“Is my husband gaslighting me?” If you’ve asked yourself this question, here are three types of gaslighting to watch for.
Dr. Robin Stern, co-founder and director for the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, is on The BTR.ORG Podcast. An expert on gaslighting, Dr. Stern is detailing the three types of gaslighters and the tactics they use to make YOU feel crazy.
The Glamorous Gaslighter
“He brings glamour into your life, buys you gifts, showers you with love and affection, tells you you’re amazing. He makes you feel like the most special person in the world and that the two of you are soulmates. You have something that is so special. Then after he has been missing for a couple of days, or after he won’t answer your questions or has lied to you. You’re feeling confused and crazy and complaining about that, he will come in and shower you with everything I just said. You’re so amazing. Don’t you know how much I love you?”
– Dr. Robin Stern
Anne shares that the glamorous gaslighter grooms victims by using manipulative kindness – a tactic that lures victims into believing they’re loved and safe.
The Good Guy Gaslighter
“He’s someone who people really like. He’s very accommodating – even in the way he approaches you and talks through things. It’s hard to spot the good guy gaslighter because often you end up getting what you want on the surface.”
– Dr. Robin Stern
The good guy gaslighter uses covert abuse to condition everyone, including the victim, into believing that the victim is the problem, rather than his deceit and manipulation.
The Intimidator Gaslighter
“Somebody who’s a bully, somebody who uses verbal abuse, somebody who might be on the threshold of using physical violence.”
– Dr. Robin Stern
The intimidator gaslighter may seem easier to identify – however, Dr. Stern shares an example of an intimidator gaslighter turning tables on a victim so covertly that Dr. Stern’s team had difficulty identifying the gaslighting. In this scenario where the abuser had used physical violence against the victim.
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Anne: I am delighted to have Dr. Robin Stern on today’s episode. She is the co founder and associate director for the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a senior consultant at the Yale New Haven Hospital. She is a licensed psychoanalyst with 30 years of experience treating individuals, couples, and families. She’s the author of The Gaslight Effect, How to Spot and Survive Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life, and The Gaslight Effect Recovery Guide Your Personal Journey Toward Healing from Emotional Abuse.
Dr. Stern has been a guest on many local and national radio shows and has traveled widely to lecture on emotional intelligence, women in leadership, and relational bullying. Welcome, Dr. Stern.
Dr. Robin Stern: Thank you so much, Anne. Thank you so much for having me on this show and for doing this work to help women.
I’m delighted.
Anne: Let’s just start with the definition of gaslighting since you’re the gaslighting expert.
Dr. Robin Stern: So gaslighting is a form of manipulation in a power dynamic where the person more powerful seeks to sow seeds of doubt in the person less powerful in order to lead them to question their memory, their sanity, their character.
Anne: What is their intent in doing this?
Dr. Robin Stern: most of the time Gaslighters intent is to destabilize their gaslightee to cause them to wonder if they’re going crazy, to stay connected to them so that they, the gaslighter, become the source of stability and reality and undermine the ground they’re standing on.
Anne: Are you familiar with the Allegory of the Cave by Plato?
Dr. Robin Stern: Yes, of course.
Anne: We use that allegory of the cave quite often, and instead of having the fire and then people walking in between the fire with the shadows, we just make the man the fire itself, and he’s holding up these objects. So basically, he wants to be the person who is defining reality. Oh, one other thing, Dr.
Stern. I talk in a gender segregated way because this particular podcast is specifically for women who have been emotionally and psychologically abused by men.
Dr. Robin Stern: And that works for me because even though gaslighting happens in any relationship, the pairing that I’ve seen most often is where the man is the gaslighter and the woman is the gaslightee.
Anne: So we use that allegory where he is setting himself up as the person who’s defining reality and keeping her oppressed and keeping her stuck. And that’s interesting that you also say that they want to be able to define reality for this person.
Dr. Robin Stern: More than that, in a moment of feeling out of control, a gas lighter will go to gas lighting to feel more cohesive, to feel more grounded, to feel more in control. And so it’s not just, I want to do this. It’s I need to do this in order for me to feel in control of the moment and in control of the relationship.
