By JoyGenea with assistance from Chat GPT EQ Breakthrough Navigator
The topic of self-gaslighting applies to people in leadership as well as people who know they have ADHD, dyslexia, or autistic traits.
In leadership and as the person running the company it is easy to think everyone else thinks like you and has the same goals for the organization. When someone who does not sneaks in, it can erode on so many levels.
With people who identify as neurodiverse, this is actually very common, because of all of the years of no diagnosis and the school system not being able to adapt for this style of learning. The unintentional gaslighting by the teachers and administration and some parents started early for some people and happened for many many years.
I want you to know that this is very real and you’re not alone. It’s time to change this in your life, starting today.
Self-Gaslighting is when someone’s gaslighting of you causes you to question your own perceptions, memories, skills, abilities, thoughts, instincts, or even your sanity. Over time, this external influence becomes internalized. Your inner dialogue starts to work against you, questioning your decisions and choices in real time.
This is what truly erodes self-confidence and the ability to fight back. It becomes a mentally unhealthy loop that’s hard to break. You feel something, then immediately doubt it. You think a thought, then dismiss it. You sense danger, then override it.
The result? A growing distance from your inner truth, and eventually, from yourself.
So, what can you do about it?
Let me introduce a practical tool I use with clients: the C.L.E.A.R. method. It’s designed to help interrupt the self-gaslighting loop and restore your ability to trust yourself again. It is time to stop renting out your thoughts to someone else and reclaim your brain.
I will tell you that this method is most powerful when you invite a few trusted people into the process with you. Sometimes it can be almost impossible for us to notice things that are internal, so when we start to share them in safe ways externally with trusted friends, support group members, coaches, counselors, and spiritual advisors we can start to see them easily.
The C.L.E.A.R. Method
C – Catch the self-gaslighting
Start by noticing when it’s happening. It will sound like you are talking yourself out of something. That is the sound of your confidence and self-worth dying. This often has words like:
- “Maybe I’m overreacting.”
- “It probably wasn’t that bad.”
- “Other people have it worse.”
This step is not about judgment. It’s about awareness. You can’t shift what you don’t first recognize.
L – Listen to your emotions
Your feelings are not the problem. Your emotions are messengers. They’re trying to tell you something.
Instead of immediately minimizing or explaining them away, practice presence. Say to yourself:
“I feel this way. That’s enough.”
Emotions don’t need justification to be valid. They are valid because you are feeling them. It’s what you do with them that defines your life and future.
E – Examine the origin
Where is this internalized voice coming from?
- From your past – Is it a caregiver’s old narrative?
- A boss who dismissed your concerns?
- A cultural message that taught you to put others first?
Tracing the voice helps separate your truth from what was projected onto you.
A – Affirm your reality
This is where the rewiring begins.
Affirm what “is,” what you felt, what you saw, what you experienced. Practice saying:
- “My perspective matters.”
- “I’m allowed to trust what I felt.”
- “My lived experience is real.”
Affirmation doesn’t require proof. It requires presence.
R – Rewire with repetition
Self-gaslighting is a loop. So is healing.
The more you catch, listen, examine, and affirm, the more natural it becomes to respond to yourself with clarity and self-respect. Like a muscle, self-trust gets stronger the more you use it.
The Next Big Action
The best way to start this process is with you writing down the answers to each section of C.L.E.A.R. about a situation you are sorting out.
By writing it down you will discover more. If you are able, talk about it with someone. The big key here, do NOT talk it over with the person gaslighting you. They will not help you find your truth. They will just continue to lead you in the wrong direction.
Final Thoughts
Self-gaslighting isn’t your fault. It often begins as a response to a relationship or environment where your reality isn’t or wasn’t honored. But you don’t have to stay stuck in that loop.
The truth is: you are not too much. You are not making it up. You are not broken.
You’re learning to trust yourself again, and that is powerful.
Thanks for reading and please pass this along to someone you know who could use this type of insight.
JoyGenea Schumer
Unconventional Leadership and international Neurodiversity Success Coach
Championing Different Thinkers to Have Incredible Lives.
Video Transcription:
Okay, we are talking about self-gaslighting, how to claim your inner truth. If you have not heard of this before, well, welcome, and now you’re gonna hear about it.
