Abuse can sometimes feel like a slow, torturous deterioration of your sanity. You can't name what was done to you, you can't point out what anyone has done to hurt you, you can't prove to yourself that you're being abused. You instead feel like you might be going crazy. Like everything they're saying about you might be true and you can't get a hold of your senses or figure out what is going on.
And when it keeps getting worse, you hang onto every little thing trying to analyze if you're having the correct perception of it, trying to figure out if what you're feeling about it is rational or true. You don't know what's going on anymore but you know something is wrong deep inside of you and it's harder and harder to exist, to experience anything. Your every experience becomes a mass of uncertainty, doubt, questions, endless analysis, and you still don't know what is right, what you're allowed to say, think, believe. You cannot state the facts, because you're not sure what they are. You're blind in a fog, unable to stop whatever is going on, unsure if you're being hurt, or if you're imagining it in your head.
There doesn't seem to be any way out. If you could only stop imagining it, stop going insane, but no matter how hard you try, your emotions go out of control, you feel like you're going to explode, you end up feeling helpless and ashamed. It feels like a descent into madness, you can't stop feeling like you've embarrassed yourself, done something wrong, had the wrong reaction to every event, ashamed of how others must see you as pathetic and crazy. It makes you want to hide from everyone forever, but the doubt and inability to see reality still follow you and drive you insane. You end up wishing you didn't exist because you can't even do that right.
This is what gaslighting does to you, and why it can be damaging and painful just to exist next to the people who have done that to you. Even if they don't do anything else to you, just being continuously gaslit about what did happen can make you feel like you're losing your mind, because you're trying to force yourself to emotionally experience a fictional reality that is super-imposed over the actual truth of what had happened. Your emotions are the result of the events that did happen, so they cannot change to correspond to the abuser's imagined, revised and fictional version. However, if you fail to force this process, the abusers will humiliate, degrade and psychologically attack your sanity, pressuring you to keep trying to change how you emotionally react to reality. No person can change that.
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