Anne: Control. It always comes back to that. I have heard some people say, “Well, everyone gaslights, but just some people are more dangerous than others.” this example that maybe a mom might gaslight a child into, like, eating a salad. What would be the main difference between telling a child, like, “Oh, of course you like vegetables.
Eat your vegetables.” When they’re like, I don’t like vegetables. What would be the difference between that and someone who is intentionally deceitful.
Dr. Robin Stern: Just what you said. There is an intent to deceive in order to maintain control and most importantly, it becomes the core dynamic of the relationship.
So in a moment, A mom might gaslight a child either to eat a salad or eat their vegetables or my favorite is when you go into a grocery store and you see a mom grab the child’s hand and say, you are not hungry, you’re tired. And in that moment, sometimes you’ll see a kid saying, I don’t know, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not, I’m really hungry.
And then the mom says it again. I don’t know, maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m tired. So, the message is not just vegetables are good for you, or you’re not hungry, you’re tired. It’s, you don’t know what you feel. I know what you feel. And in that way, it’s similar to more diabolical gaslighting, if you will. For the most part, I would say there is not an intent when parents are gaslighting to cause harm. I’m guilty of it myself, I’m sure. My kids who are grown up now, will once in a while say, uh huh, I think you’re trying to gaslight me. But in the gaslight or gaslightee dynamic, that causes people pain, that causes people to feel like their souls are being destroyed and their identity is being destroyed, there is that intent to destabilize someone and to lead someone to deny their own reality, even something they actually saw or heard in favor of the lie or the made up reality of the gaslighter.
So the gaslighter can control the reality. Men who are, for example, having an affair or seeking out porn to gratify themselves, those are things that most men don’t want their partners to know about. So they will lie, and then they will gaslight.
So, the wife or girlfriend can be kept off track of what’s really going on. It’s very common. “So, honey, you know, I haven’t been able to reach you when you say you’re working late at the office. Like, I’m nervous. What’s going on? Are you seeing someone? Are you doing something? Like what, in our sex life, it’s just not been, so honey, what’s wrong with you?”
“Why are you so paranoid?” And that happens once, and maybe the woman even thinks. You know, I am feeling a little paranoid. It still doesn’t answer the question of where he was, so of course it already threw her off track. But by the second time, or the third time, or the nth time that he says, you’re paranoid when she asks him a question he does not want to answer, the gaslightee is thinking to herself, maybe he’s right, maybe that is a problem for me, and maybe that is our problem.
Anne: That I’ve been so paranoid that I don’t trust him. If maybe I trusted him more, we would have a better relationship.
Dr. Robin Stern: And we wouldn’t be having these arguments.
Anne: Exactly. When reality is, you wouldn’t get any arguments if he was not having an affair.
Dr. Robin Stern: Exactly.
Anne: But you don’t know that. Yeah.
Dr. Robin Stern: And one case in particular that I’m thinking about, one man told his wife that It was her fault when she finally found out that he was having the affair.
He said, well of course I’m having an affair because you won’t travel with me on my business trips. She was devastated, couldn’t believe she couldn’t convince me that he was right. Because, of course, it becomes a closed loop. Like, if she traveled with him, he wouldn’t be having the affair.
So, isn’t it her fault? Because she didn’t travel with him.
Anne: It’s also a very dangerous loop. Because, let’s say she does start traveling with him. And then he might say, “Well, when you travel with me, you need to be at the hotel right at 8 when I get back and we need to have sex that night.”
And she’s like, ” wait a minute. We got in a fight. I don’t really want to have sex with you.” And he might be like, ” even though you travel with me, now that you’re not having sex with me on this trip, now.” They’re always going to move the flagpoles.
Dr. Robin Stern: Right.
Anne: So tell me about the three types of gaslighters.
