Why Gaslighting Makes You Question Your Goodness

People don’t usually wake up wondering if they’re a bad person.

The question tends to come up later, after you've been told more than once that your reaction is the issue. It comes after hearing you’re too sensitive. It follows being told you’re remembering things wrong. It shows up after watching responsibility slide off someone else and land on you instead.

This isn’t limited to romantic relationships. It shows up between friends, within families, and in workplaces, especially when someone has enough influence to decide what counts as reasonable.

Most people don’t call it gaslighting at first. They notice something feels off.

“I don’t trust myself anymore.”
“I keep replaying conversations.”
“I feel like I’m always the problem.”
“I don’t know if I’m a good person.”

What Starts to Change

You leave conversations unsettled. Not angry. Not explosive. Just off.

Later, you think about what you said. You wonder if your tone was wrong. You ask yourself if you misunderstood something obvious. You tell yourself you’re being dramatic. You tell yourself to let it go.

You replay things because you’re trying to understand why the same situation keeps ending the same way.

Eventually, you start questioning yourself:

Did I overreact?
Did I cause this?
Why does this keep happening to me?

When It Comes From Someone You Trust

I remember sitting with someone I thought was a friend and trying to talk about something that upset me. I wasn’t yelling. I wasn’t attacking her. I was explaining why I was upset.

She turned it back on me almost immediately. She said I had no right to feel angry. Then she said something I still remember clearly. She told me my feelings were lying to me.

I didn’t argue. I didn’t defend myself. I went quiet. Not because I agreed, but because I suddenly wasn’t sure I was allowed to trust my own reaction at all.

What made it worse was how she presented herself elsewhere. Online, she talks about honoring emotions and sitting with feelings. Sitting across from me, she told me mine couldn’t be trusted.

I didn’t forget that.

How Doubt Spreads

People who begin to question their goodness usually care about how they affect others. They think about fairness. They consider how their actions affect others. They worry about crossing lines and causing harm.

People who don’t care about those things don’t spend much time agonizing over them. They don’t replay conversations. They don’t lie awake wondering if they hurt someone.

When reactions keep being framed as the problem, doubt no longer stays tethered to a single moment. It begins to shape how you see yourself.

You stop asking what happened and start asking what’s wrong with you.

After You Step Away

Even when the relationship, friendship, or job ends, the habit of questioning yourself doesn’t disappear right away.

You still feel the urge to explain before anyone asks.
You still brace for criticism in neutral conversations.
You still assume you need to justify why something bothered you.

Trust doesn’t come back cleanly. Some days feel solid. On other days, a small interaction pulls you back into second-guessing.

Many people expect to be past this by now. Most aren’t.

Finding Your Way Back

This doesn’t resolve through thinking harder or analyzing every detail.

What helps is noticing how quickly you turn on yourself. How easily you dismiss your reaction. How often do you assume fault before anyone else assigns it?

The internal voice that questions you doesn’t disappear overnight. Arguing with it usually keeps it loud. Seeing it and choosing not to follow it changes the relationship instead.

Letting go of the need to prove you’re good doesn’t mean you stop caring. It means you stop putting yourself on trial for every interaction.

Trust often starts to return there.

About Healing Arts Center

At Healing Arts Center, we work with people who are rebuilding trust in themselves after experiences where their perceptions, reactions, or emotions were repeatedly questioned. The work is somatic- and mindfulness-informed, focused on what shows up in everyday life rather than on dissecting or reliving the past.

We don’t replace therapy, and we don’t ask people to justify or defend what they lived through. The focus is on helping people reconnect with their own internal signals and learn how to listen to themselves again without immediately overriding what they notice.

You can learn more at
https://www.healingartsvb.com

Availability and booking information can be found at
https://www.vagaro.com/healingartscenter