Dear anita,

I took my time posting so i could sort my thoughts into a (i hope) coherent form.

During our first discussion i talked about my confusion about my last relationship and about me feeling gaslit, which you strongly (and rightfully so) opposed. As i myself had nothing more than diffuse impressions of a supposed gaslighting happening and a lot of intense feelings to work through, i was wrong to make any sort of claim of that kind then. I also dont want to claim that now.

After i now managed to get through the anger i had then, i could find the things that led me to this conclusion. This post is not asking you to decide whether or not some sort of gaslighting happened, instead i am asking for your opinion on the matter again. I am sorry if this post is getting too long, if you want to answer take all the time you need.

My impression of being gaslit started generally during october of last year, when first my ex and later some friends we both knew started telling me that the state of my mental health would be getting worse and that i should at least find a new therapist, while my ex tried to persuade me to get an ect-treatment (Electro convulsion therapy).

But:

– the idea of getting an ect i had myself some months prior, but my therapist at the time was strongly against this, as she called this step “completely unnecessary”. I then decided against the treatment.

– The friends spent around 90% of their time with my ex, i saw them seldom. 3 months after the breakup one these friends told me that my ex used to talk very harshly about how i managed my mental health state, he called it “frequent complaining” he himself was not comfortable listening to.

– my therapy ended just at the end of september. Not even two weeks later first my ex, then the friends started pressuring me to find a new therapist or to get ect-treatment.

My ex started to get overly concerned about my mental state shortly after an argument we had, during which i made it clear that i wasnt going to continue the relationship much longer due to the issues i had with her behaviour towards me (distanced, desinterested, dismissive of my feelings, telling me that my issues with the relationship were not real, etc). She then also started saying things like that “nobody would be there for me/ i would be all alone if we would break up”.

Thing is, that i was actually feeling quite well and proud of myself during and after finishing the therapy. I got a lot of positive feedback from my therapist concerning my coping behaviour and techniques and a lot of suggestions for further improvement which i wanted to take my time with understanding.

By the end of october the constant pressure from these people pushing me to do things i did not want or need to do started to make me feel suffocated and unstable, which in turn made me withdraw from the group of friends and i spent less time with my ex because i needed room to understand what was even happening around me. I also started to severly doubt my self-perception regarding the state of my mental health.

Around the mid of november two friends (at that point solely) of hers approached me after meeting under some pretext to tell me that in each of their own opinions i should break up with my ex. None of these two had asked me about my mental wellbeing since i finished the therapy or about my perspective regarding the relationship they were intervening in. At this point i had lost all orientation regarding the situation. My self-doubts were growing more intense after i asked my ex then if she had any idea why her friends would tell me to break up with her, to which she replied that she would not know.

By now i understood that something was going horribly wrong, even though i could not determine why or what. My last-ditch attempt to clear things up was a talk with my ex around mid december during which i asked her to explain her hurtful behaviour towards me during the last year and to explain what was even happening during the last 3 months. She then gave me her handwritten list i already vented so much about and told me that “these were the reasons why she had acted that way towards me.” The contents of the list mostly being about problematic behaviour on my part, made me feel like everything that happened so far was my fault, because of me not being able to see how things really were, even if my ex and her friends were telling me the truth about me the whole time.

I knew at that point that things were broken beyond repair for me. Before finally breaking up one week later i tried one last time to raise the topic of my supposedly concerning mental state (which was true at that point), but was immediatly shut down by her angrily demanding that i undergo ect-treatment.

Around two weeks ago i decided to finally make moving on from this mess the priority for the next months and decided to try and ask one of the former friends to ask my ex if she would be interested in talking one last time with me, to maybe clear things up, say a last few important things etc. The friend replied calling me “insolent for even writing him after the things i had done” and that “the things i would want to talk about were only important in my own little world”. At this point i decided to withdraw my request and wished him well.

I am struggling to this day to understand what i did to these people. If you have any idea of what happened, please tell me.

Thank you very much for reading all of this.

Ed