Dr. Robin Stern: Three types of gaslighters that I identified in my 30 years: the glamour gaslighter, who is like it sounds, but brings glamour into your life, buys you gifts, showers you with love and affection, tells you you’re amazing, makes you feel like the most special person in the world, and that the two of you are soulmates, you have something that is so special, and after he has gaslighted you, after he has been missing for a couple of days, or after he won’t answer your questions, or has lied to you, and you’re feeling confused and crazy and complaining about that, He will come in and shower you with everything I just said.
How amazing you are. Don’t you know how much I love you? Oh my goodness. Don’t focus on that. Tonight we’re going to the theater. We’re going out for dinner. I love you. This is candlelight. This is magic for us. Any way that he can use Love with a capital L and romance and his big personality to distract you from what’s just happened.
So, what you’re focusing on, then, when you look at the picture of your lover, your husband, your boyfriend, you’re focusing on, like, yeah, he did that, and that totally sucks, but he told me the most special person he’s ever met, and he adores me, and I can feel our connection. That connection’s amazing, so I’m just gonna move on from this.
Anne: We call that grooming too. That’s the grooming part of the abuse.
Dr. Robin Stern: Of course. Like getting into a cult, right?
Anne: Right, yeah. Gaslighting is such the perfect word for When you feel like you’re losing touch with reality.
But it also covers grooming and then it covers emotional and psychological abuse. It overlaps .
Dr. Robin Stern: You know, people are not born gaslighters. But it works.
It’s very effective in keeping somebody connected to you and keeping someone dependent on you and looking to you for a standard setting, for reality setting.
Because when you are feeling anxious and you don’t know what reality is. If you’re with somebody who’s telling you that they are certain of what reality is you don’t learn what reality is.
The second type of gaslighter is the good guy gaslighter. If that good guy gaslighter were right here with us now, he would be affable and pleasant, and he’s someone who people really like.
It’s very accommodating and very even in the way he approaches you and talks through things. Hard to spot the good guy gaslighter because often you end up getting what you want on the surface. Like, for example, if the woman, let’s call her Janine, Janine decides she wants to visit her family for the weekend, and her husband, Doug, doesn’t want to go, and says, ” I really don’t want to go, and I don’t know why you want to go, we never really have a good time.”
And they start like that, but he’s very pleasant and they continue on the conversation so that each one of them has some room to talk about what they think and what they feel about going to visit. And the conversation is going on for hours, hours, and she’s exhausted from it. She said, I just want to go.
And so finally he says, all right, we’re just going to go. They go. And while they’re there, he’s basically pouting and not engaging in conversation. And then in the car ride home, he’s basically punishing her and telling her, they didn’t really want us to be there, and it wasn’t fun anyway, and it was basically miserable.
But at night, when she gets into bed and she’s exhausted and doesn’t want to be intimate, I’m just not feeling great about this weekend. He said, I don’t understand. What’s your problem? You got exactly what you wanted. So he’s Manipulating her into feeling like, What is wrong with me?
He’s right. I got to go. Never mind that the conversation about whether they should go, or whether she’s wanted, or whether it will be good lasted so long that she was depleted and exhausted. Never mind that he punished her when they were there and on the way home. But there’s something wrong with her for complaining.
Exactly. I just hear you breathing.
Anne: Frustrating, right? And
Dr. Robin Stern: then you say to your friends, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Because he does everything I want I get my way, but I’m just not happy.
And then, of course, there’s the intimidator gaslighter. And the intimidator gaslighter is just, as it says, somebody who’s a bully, somebody who uses verbal abuse, somebody who might be on the threshold of using physical violence.
And like in the example I was sharing earlier, Somebody said, I don’t know if I’m being abused, Dr. Stern because I came home late from work and my husband doesn’t like it when I come home late, and so he feels abused and he tells me I’m abusing him. Then when he puts his hand around my throat or he is physically violent with me, he says that he’s not abusing me during that time, he’s just reacting to my abuse. And so
Anne: Even without the physical assault
Dr. Robin Stern: Telling you you’re a moron, and being critical and screaming and cornering you perhaps. I was studying subjectivity and reality at that time, and several of the people in my class were talking about how you can’t tell someone that they’re not being abusive.
