Dear Anita,

“How was I so badly tricked? There was real love in the relationship right?“- most abusers (and gaslighting is abuse) are not people who plan to abuse and then carry out the plan cold heartedly over days and longer, every so often, assessing their progress in tearing down the abused, and knowingly, with full awareness continue to .. improve their evil mission to methodically abuse.

I don’t think that N had a mission to trick you and then methodically abused you. As a child, he adjusted to his childhood difficulties in certain ways, and he got used to those ways. Those ways became part of his modus operandi/ method of operation (MO), and he will continue his MO for the rest of his life (unless something motivates him to change it, a change that will take a lot of introspection and hard work over months and years).

Gaslighting (without him knowing the term) worked for him as a child, so he keeps working it.

When you tried to make him operate differently, as in being honest and upfront about his feelings and motivations, you had no chance of success because his MO is habitual and heavily ingrained in him.

Did he sometimes feel genuine affection for you? I am sure he did. Is it love? Depends how you define love: if you define it as occasional affection/  passion, then yes, he loved you. I don’t define love by occasional emotions and behaviors. I look at the BIGGER picture, and ask: is this love?

Imagine this scene: a man surprises his wife one evening with a fancy dinner with candles. He smiles at her, tells her he loves her in the most genuine way you can imagine, and he indeed feels genuine affection and appreciation for her. Now, imagine this bigger picture: the day before the surprise dinner, he beat and bruised her, and the day after the fancy dinner, he beat her so badly that she ended up in the hospital.

I’d say, in this example, although the husband felt genuine affection and appreciation for his wife on that one night, overall, he doesn’t love her based on the bigger picture.

Where there is repeated abuse,  there is no love.  N didn’t beat you up, but he lied and gaslighted you repeatedly, unnecessarily hurting you repeatedly. This- I say- is not love.

“Ever since your very first bringing up the words ‘controlling’ and ‘gaslighting’ I have seen him as if he is another person, when away from him…. now when I see him in my head it is a person with a mask on, false and trying so hard to portray things that he did not actually feel…  I tried so hard to help him see me“- a mask that’s covering his eyes, so he can’t see you. You can’t remove his mask. He has to acknowledge first that he has a mask on, and then intend to remove it.. and then do the hard work that it’d take to remove it.

As a pattern, he is too busy appearing, pretending and calculating his moves to have the time and state of mind to.. genuinely and spontaneously be.

“His reaction to the wallet was immediate tears…he cried when he read the poem on the wallet and the love letter, but the weird part is later he said ‘I don’t know why I cried‘ this was weird to me… it scares me that he was this out of touch”-

– imagine that normally (according to his MO), he cries in front of someone only when there is a reason, a manipulative intent to it.. but on that occasion he cried without an intent and it confused him.

“Although I have a lot of emotions over the breakup I also feel relieved still, waking up lighter“- it’s a good thing when you remove abuse from your life, it’s like removing what was weighing you down for too long.

“It is just such a weird, uncomfortable, icky, confusing, saddening, scary feeling that I did not know who I was really with“- you will get used to the reality that you didn’t know who you were really with, and you will continue to learn from the experience and get way better at evaluating people in the future.

“Coming to the realization of N’s gaslighting and emotional manipulation has made me see (F) in a totally new light… My dad even just texted me ‘so excited to hang’ with two kissing emojis. He has learned how to talk to me in order to make me feel comfortable, I assume similar to N’s tactics in making me feel loved. It feels false suddenly and I am having a hard time because I don’t want to be inauthentic, but I also don’t want to put hatch in her cage .. I need some tips how to deal with my dad in a kind but way that protects me. We have only a few hours together, then I will see my mom and sister who I feel safer with”-

– Your father will not be the only inauthentic person you still need to deal with, there will be more, in the workplace and elsewhere. Coming to think of it, when you go to the supermarket, for example, and you interact with the employee behind the cash register, you don’t know if he or she is authentic or not.. but it doesn’t matter to you: you are there for a reason and the cashier’s authenticity, or lack of, is a matter of no consequence to you.  So, you smile politely (not necessarily authentically) and say thank you.  Do the same when you spend that bit of time with your father: smile and say thank you.

Accept that F is the way he is. Don’t internally resist fully accepting who he is. It doesn’t mean that you approve of who he is, it means that you fully understand that he is who he is independently of you (not your fault, not your doing). You were never able to change him, and never will, not any more than you’d be able to change the cashier as you pass by the cash register.

The child only imagines that her father’s misbehavior or abuse is about herself (the child). She imagines that because this man is far from being a stranger, in the child’s mind. She feels too connected to him because she needs to be connected to him. I suggest that you learn to see F as your biological and legal father, but not closer than that.

Safe travels and hope to read from you soon!

anita