trump 2.0 Survival Guide

Step 1 - Self-Gaslighting: Deeper Origins - Part II

In Part I of CNI’s trump 2.0 Survival Guide, we began with the need to reset our minds, tactics and strategies for the increasingly treacherous world war for truth, justice, freedom, democracy and reality itself, because if the last “election” proved anything, there is no more time or energy to waste for those who are capable of fighting for an America with the constitutional fundamentals of “We the People,” with “Rule of Law,” in a forward thinking country where “All are created equal” and have the opportunity for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Like so many industries today, the psychiatric field tends to hide behind shrouded truths with their jargon, and stands behind some questionable ideological abstractions in their own self-interest, which seems a great irony since they have all signed an oath to help people more than narcissistically help themselves. Therefore, the more opportunities CNI has to break down the establishment’s overly-complicated concepts into understandable and useful basic elements for the general public, the better.

That is why Part II has detoured from self-gaslighting counters into covering some deeper levels of psychological origins and contexts. This coverage should help simplify some of the more elusive concepts of gaslighting and provide a deeper understanding of the tools suggested in the noble endeavor of reducing one’s own self-gaslighting.

Self-gaslighting is poison left behind to control you. Purge it!

As was briefly touched on in Part I, self-gaslighting is almost always a remnant of previous gaslighting, aka a form of narcissistic abuse. Self-gaslighting is a triggering poison left behind in the well of your soul, that was put there as a way to control you. This is a main reason why we can’t get to the root or defeat self-gaslighting without covering the unjust, unrecognized or unfathomable roots of narcissistic abuse that still cause many good people to gaslight themselves.

This is why a CNI axiom that the more one understands the psychological weaknesses, disorders and predictable compulsions of malignant narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths, the more one can recognize the poison pills they left behind, and the more one can take away the power of their toxic abuser’s long-practiced illusions of gaslighting. Providing greater context in this effort is what we have now set out to do in Part II.

Clearly narcissists can acquire psychological power over the ignorant, foolish, unprepared and fellow self-servers, but know that it is a hollow selfish power that is held together with trickery, lies, illusion and intimidation. This is why it all starts and ends with individual and public awareness of these weaponized antisocial behaviors being used against us, to control us, and why it must stop if we want to keep the psychologically disordered from turning our Earth into a dystopian and barely habitable hellscape.

Society can and must do better for children of narcissists.

As many CNI readers know, children of narcissists and those who just found themselves under the thumb of a malignant narcissist at some point in their lives were gaslit by that “person” and their flying monkeys from day one.

Their Day One dictator is why understandably and unjustly, they have a much steeper climb than the vast majority of us who have not been forced to endure our formative years being predatorily targeted and used by someone who selfishly, antisocially, and cruelly manipulated and unjustly punished us. This is why so many children of narcissists fall to the dark side. That is what can often happen when children have been groomed their entire lives to view abuse as strength.

It can be shocking how instinctively gaslighting comes to those with Dark Triad/ malignant Cluster B psychological disorders, but it is the way they have compulsively behaved most-to-all of their lives, so it is their nature, which means the children of narcissists who rise above to become kind and/or decent people deserve major kudos.

In the case of the children of narcissists, sociopaths or psychopaths, they are completely defenseless against all the early grooming and gaslighting. Therefore, they are unjustly forced to endure, survive and often habitually succumb to defense mechanisms like self-gaslighting to calm their abuser.

Indeed many children of narcissists fall to the dark side if there is no one there like a relative there to teach them about real love and empathy. Of course according to the narcissist parent and co-narcissist spouses who have been groomed to dysfunctionally support such abuse as strength, the only one deserving of love, empathy or understanding is the toxic abuser themselves, which is why it is so fascinating that these egomaniacs who claim great strength have the massive contradiction of being masters at playing the victim.

Hopefully, all the sad truths listed so far help clarify why most self-gaslighting is a self-imposed continuation of doubts, blame, insecurities and shame one or more toxic narcissists have previously inflicted and installed on a vulnerable target, or at their most vulnerable as children of narcissists.

The establishment’s failure and gaslighting about gaslighting.

Every so often, when I or others use the term, someone will say “that is not the correct meaning of gaslighting.” While I have always tried to be very precise in my use of official psychological terms, as the years have gone by I have noticed a variety of flaws, inconsistencies and misleading “official” terms, and considering how badly we have been failed by the psychological establishment regarding malignant narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths, at some point I stopped fighting people over what the official definitions are, when the expanded meaning has useful features.

One of my greatest WOW moments was this tweet of a psychologist saying they had zero mentions of gaslighting in their training and how little is studied or known about it. This is why when someone says gaslighting is only X, Y or Z, they are standing on a very limited and weak foundation, which is why CNI has zero qualms about usefully expanding the definition of gaslighting to include the overt kind.

i.e. If you catch someone lighting your emotional gas, you should be able to call it gaslighting if the technical definition is not considered important enough by the establishment to be a standard in the psychological curriculum. With the industry’s epic failures in educating the public to the point where an entire party of malignant-type narcissists are gaslighting their way into “public service,” rigidly sticking to a failed establishment’s declared definitions almost seems silly.