Like, I couldn’t tell someone, they said, that they’re not being abusive because the reality was that the guy felt abused. And so she maybe was abusing him because he felt abused. We got caught up in this very, like, high level conversation about it. And I ended up saying in class and along with several of my colleagues supporting me, whatever you want to call it, this woman has to move out of that house.
Because um, she’s in danger. If you’re saying that she ought to stay till they figure it out, which is what I was hearing from them I just don’t agree.
Maybe this is a confusing example, but there’s something important about that people will try to convince you of realities that may be very different than the way you see the world.
Anne: Well, that are frankly false.
She might be like, why aren’t we having sex? Are you having an affair? Or why aren’t we having sex? Is it because you’re masturbating to porn? And he’ll be like, no, it’s because you’re emotionally abusive to me. He might say something like that, which is not true. She isn’t. She’s asking questions. She’s curious. She’s wondering what’s going on. She genuinely cares. She’s trying to figure it out.
We have found that these types of psychological abusers, they feel oppressed when they can’t do what they want with impunity. It actually does feel oppressive to them because they’re like, uh, she’s stopping me from soliciting prostitutes it feels like she’s oppressing me not realizing that he is actually oppressing her. The reversal of victim and perpetrator roles when perpetrators are trying to defend themselves is gaslighting in and of itself.
It’s also abuse in and of itself. So when people listen to these two people and they’re like, “Oh, we don’t know who the abuser is. Cause she says he’s abusive. And he says, she’s abusive. And we can’t figure it out.” I want to say, she’s telling the truth. She is being abused. And his accusations that she is abusive are abuse.
They are gaslighting. He’s doing it to destabilize the situation like you talked about before.
Dr. Robin Stern: Absolutely. It reminds me of when I was in high school and people would sit around at the end of the party and people would say, what do you think reality is?
And they would have these conversations that could go on for hours. But in a situation where you can’t confront the person you’re living with because it will result in abuse. Or you can’t move out of the lane that he has set up for you because he will decide it’s abuse and begin to abuse you about it.
There’s no question who the abuser is and who the target of that abuse is.
Anne: Yeah, it’s also What they’re trying to achieve. So for example, on this podcast, I will get men who will write bad reviews or angry emails, and they’ll say two contradictory things.
They’ll say, number one, I am not the abuser. My wife is, and you convinced her that I’m abusive when I’m not, and she’s terrible and awful and she lies and they’ll say all these terrible things about her. Then they’ll say and it’s your fault. That our marriage is over. Like you were the one that caused this to happen.
And same thing to the people that you were having that discussion with at the school. It’s like, hold on a minute. If he genuinely does think that she is abusing him rather than physically intimidate her or abuse her back, wouldn’t he want to get to safety? Wouldn’t he want to move away?
But then they lose control. So they don’t want to move away, they want to stay close. And that’s also an indicator that like, no, the end result that you want is to be able to maintain control. Whereas the end result that she wants is safety. Those are two totally different things.
Dr. Robin Stern: That’s a very important point.
And, In the work that I do at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, we encourage people to give themselves and others permission to feel. It’s very important that you allow all of your feelings, and that you don’t judge the feelings you’re having.
So maybe it is true that in that moment, maybe we would say to the abuser, What are your feelings? But then, importantly, what you do with your feelings is another story. So we want people to have their feelings. We want people to own when they feel unpleasant things as well as when they feel pleasant things and be able to explore all of it.
But it’s what you do about your feelings and with your feelings and in a relationship, how you bring your feelings in in those moments of co regulating that really is what we’re talking about.
Anne: There’s a pitfall with abusers and therapy. And the pitfall is that they know what the right answer is. They know that if they say, ” I’m feeling abused, then someone will be like, Oh, well, those are your feelings.” I truly believe that a lot of the time they are lying. Because they know what they need to say to gain empathy or to gain validation.
A known compulsive liar and a known abuser, is going to lie about their own feelings in order to manipulate people.
