I watched a wonderful documentary yesterday called Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa. It’s about the Nepalese woman who submitted Mt. Everest ten times. Really inspiring. But not only because she accomplished an unimaginable feat and survived on Everest but also because she survived a violently abusive alcoholic husband who brought her from Nepal to Connecticut, illiterate and not speaking English, where she was 100% in his power.
At one point in the film, her teenage daughter commented to her sister that their father, who had died of cancer by that time, had told her once that he’d never hurt the girls in any way. The daughter said, “What about all those times he pulled our hair and hit us? Was I imagining it?” And I thought, BINGO! That’s the perfect example of gaslighting. When a person’s reality is challenged so that she questions her own lived experience. “Am I crazy or did it really happen?”
For many women in our community, the one question they ask themselves when their husband leaves is, “Am I crazy?” Why does this come up over and over? Because, on running away, so many husbands attack their wives with a distorted reality, different from what really took place. He might say something like, “I hated that trip we took to Florida” when in reality, he seemed to be having a great time. Or he could say (like my ex-husband did), “I never liked this house” when, in reality, he loved it and said the only way he would leave it is feet first (an actual quote).
Or, he could say even more baffling things like, “I never really loved you”, when he’d been a loving husband for 27 years.
Words have tremendous power, particularly when you’ve trusted the person who is saying those words for decades. He couldn’t be lying - that doesn’t make any sense - so the next possible explanation is for you to question yourself. Did I mis-read what was actually going on in my own life? Was I blind to the reality? Did I have my head in the proverbial sand?
Or . . . there’s a third explanation, have I been gaslighted? Is my husband saying whatever he wants to undermine my version of our relationship so that he can have an excuse for “having” to leave? Is he banking on my trusting his word, as I always have, so that I would question myself before questioning him?
BINGO! That's it!
As hard as it is to understand, your ex is re-writing history to suit his new narrative.
When my husband left and I was dumbfounded to understand how he now viewed our joint life in such different hues than he had when we were married, I called up Mike, a friend of ours who is a history professor, and asked him what to believe. Mike said, “believe your lived experience. You have to believe yourself.”
For so many women, that takes courage. Believing yourself in the face of someone else’s adamant denial of your reality requires grit. You would need to accept that his denial of what really happened is in the service of supporting his story. He doesn’t really care about the truth.
So, in the end, the Everest climber’s daughters were abused by their father regardless of what he said and you need to know that your version of your story is real. Be a strong mountain climber, like Lhakpa Sherpa, and trust yourself.