If for no other reason, the establishment’s total failure in protecting our society is why we welcome the expansive use of psychological terms when they enter the zeitgeist and/or seem to be specifically describing something else important in the here and now, as was the case with “malignant narcissist” and trump his first time in office.

To exemplify the utter failure of the psychological and media establishments, malignant means “progressively gets worse,” which can certainly be applied to trump’s behavior from the day he took office in 2016. Indeed by staying silent about the clear and present dangers trump’s obvious psychological issues present to America and the world, institutions we thought we could count on to fight for truth, mental health and democracy have been gaslighting us by omission and silence.

In other words, although it is not technically accurate to say you are being gaslit when someone is obviously triggering you, CNI finds it highly counter-productive (and possibly gaslighting) to not accept the use of the term “gaslighting” if someone is “lighting our gas,” aka overtly triggering us.

So the next time someone says you are not using “gaslighting” correctly, just say the psychological establishment has proven to be a total failure with definitions by allowing a textbook gaslighting malignant narcissist a second uncontested election. If they still have a problem, tell them CNI accepts both definitions of the term, and to contact me if they still want to debate it.

Same applies to self-gaslighting. In the CNI dictionary, it is just as likely to mean general self-triggering as it is to mean self-deceptive triggering, because it is so self-descriptive. Certainly what really matters is for the general public to have a better understanding of the narcissist psychology threatening humankind before it is too late for us to stop it, rather than sticking by official definitions from institutions that have continually failed in their duty to warn and protect us.

A narcissist in public service is a gaslighting and recipe for disaster.

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense that nearly all selfish and insecure people by their very nature hate the foundations of any true democracy. Again, it is only logical that people who “can’t handle the truth” have their own warped and instinctual self-serving nature and versions of alternative truth, justice and reality.

It is also empirical psychology that when someone has an antisocial narcissistic disorder, it causes them to only see their own perspective, to only think about themselves compulsively, and to see other humans as merely tools to be used to fill their standard primary compulsions of more money, power and control.

In other words, these are people psychologically unfit to perform “public service.” Literally the last thing they will ever think about is helping other people unless there is something in it for them. You know when someone is described in the news as “transactional,” very few seem to realize that virtually every clinical-level narcissist is purely transactional.

Ergo, everyone who is purely transactional is showing a primary tell of disorder-level narcissism and it should be a big red flag that they are unfit for “public service” due to an obsession with self-service.

They can’t conceive that anyone else should be treated equally, because their insecurities and/or lack of empathy seems to drive most to believe they are superior to everyone else.

Another tell that is hard to miss in the grandiose narcissist version is they always claim they are the best and smartest at everything, can’t admit a mistake, and will say and do almost anything to maintain their self-delusion illusion. Sound familiar?

Logic and science seems to dictate that trauma-built narcissists need to constantly tell themselves and believe they are superior and stable geniuses to avoid narcissistic collapse. However, always remember you never want to trigger a collapse until you have fully accounted for the firehose of narcissistic rage you will unleash, and have chosen your best battlefield and moment.

It is near 100% that the inevitable toxic power blast of a narcissistic collapse that is unleashed is darker, more shameless and a more twisted bottomless pit of chaos and cold-blooded cruelty than most who haven’t experienced it can conceive. This is why one must be fully prepared for the battle and ready to expose the narcissist’s inhumanity for the world to see, with a mechanism that will truly hold them accountable, and thus forces them to behave. One thing for sure, it is not something anyone wants chaotically blowing back on them, so choose wisely.

Of course, if anyone has a malignant narcissist or a whole cabal of them that need to be taken down, always best to deal with your own issues and vulnerabilities first, like trying to eliminate all self-defeating bad habits such as self-gaslighting.

Have no doubts that malignant-type narcissists will definitely attempt to trigger, derail and destroy free people with whatever gets to them, before they are forced to destroy the narcissists (hitler, mussolini, etc.) in self-defense.

As always, the choice narcissists give everyone is submit or rebel, so in this dark time, there are few things better to do for yourself and a free society than to rebel against and eliminate any personal weaknesses like self-gaslighting, since they can and will be used against you. You can do it!

Recalibrating

At CNI, each recalibration starts with the recommendation to be more kind, gain greater understanding and to take more care of the one thing you have the most control over, yourself. This process needs to start with finding tools that will help end any self-gaslighting. The simplest CNI mantra tools that have maintained their effectiveness for years are,

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

“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.”

In Part III out soon, we will have suggestions on ways not to self-gaslight and other kinds of counter-moves on the way to Step 2 of this psychological survival series.