Dr. Robin Stern: Yes, very often.
Absolutely.
Anne: For someone to say, I’m going to take this known manipulative person and this known compulsive liar and be like, “Oh, you’re feeling sad? Okay.” And not be like, “wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. This is how they manipulate. So they might not be feeling sad at all. We don’t actually know how they actually feel because they won’t ever tell you.
Dr. Robin Stern: And we don’t know how other people feel. We can only know when they tell us. And if they lie there’s no authentic communication. The goal is not to sit there and say, Oh, so you’re feeling abused or you’re feeling sad. Let’s talk more about that. So then what did you do?
If somebody’s telling you in a moment about an interaction, what was the interaction? What are the consequences with your wife when you feel that? Well, the consequence in this case was violence, and that’s not okay. That’s abuse.
Anne: To just follow that a little bit farther, they think that their emotions will justify their choices when they don’t justify them at all, because I feel shame and I might eat ice cream.
I’m not going to yell at someone. I might feel sad and I’m not going to lie to them and go solicit a prostitute. There is no logical connection between their feeling and their choice to lie, but they like to make some logical connection there, which is that gaslighting that this caused this when it’s no reality at all.
Dr. Robin Stern: Absolutely. Absolutely. It just reminds me of somebody I’ve worked with whose boyfriend was very controlling and jealous and so they would walk around the neighborhood and she would be friendly and talk to people who said hello to her on the street and then they’d go for dinner and she would sometimes see people they knew and she would be friendly.
He didn’t like it. He didn’t like her diverting her attention to anyone else and, um, accused her of not caring about him and loving him enough to be focused on him.
Accused her of flirting. And ultimately he came to the conclusion that it would be good for their relationship if when they walked down the street, she kept her head down and she didn’t make eye contact with anyone.
And then when they went to dinner it would be good for their relationship if she always took the seat where she looked at the wall. The first time he said it to her, she like, “What? That’s kind of crazy.” But then when he stepped her through the logic, his reality, she thought it made sense.
Anne: When you said logic, did you use air quotes?
Dr. Robin Stern: Yeah.
Anne: So to me, that’s not logical at all. And logic is high up on my value system. So these are like red flags to me. But have you found that gaslightees they start thinking that it is logical, even though it’s just not even remotely logical?
Dr. Robin Stern: Absolutely. I mean, this is how she presented in therapy.
It was heartbreaking. “So, Dr. Stern, when we walked down the street, and I looked down at the ground And we sit in a restaurant and I face the wall, we are not fighting anymore. He’s loving. He’s wonderful. But I feel weird about it. Because I thought it was ridiculous when he told me. And I didn’t think it was right.
And why should I have to look down? But then when I tell him that, he reminds me that it’s just an easy one, two, three. You look down at the street. You sit and face the wall and we’re a loving couple. You look up at other people. You are friendly in the restaurant, and we’re fighting all the time.
Don’t you see? It just makes sense.”
Anne: My guess is, I don’t know what happened after this, but like, there were going to be other things that he was like, “okay, now that you look down and sit and face the wall, now, I’m going to tell you that if you loaded the dishwasher different, we wouldn’t fight. Then it’s gonna continue.
Did she notice that this was spilling over into other things or did this solve literally all of their problems?
Dr. Robin Stern: It solved their problems until the next thing.
Anne: Yeah.
Dr. Robin Stern: When it was about what she should wear on the street.
Anne: Right.
Dr. Robin Stern: And the thing that was so hard for her was getting the courage to simply say, I’m not going to do that anymore.
And we’re just going to have to talk through what happens when I don’t. And it took a long time for her to feel ready to say that sentence because in that kind of relationship, if you can see it clearly, which she came to see it clearly that doesn’t mean you’re ready to do it differently. Because the price you’re paying is the loss of the relationship. And one of the things that I say to people all the time, you’ve got to be willing to make a sacrifice because often in these very manipulative, gaslighting relationships, there is something you’re there for that feels good to you sometimes maybe it’s just having a partner after a while.