Why I feel confident and know that this term applies to individuals that are different thinkers—dyslexic, ADHD, autism, those types of traits, whether they’ve been identified or not—is because, quite often, going through a schooling system not designed for that type of brain and that style of learning means there were a lot of times that, unintentionally, people told and said to an individual that, “Well, what you’re feeling, or thinking, or observing isn’t actually real.”
And so, quite often, this is one of the hurdles that actually needs to be addressed early on. What I’ve also found is that for leaders that are very kind, and empathetic, and generous, they also can get caught up in ways by vendors, employees, those types of things, that might just cause them to doubt themselves at a pretty high level. And so knowing how to handle that can be really, really important. So that’s why we’re hanging out today, and that’s my topic.
Now that I’ve explained it a little bit more, just a reminder: self-gaslighting is when someone’s gaslighting you, and it’s causing you to question your own perceptions, memories, skills, abilities, thoughts, instincts, and even your own sanity. Over time, this external influence becomes internalized, and your inner dialogue starts to work against you. You start questioning all of your decisions and your choices in real time, which makes it really hard to move forward, to grow, to lead, to have self-confidence.
It erodes a bunch of things, and I don’t want that for you. You don’t need that, that’s just not necessary. So what do I do about it? I help people work with that, and I created a really simple acronym called CLEAR, just to make this simple. I can’t promise you I completely made it up, it’s probably a hybrid of a few things I’ve heard over the years.
So, CLEAR is: Catch the self-gaslighting. It’s always important, when it comes to internal dialogue, to just start to identify, “Oh hey, there’s that thought, and that thought. I need to question that thought.”
So what it might sound like is:
“Maybe I’m overreacting to this, I should think about that.”
“It probably wasn’t as bad as I think it was.”
“Well, other people have it worse.”
When you start to hear that in your internal dialogue, that’s a hint that you are actually selling to yourself a different form of reality, and you need to pause. This is the time to catch that, start to hear that, and shift it.
Listen to your emotions. Start to actually say to yourself, “Oh, I’m feeling these emotions, and that’s okay. They’re valid. They can exist. I don’t have to react to them, I don’t have to add to them, but they exist in this space.” That’s good.
Examine the origin. I don’t encourage people to over-examine, I don’t want people to get stuck in the past. That is definitely a space and time and grace to be utilizing counseling services if you want to really start to dig into the origins of some of the self-gaslighting. If we’re not able to turn it off, if it’s not easily shifted, yes, it should be examined. But that can be simple things like: Who else did I know that sounded like this? Was this a boss I had at some time, somebody in leadership? Was this a parent? Was this a grandparent that also sounded like this? Or was it a societal thing?
Don’t skip that one. Society can have a lot of rules, and you take them in. Different cultures, different religions—it all plays out in how we judge what we’re seeing and doing.
The next part of CLEAR is: Affirm your reality. Literally just be like, “Oh, my perceptions matter. My perspective on this matters. Whether anybody else wants to hear it, I want to hear it. I know that it’s valid. I’m allowed to trust what I felt. I don’t need other people to tell me, ‘Yep, that’s what happened.’ I can say that to myself. I can say, ‘Boy, that’s how I took it in, and that’s how it felt for me.’” That is your lived experience, and you have a right to it.
And then the last part of CLEAR is: Rewire with repetition. It’s about that repetition. So that means you don’t do it once. This means you work to apply this to your lifetime, time and time again, so that you are able to catch, listen, examine, and affirm over and over again, quickly and faster each time, so that it gives it immense momentum and this self-gaslighting just moves on.
I know I’ve made that sound really easy. It’s probably easier than you think. It’s also probably a whole new set of muscles internally that you have not used, so it’ll be clunky at first. So what? That’s fine. Start to reclaim your confidence, your worthiness, your internal feelings. They’re really probably quite right.
I know this, when working with my clients, people know a lot more about what’s really going on than they sometimes even allow themselves the honesty of admitting to or living in. And once you start to live in that space of your reality, and how you’re experiencing life, and not taking on other people’s stories and other people’s junk—which is what is happening if somebody’s gaslighting you—once you peel all that off, it’s incredible who I find underneath a lot of that.
So I hope that’s been helpful for you. If you want to hear more about that, I would love to hear your stories of how this might relate to you. If this was valuable, pass it on to somebody else. Please share.
I’m JoyGenea, International Neurodiversity Coach and Unconventional Leadership Coach. Thank you so much for your time, and I will catch you next time.