I read recently that one of the most important things about gaslighting (the emotional abuse technique of denying the victim’s perception of reality) is that it’s not always deliberate; that your abuser may simply believe things about you, and so twists reality to convince themselves and you that you are lazy, or selfish, or that you lack empathy. And I’m not sure that he isolated me intentionally either. I wanted to be with him. I wanted to please him. My family never really said a word against him, and I didn’t listen when they did try. We’re not very good at hard emotional conversations. But the outcome was that he was able to create a bubble in which his version of me was the only one that was shown to me, and I wasn’t confident enough in myself to reject it. He would enumerate the ways in which I had failed to be a good partner, and I would cry and apologise while he held me comfortingly. “Why do you love me then, if I’m so awful?” I would sob, trying desperately to understand this version of myself that no one else had ever told me about. “Because you’re pretty!” he would say jokingly, wiping away my tears kindly. He never gave me a serious answer.
I don’t, even now, think that he is an evil person or that he set out consciously to break me down in this way. He just has an innate belief in his own correctness at all times, and therefore, reality must be moulded to fit that “fact”. If something is wrong in his life, since he cannot possibly be at fault, it must be someone else, and I let him make me that someone else.