It doesn’t feel good. Of course, when you’re devastated, but through the stages of gaslighting, you may still think that guy is so handsome and he’s my soulmate and I just love the way he looks at me. So no, I’m not going to risk that. Or he’s a good guy. After all, we made a life together and so he’s a little difficult.
And so I feel depressed sometimes, like maybe I’m too sensitive.
Anne: Or no relationship’s perfect. I
hear that a
lot. In our community we don’t really see a certain type of women who is more probable a victim of gaslighting because at least in my community, it happens to victims of betrayal across the board, even women with otherwise healthy attachment styles with their family or other people.
So because our community is comprised of women of every demographic and it’s happening to business executives and teachers and therapists and everyone, in your view, why are you confident and competent and even emotionally intelligent women in all walks of life? find themselves in these situations where they’re being gas lit?
Dr. Robin Stern: I’m going to use myself as an example, because in my former marriage, note former, I was married to a good guy gaslighter. He would resort to gaslighting as a technique to control the moment.
He and I had a very different conception of Being on time and what that meant and so he was always late, but not just five minutes late could be 25 minutes late 40 minutes late. We’re sitting down to dinner. I’m waiting for him. And I would say to him, I don’t like that. It feels disrespectful.
It is disrespectful. What can I do to help this not happen anymore? Is there anything I can do? Can you work on this? Whatever lovely, kind but firm communication I could come up with. And this was the time where I was taking a lot of notes and keeping track of the gaslighting going on .
And he would say to me, I’m not the one who has a problem with time, you are. Your parents were very uptight, and they taught you that people had to be on time, and it meant something different than it actually means in the world. And there are many women who wouldn’t care.
You’re uptight, so don’t give me a hard time. And I thought, no, that’s not right. I may have had a different upbringing than you and you may have learned different things, but it’s disrespectful. Being a few minutes late is different than being consistently very late. So no, I’m not the one with the problem.
And if we have a different conception, we need to organize our dinners differently. No, no, no, you’re the one with the problem. And here I was, somebody very confident in my own opinions, you’re writing about gaslighting, knowing that this was a gaslighting interaction that we were having, and at the same time, beginning to think, over time, maybe he’s right.
It was absolutely the reason I said I need to write this book now. Because if I was experiencing that, knowing what I knew, knowing that gaslighting takes time, that you can go through stages. I was writing about it. I was taking notes on my patients who were going through these terrible interactions and some of them feeling really distraught most of the time and sad and joyless in their life. I thought that was happening to me. What’s happening to people when they don’t even have a word to put to it? So when I began to unpack that, it wasn’t, about attachment styles. It wasn’t about early learning but it was because I did learn, and most women have learned to be empathic, to stand in somebody else’s shoes.
Most women have learned to try to understand, to try to accommodate. And accommodating in a relationship is a wonderful thing. We all have to accommodate at one time or another. But accommodating so much that you’re living in somebody else’s shoes that you’re not paying attention to your feelings is, I believe, why I ended up second guessing myself, even though I knew he was wrong.
I could feel that shift inside, too.
Anne: One thing that struck me is that you also need to know what you are accommodating. It’s one thing to accommodate someone who’s telling the truth. It’s another thing to accommodate lies. Like, that’s a totally different scenario. So if someone says, “I’m so sorry I was late, uh, my tire blew out on the freeway and I had to stop and change my tire,” and it’s true, then it’s easy to be accommodating.
Then that’s an understandable thing and you’re empathetic and everybody’s got problems and we all want to work together. It’s an entirely different thing for someone to say, “I’m so sorry I was late. My tire blew out on the freeway and that’s why I’m late.” When they were having sex with a prostitute.
That is an entirely different thing to accommodate and sometimes you don’t know what is what for a while and it really does take paying attention to what we call around here as your sacred internal warning system, that like something is not right here. This sounds like I should be accommodating because I should be kind and understanding when someone’s late , but like it doesn’t feel right .
