Most of us know what gaslighting is.
Someone makes you question your own reality. Your memory, your feelings, your sense of what actually happened.
It’s disorienting and it tends to come from someone else.
But self gaslighting is the version we do to ourselves. Quietly. Almost automatically.
And it might be the most common thing I see in my work with women. The moment something true gets talked down before it even has a chance to breathe.
The dinner table I grew up at
Growing up, dinner at our house could get pretty loud.
My parents (who I lovingly refer to as the “Bickersons”) could pretty much argue their way through an entire meal.
As the youngest of four, I somehow landed the role of family peacekeeper.
I did whatever I could to keep things calm, keep everyone happy. And avoid even the tiniest hint of conflict.
Those family dinners shaped me into being a good girl and people-pleaser.
Someone who who was good at managing everyone else’s feelings. And had very little idea what to do with her own. Or even what those feelings were.
The moment that things started to shift came in my early 30s.
I was describing myself to a new boss, when I said, almost apologetically:
“I’m just too sensitive.”
She looked at me and said something I’d genuinely never heard before…
“There’s no such thing as too sensitive. You’re just sensitive.”
I think my mouth hit the floor.
It had never occurred to me that sensitivity wasn’t a flaw to apologize for. That maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with me after all.
I’ve had to keep reminding myself of that every since.
What self gaslighting actually looks like
Here’s the pattern I notice in almost every conversation I have with women.
She’ll say something that’s clearly true for her:
- I’m unhappy in this relationship.
- This situation at work doesn’t feel right anymore.
- That comment really bothered me.
And then, almost in the same breath, she starts explaining it away.
Maybe I’m being too hard on him. Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe it’s just me.
That’s self gaslighting.
Taking something you know — something real, something you felt clearly — and then methodically talking yourself out of it.
It’s not dramatic.
It doesn’t announce itself.
It just sounds like being reasonable.
Being fair.
Not wanting to make a big deal out of things.
And it’s so practised by the time most women come to coaching that it happens before they even notice it’s started.
Why we do it
For most women I work with, this didn’t come from nowhere.
It came from years of learning, sometimes explicitly, sometimes just by observation, that their feelings were too much, too inconvenient, or simply not that important.
That being easy was better than being honest.
That keeping the peace mattered more than saying the thing.
So they got good at it. Really good.
But the feelings don’t disappear. They just get filed away under probably nothing before they ever see the light of day.
The shift that matters
The most important thing isn’t always figuring out what you feel.
Often you already know what you feel.
The shift is noticing the exact moment you start talking yourself out of it.
That tiny pivot — from I feel this to but maybe I’m wrong — is where so much gets lost.
You don’t have to do anything dramatic with that moment.
You don’t have to fix it or act on it or build a case for it.
Just pause there.
Because before you started explaining it away…before you decided you were too much or that something must be wrong with you…you knew.
And that knowing is worth something. It’s worth at least not immediately dismissing it.
A question to sit with
Where in your life have you been talking yourself out of something you already know to be true?
Not to fix it. Not to figure out what to do next.
Just to notice.
That’s usually where it starts.
With one honest look at the thing you’ve been quietly explaining away.
If this landed, my free guide How to Stop Second-Guessing Yourself goes deeper into exactly this — the moment you override what you already know, and a simple process to help you stop.
Because the problem usually isn’t that you don’t have an answer.
It’s that somewhere along the way, you stopped trusting it.
Kerry xo