realize that they're projecting or splitting. Gaslighting involves coercion. The gaslighter forces you to admit that you're wrong. And if you refuse to admit that you're wrong, you're penalized, you're punished. He forces you, for example, to apologize. Even if you are the one who feels betrayed, gaslighters change the narrative. They blame shift. They victimize, self-victimize. They make you feel bad and guilty and ashamed and ego-distonic. And so you end up accepting their reality. You end up apologizing. They say to you, you made me do it. They pin their bad behavior on you somehow. You're the source. And if you're a people pleaser, you take responsibility for things you didn't do. This is called auto-plastic defenses. The gaslighter is always assured, confident, strong, explosive, repetitive. He entrains you. He makes you feel déjà vu and jamais vu in all these mechanisms. Jamais vu, déjà vu. And so you're in a state of disorientation and you don't know what to trust and who to trust anymore. It's much easier to simply succumb, to surrender, to become submissive and to say you're right. You're right, I've been wrong and I've been wrong all along. It leaves you mistrusting your perception. You start doubting yourself, constantly questioning what is real and where you're overreacting. Did you misunderstand a certain situation? The article quotes Ackerman, if you start to have a disproportionate amount of doubt in yourself that was not previously there, that's a sign of gaslighting. You may think maybe I'm crazy, maybe I am paranoid, maybe I am too sensitive. Whatever that person is calling you. His voice is in your mind. This is entraining. It's taking over your mind. He implants his own voice in your mind. It's an introject. It's an internal object. And you can't get rid of it. In early childhood, this is known as the Imago processing, but it can happen to you as an adult. The abuser regresses you to early childhood and then implants his voice in your mind. And you tend to repeat like a parrot, like a robot, like someone without a will, like a zombie. You tend to repeat this voice in your mind. If this voice says you're paranoid, you would say, well, maybe I'm paranoid. If this voice says you're too sensitive. Say, well, maybe I'm hyper-vigilant and hypersensitive. You tend to blame yourself and you need to understand that you're being gaslit. You need to identify the situation of gaslighting. Is there a power symmetry? Is there a question of trust? Did you give up on reality as you had known it? Are you beginning to mimic your abuser? Resonate with him. Repeat his phrases ad nauseam. Did he take over? You need to recognize a takeover, a hostile takeover. It's a form, it's a subtle form of interpersonal abuse because the abuser often doesn't attack you personally. He attacks reality. He doesn't tell you something is wrong with you. He tells you something is wrong with your reality. And so it's kind of a by proxy abuse, vicarious abuse. So it's under the radar, it's very difficult to spot and to tackle. But just knowing that you're abused, just labeling it gaslighting, that's very, very important. And some therapist says you are giving yourself some clarity and removing the extra tax on your brain as it struggles to make sense of what's happening. Pay attention to how you feel. Journal, write a journal, write it down. Every time you're in doubt, write it down. Document every event, however minute, however inconsequential. You're brewing coffee, take a photo, you're saying something, record yourself. Document, document, document. Create hundreds of photographs a day in order to fight back. Ask yourself, how do I feel when I'm around that person? Corbo suggests the following questions. Do I feel anxious? Do I feel that the person is going to contradict me? Do I find that I might be ready? I might be really confident and outgoing when I'm not with him. But when I'm with him, I feel fuzzy. Do I think that something's wrong? Can I identify what's wrong? Write, write times, write dates, write down places, write document feelings. Make a detailed minutiae record of your life so that whenever you're self-doubt, you can go back to this record and remind yourself how things truly were, how things stood, how did you feel? No one will be able to gaslight you because this kind of record creates self-trust. Gradually, you will not need these crutches. I mean, you will stop journaling and you will stop writing and documenting everything down once your self-confidence, self-esteem and sense of self-worth had been stabilized, regulated and restored. Assert yourself. If he starts to gaslight, stop the conversation. Torres McKee says, assert your own reality as much as you can and as much as is safe. You could say, no, you were the one who called me stupid. Don't twist it. Don't try to gaslight. It sounds, a speck says, another psychologist, speck says, it sounds like you're having a really hard time hearing what I'm saying. I know what I felt and it's important for me to voice this. This is what you should say to your abuser. It doesn't sound like you can take in this perspective. I no longer want to engage in this conversation, you're gaslighting me. If you're ready to hear how I felt and to discuss it, I'd be open to do this at a later time. Walk away. Call someone you're close to restore your reality testing. Tell a friend, you know, I know this thing happened and he's trying to tell me that it's not true. I need to share this with you in order to ground myself. Torres McKee continues, otherwise, you only have that one person who is telling you this false reality and it's easy to get swept into that reality and least support. To use other people as external memory, your identity crucially depends on input from other people and don't hesitate to involve authorities or structures within your environment. For example, if you're being gaslit at work, involve the human resources department. If you're being gaslit by a dangerous abuser, involve the police. Don't hesitate to involve not only your social network, not only your friends and family. Remember, sunlight disinfects abuse. In extreme cases, you would need to walk away. You would need even to resign your job. But until then, try to confront the gaslighter. Address the situation. You, Torres McKee, suggest saying, hey, you're telling me something, but my sense is this other thing is right or true. How can we account for this difference? Try to reason with the gaslighter because many gaslighters, I repeat, don't know what they're doing. See if you can find colleagues who may be experiencing the same thing with the same person. Torres McKee continues this, strengthen numbers. If someone is doing it to you, it's likely they might be doing it to more people and it can help you get support. And finally, of course, talk to a professional. If the gaslighting had been all pervasive and lasted for many, many years, this voice is embedded in your mind. You need to separate and devigate from your abuser. It's exactly like being a two-year-old, exactly like undergoing this traumatic process all over again without a safe base. So you need a safe base and your safe base could be your therapist. Recovering can take years. You need to work with a therapist because you need to feel safe and you need to have external validating input. Gaslighting is emotional abuse. This person has taken over your life talking to a professional breaks this pattern and provides a counterweight to your gaslighter. The therapist is a modeling agent. If you model yourself after the therapist, he provides you with a good enough parent as opposed to the bed or dead parent that your abuser is emulating. Use all these tools. Gaslighting is dangerous for your mental health, possibly the most dangerous technique that abusers use, and that is saying a lot.