trump 2.0 Survival Guide

Step 1 - No More Self-Gaslighting - Part I

With Counter-Narcissist Intelligence’s prime directive being to provide Common Sense for humanity’s most existential psychological challenges, current events have made it clear that all of us striving to be more knowledgeable, present, forward-thinking and self-aware need to reset our minds, tactics and strategies for the increasingly treacherous world for truth, justice, freedom, democracy and reality itself.

From a CNI perspective, the first step in recalibrating when forced to counter malignant narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths out to destroy everything good so they can rule, dominate and control is to take a personal inventory and adjust, correct or move past the issues we are capable of as individuals. This does not mean every one of good intentions shouldn’t feel whatever they feel, or to infer that one can just snap their fingers to have traumas heal.

It simply means that when dealing with these types of disordered personalities, you will need most-to-all of your energy in the things that really matter, so you can’t waste any energy on self-defeating habits anymore if you want a decent shot at success.

Malignantly disordered types are like sharks to blood for such weaknesses and will do everything they can (consciously and unconsciously) to drain you of your energy and crush your will to stand up for yourself and others, by gaslighting those weaknesses.

Hopefully, once one fully processes that the main purpose of a narcissist’s toxic, cruel and disgusting gaslighting abuse of everyone is distraction, deflection and disorientation, they understand that these behaviors are based on weakness, not on power. Thus this is a place where they are vulnerable.

Their default programming is to make things so toxic and disturbing that we either submit, run away, embrace their evil or just stop fighting against their compulsive and insecure need to acquire, dominate and control, to fill a bottomless empty pit of a soul.

Obviously, lies and gaslighting can be used to gain power, but we must never forget at its roots are zero emotional empathy for anyone else due to an unfathomable amount of trauma-based fears, insecurities, and/or brains without functioning consciences.

From personal experience, this means we must strive to resolve, better manage and/or eliminate our own negative predispositions, thoughts or beliefs within one’s ability to do so, so they cannot be used against us to drain us.

For the unfamiliar, the vast majority of malignant-types will shamelessly and ruthlessly use anything and everything against anyone and everyone who stands in the way of them fulfilling their cravings, because it is their nature and/or conditioning.

Indeed their natural compulsions are a big part of why they can’t or won’t ever stop, they constantly double down on their lies and why firm barriers are normally the only things that will ever stop a narcissist’s greedy, toxic and cruel behaviors. Yes cruelty is the point, but not the point most think it is, and most cruel of all is when their lies and abuses get good and decent people to hurt themselves.

Therefore, to put ourselves in the best positions to defeat these evils born out of nature and/or disordered and traumatic non-nurture, we must help ourselves by minimizing the power standard narcissistic abuses can have over us.

Yes we all have our triggers and these toxic-types are constantly phishing for them, so if we can somehow remove them or make them more difficult to set off, narcissists lose most of their power to upset us, which is obviously a very good thing.

That is why when ready, an honest personal psychological inventory and new plans to be more forgiving and kinder to yourself are CNI’s highest recommended starting points to prepare for the inevitable gaslighting battles yet to come and to be avoided. Otherwise, your human weaknesses can and will be constantly used against you via micro-targeted lies and gaslighting, as was done to vulnerable and insecure “voters.”

As incentive, always remember that even when just one person striving to be good is able to accurately assess the drags on their personal progress and can let go of the negative feelings that work against them, every positive goal of individual, communal and global happiness, progress and enlightenment becomes that much closer.

Regardless of whether you are in the fight by choice or by need, always remember wars are won or lost with “hearts and minds.” Ergo, in order to counter the many evils that exist in our world, common sense, logic, CNI and virtually every other pro-social philosophy advises we need to break our own psychological chains before we can truly help others break theirs.

This means that while there are multitudes of Counter-Narcissist steps civil societies need to take to stop and reverse gaslighting liars from gaining more power, we need to start with the power we have within ourselves to be more effective, because we no longer have margins of time or energy to waste.

Step 1: No more self-gaslighting.

Self-gaslighting options to save humanity according to Yoda.

Gaslighting

As those who are familiar with the term know, ‘Gaslighting’ comes from the 1938 play “Gaslight” which is about a husband who performs all sorts of psychological manipulations including denying reality to make his wife think she is going insane, so she does not discover his dark secret. What a coincidence that is exactly what malignant narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths almost always do too.

In 2022, ‘Gaslighting’ was Merriam-Webster's word of the year. They defined it as "the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one's own advantage"

Personally, I am a long-time fan of Wikipedia’s strong definition.

Yes, this means that every time trump and maga Republicans deny or lie about reality or statements that they made in public, they are 'gaslighting' the American people and the world.

Self-gaslighting

Essentially, self-gaslighting is the same thing as gaslighting, but obviously you do it to yourself. However, most self-gaslighting is a self-imposed continuation of doubts, blame, insecurities and shame a gaslighter previously inflicted upon you.

Self-gaslighting will continue to self-ignite via installed trauma triggers until you are able to manage, remove or release yourself from the triggers that cause you to self-blame for things not really your fault, just as the gaslighter did to you.

Unjustly, those raised by a narcissist are groomed to blame themselves for things a narcissist does wrong, so have the even greater uphill psychological battle of unlearning a primary defense mechanism they learned to use in conflict avoidance.

Yes a child of a narcissist is conditioned to take the blame for everything. This is how they keep their delusional and unworthy self-declared Alpha from throwing a toddler rage temper tantrum (of mean tweets) when things don’t go their way.

Self-gaslighting origins

The first few times in the mid-2010s when I caught myself watching or reading news that had no redeeming qualities, information, was pushing my buttons, was a logical fallacy hanging on a lie, and/or was upsetting me for no useful purpose, I said to myself, “Why am I self-gaslighting?” Fortunately, long before I had ever thought up my version of the term, I had a life-changing previous experience I was able to draw from.

Like most reformed perfectionists, I used to beat myself up pretty good about not doing things perfectly. Then somewhere around 16-years-old, I had what I now recognize as my first and last panic attack.

I remember laying on my back, my breathing becoming heavy panting and my heart thumping through my chest because I was extremely stressed out about something. Fortunately, like Sheldon Cooper, I have been a fan of the original Star Trek with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock since boyhood.

What is important in this context is that Mr. Spock taught me logic, and that logic is why I have never had another panic attack again. The reason I know this to be true is because as I began to consciously panic about the attack itself, I thought about what Spock would say to Kirk if he was freaking out about something. With Spock’s words in mind, I was able to calm myself then and ever since. His logical lessons to Kirk were always something to the effect of,

“Captain, it is illogical to get so upset. It will not help the situation.”

So true Mr. Spock, so true.

By repeating and processing that my panic was not helping me, that was how I was able to calm myself. I resolved then and there that if I didn’t learn to use logic to calm my feelings, I would have a heart attack at 25. Instead, the calm of logic has served me well my entire life.

Calming Mantras

The following became my main calming mantras over the years in moments of stress or anxiety. I am sharing them because they have been highly effective in keeping me from being too hard on myself over the years. Hopefully they can serve others well too.

“All I can do is the best I can do. If I have done that, I can’t be mad at myself, because I can’t do more than my best.”

“The world beats us up enough, don’t help.”

Part II