Dr. Robin Stern: Yes, and sometimes accommodating is really about not the story that you’re told, which he’s probably lying. But then, you’re going into what I call the explanation trap, where you’re more interested in explaining his behavior. “Well, I wonder why he felt like he had to lie tonight.
Maybe his mother was very all over him. I don’t know if he’s lying or he’s not lying. He’s probably lying, but I’m, I’m just going to let it go because I don’t want to be like his controlling mother.” So, rather than thinking. Do I want to be with somebody who’s lying? You are trying to figure out his psychology, and it keeps you connected.
Anne: When you say it keeps you connected, for our listeners, what that means is it keeps you in proximity to the abuse. Because they’re not going to stop being abusive, well they might, hopefully they will at some point, but they haven’t stopped right now. So you’re experiencing the harm real time. The only thing you can do as a victim of this type of abuse is to separate yourself through mental space, through physical space, some degree of separation from the harm, because if you’re in proximity to it it’s going to hurt you no matter what you think about it. Just like Robin, an amazing, super smart professor at Yale, thinking, well, maybe he’s got a point, even though you knew that he didn’t.
Dr. Robin Stern: I’ve heard from people all over the country when I published my book, people would say things to me like, are you in my living room?
Are you like listening in the kitchen? And people who were super smart, super successful would call me and say, I know he’s lying. I know it. When we’re together and I say, you are lying. He convinces me that I must be crazy. To the point where someone told. This wonderful woman I was working with, that it wasn’t him that her friend saw on a dating site.
Even though her friend saw him on a dating site while they were together. It wasn’t him. Her friend must have seen an old picture of his cousin who looks like him. And she knew it was. She absolutely knew it was. But she sat with him while he Showered her with, you’re so special to me, and how could you ever think that I would do that, time and time again, until finally, she said, I just can’t be with you anymore.
I don’t know if you’re right or you’re not right, but I know that I just can’t be with you anymore. So to your point of being proximal to the abuse. As long as you stay, you’re at risk, but the minute you can get away, you’ll at least have some contact with your inner knowing. What did you say you call it?
Anne: We call it your sacred internal warning system. We teach all about that in our living free workshop.
Dr. Robin Stern: Yeah, so it’s hard to contact that when there’s so much noise and when you’re fighting so hard.
Anne: It’s our experience that when women do get some distance, they’re able to see it so much more clearly.
Dr. Robin Stern: I encourage people to just like go shopping on your own. Just go to your friend’s house. Just take a pause. Just get away to clear some space to hear yourself. When you listen to yourself and you can access your sacred knowing, you will begin to think this is not okay. And it’s often in my experience why people have that wake up call just in a moment that they’re pausing.
Somebody described to me that it was in a gas station where something happened with the credit card and so she had to sit in the car longer than a normal time, and I don’t know what, maybe a half hour. And she said in that space and time, it was the first half hour that she’d been without him for days.
And she heard herself saying, this is not okay. And after that, she left him. And in that case, she never looked back. It’s not usually that clean a break, and that immediate response, but often, it’s a third person who will say, Wait a minute, what are you doing? I haven’t seen you in months. You don’t seem like yourself.
And then you have to answer to that inside of yourself, if you’re willing to listen, that no, I’m not the same self I was. Maybe I’m not even the same strong self that I was .
Anne: I remember my sister telling me, when you talk on the phone with your husband, you sound like a completely different person.
That was at the beginning and I brushed it off at that point. But I think back on that now and think, wow, had, I really listened at that point, that would have maybe saved me five more years of abuse. Robin, Dr. Stern, you are incredible. I am so appreciative of your time and all of your hard work.
So thank you for your life’s work that has helped women get to safety all over the world.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Dr. Robin Stern: Anne, thank you. I’m loving our conversation. I’m loving your filling in where I left it blank and I’m loving your saying to me, but wait a minute. Thank you for your wisdom and your deep knowledge and forgiving that to so many victims of emotional abuse.
Thank you sooo much! I really need that validation that I am not crazy or incredibly abusive. You’ve described that last 5 years of my life perfectly.