Let's talk about ours experiences and how we handle them

[Thoroughbred]

My personal experience is that being the target of gaslighting by your favorite BPD person is probably one of the most sinister things we are faced with. It can be pretty evil stuff.

Frankly it would be helpful for me, and I think a lot of others who float by here if we started a thread to share our story (experiences) what it looked like, and how you handled it (or failed to handle it).  There's a fair amount of reading material on the topic, but the instructional value of somebody sharing their experiences and what worked and didn't work is much more valuable. 

I'll go first.

In my case my wife used gaslighting to drive a wedge between me and the kids (they were older at the time).  She was the wonderful caring mom who needed to protect them from dad and all of his surly (made up, pretend) problems. As I became more aware of what she was really doing, I resolved to become much more involved with each of them and my grandkids (without my wife's direct presence).  I made a concious effort to unload a lot of the stress and ugliness from my life so that I'd be a lot more pleasant to be around.  It didn't work overnight, but its been highly effective. 

Perhaps the primary outcome is that any attempt she makes to gaslight me with the kids will now identify her as the problem. Consequently the past few years there's been a minimum of that activity.

Honestly, I'm really scared of the damage that a mentally ill person can do with the gaslighting technique.  There's no filter or barrier that prevents a BPD from making anything up about you and spreading this evil to the people you know and respect you.  A therapist that warned me about this a few years ago, told me that when I sensed she was spreading any ugly stuff about me, that that was my cue to grab my 'go bag' and 'GO'.

How about you?  What was it like? How did it affect you?  How have you handled it?

[paperinkart]

Luckily I don’t have too much experience with this (I mean, as far as I can logically tell! Hopefully I’m not that naive...), but once in a while my partner will claim that something didn’t happen, even when I KNOW for a fact it did.

It’s always small, usually a conversation we never had or something he never said. I know sometimes people can be forgetful (he usually has a great memory but he’s no exception) so I’d say it’s 50% forgetfulness and sometimes gaslighting. It’s funny because there’s never a logical reason for him to twist a truth, but I know he does it almost like a habit.

Anyway, hopefully other people’s experiences aren’t much more severe than mine. I’m grateful mine is mild!

[WorksNeverDone]

My primary experience with gaslighting was when my BPDw would do something unacceptable (have an affair).  I would share my grief/outrage/disbelief, and she would tell me that I was only feeling those things because of a "repressed" upbringing or an antiquated value system.  Her version of the affair was that she had only tried to "get more love in her life" and that she had lied to me in order to "protect the person that she loves most in this world."
She essentially painted my response as irrational and painted her infidelity as an act of love and care.
How did I handle?  Well, I talked to therapists/friends/family who validated that I wasn't crazy for having the emotional response that I did.  Eventually, through her own self-work, she came to validate that my response was completely legitimate and that she was sorry for having belittled it.  She still holds to her view of her actions, but that's her reality, so I don't begrudge her that.  The more I learned about BPD, the more I let go of the resentment that I felt towards her for having tried to make me feel like the bad guy in the situation.

[Dadofchaos]

So with my wife it manifests itself as dissociative episodes. It generally only happens when she's extremely worked up and emotional to the max. She will literally interpret anything, i mean ANYTHING, you say as an egregious wound to the core of her and rage. Twist words, flip or change a single word you said to make the statement mean something completely different, then will start a fight regarding that trying to convince you it is what you said.

Also, this only happened one time in our 19 year relationship. But when she had a long term departure from reality when recently going off major psychotropic meds she all of the sudden projected all the bad traits she felt about herself onto me. Utterly comvinced i was these things. In our discussions i would plead for examples to help myself see what she was seeing but she would become defensive and make the inquiry seem like i was being beligerent because she didn't have an example. Low and behold there were no examples because the accusations were baseless.

Eventually on day 3 of our nightly circular arguements that lasted 7 to 8 hours each night i finally decided to record the argument through Messenger. The next day when she was calm she went through it and was completely shocked. This helped snap her back and got her back into treatment. Not without being consumed by the emptiness and me being on a week long suicide watch first. As you all may know, exposing the game for what it is subjects them to their core wound which is overwhelming for most with BPD.