11/14/2025
Unscrambling Myself: A Therapist’s Reflection on Gaslighting and the Bonds That Break Us
A personal and clinical meditation on trauma, power, and the long walk back to myself.
By Ed Stuber
A peaceful relationship needs two humble hearts, not two stubborn mouths.
If a partner believes they are always right, you are not a partner to them, you are an audience.
(Superiority)
If they carry themselves as inherently more valuable, your needs become background noise to their self-importance. Power imbalances do not nurture trust, they starve it. A relationship with one person holding the crown is not a relationship, it is a dictatorship with date nights.
(Devaluation and dominance)
If they genuinely think they stand above everyone else, that is not confidence, that is grandiosity wearing borrowed grace.
(Entitlement)
The private truth always tells the real story
If in public they look gentle, regulated, curated and socially polished, but in private they are breaking dishes, screaming so loud the drywall shivers, slamming doors off hinges, calling you worthless, or shattering your nervous system with their volatility, that is not a bad day. That is the split between image and reality, the control of a narrative outside and the collapse into chaos inside. That is manipulation.
(Gaslighting)
Instability hidden becomes instability weaponized
If someone lies about the severity of their emotional instability or uses impulsive behaviors and emotional threats to create guilt, obligation or fear, you are not dealing with stress. You are dealing with a disordered relational system.
Trying to bring clarity into that environment is like trying to bring logic to an allergy. You speak calmly and they sneeze. You try to soothe and they blame you for the sneeze. Then they demand a tissue for a mess they made.
Disordered personalities resist order. Believe the first showing. Walk while you can.
When effort becomes a one way street
A partner who believes they deserve everything while contributing nothing is not seeking connection. They are seeking service.
When someone expects admiration like oxygen and views your boundaries as inconveniences, you are not their equal. You are their supply.
No one is a deity. Pretending to be one is delusional.
(Excessive need for admiration and exploitation)
The flying monkeys and the choir of excuses
When friends are recruited to protect the illusion with lines like
“that is just how they are,”
“you misunderstood,”
“let me talk to them,”
“you are too sensitive,”
these are not mediators.
They are stabilizers of dysfunction.
They help maintain the unhealthy ecosystem.
(Gaslighting)
Rapid replacement is not romance, it is resourcing.
When someone moves on before the relationship is even cold, or within days or weeks of leaving, understand this truth:
You did not lose your partner. You lost your problem.
And yes, Dolly, I love you, but you had it wrong. Jolene did not take your man. She removed your burden.
(Lack of object constancy)
When children are taught that a parent can do no wrong:
If children repeat these lines like rehearsed doctrine, accountability has been replaced with indoctrination. This is not unity. This is psychological control.
Run.
Introducing children to a new partner before the dust settles is harm, not healing
When a parent brings a new romantic partner into the children’s world before divorce is filed and before the emotional ground has stopped shaking, that is not love. That is self-centeredness with consequences the children will carry.
(Lack of empathy)
Contempt changes your physiology
No person can thrive while constantly undermined. Contempt elevates inflammatory markers for years. The immune system remembers what the heart tries to forget. Your body keeps every receipt. (Spontaneous Shingles is no joke!!)
The partner who believes they are always right eventually destroys the relationship
You cannot love someone who believes correction is attack.
You cannot collaborate with someone who believes guidance is control, and that complete submission and lack of self worth is love transcendent.
Their pride will always drown out your truth.
Ego kills empathy
Once someone believes they cannot be wrong, they stop listening. Once they stop listening, they stop learning. Once they stop learning, they stop loving.
Humility is the oxygen of connection. They traded theirs for control.
Every conversation becomes a battle
They do not want clarity. They want victory.
They twist words, escalate tone, walk away or claim they won, while the relationship loses another brick.
Silence is not peace, it is resignation; but it cannot be miss quoted, only manipulated into faint interpretation.
People do not go silent because they are weak. They go silent because speaking has become pointless.
When someone stops explaining, they stop investing. Silence is the beginning of the end.
Words become weapons
When anger is unregulated, speech becomes a blade. Words leave bruises you cannot photograph. Scars settle where affection used to live.
Tone can be apologized for. Truth cannot. The damage remains.
The walls they built become your fault
When everything collapses, they rewrite the narrative.
“You changed.”
“You made me act this way.”
“You are the unstable one.”
“You are a narcissist.”
“You are abusive.”
No.
You simply stopped fighting for someone who kept fighting against you.
No relationship survives stubbornness over softness, argument over alignment or pride over partnership.
The reactive cycle, where trauma breeds trauma
Somewhere in the middle of it all, reactive abuse forms. This is not an excuse. It is a symptom.
When someone shreds your boundaries, betrays your trust, lies with confidence, rewrites your memories and destabilizes your sense of reality, your nervous system eventually erupts. Not because you want to harm, but because you were never meant to hold that much pain alone.
Your reaction becomes their evidence. Their justification. Their rallying cry.
“You are the problem.”
“See how you act.”
“This is why everything falls apart.”
Reactive abuse is still hurtful and still damaging, but it is not the same as intentional cruelty. It is the human cost of surviving someone else’s storms.
Boundaries betrayed
Some actions do more than break trust. They break safety.
A partner who lies about affairs practices emotional abandonment.
A partner who leaves you stranded in another state practices relational desertion.
A partner who throws out wedding or engagement rings in a drunken rage discards years of sacrifice like trash.
A partner who rewrites legal consequences practices deception layered on addiction.
And then there is the vehicle.
The car that cannot start unless someone blows into a tube.
The camera that captures a face proving sobriety to the machine while denying any problem to everyone else.
When a person must prove they are sober to start a car but still insists there is no issue, you learn the truth:
It is not the device that measures the alcohol.
It is the denial that measures the danger.
That is gaslighting braided with addiction.
That is chaos draped in confidence.
That is instability made portable.
Accountability without martyrdom
I am not pretending I was flawless. I reacted at times. I raised my voice when overwhelmed. I missed red flags because trauma teaches familiarity with chaos. I held on too long because my inner child believed love could fix anything.
But accountability does not mean absorbing blame for someone else’s actions. It means owning my hurtful moments without carrying responsibility for the harm done to me.
I can hold both truths:
I contributed to the cycle,
and
I did not cause the abuse.
The narcissistic presentation
When I step back and look at the entire landscape, I see the pattern clearly.
Superiority
Devaluation
Grandiosity
Gaslighting
Lack of empathy
Exploitation
Image management
Instability
Entitlement
Rapid replacement
Flying monkeys
Boundary violations
Denial of consequences
Rewriting memories
Shifting blame
These are the traits that define narcissistic relational dynamics. Not a diagnosis, but a constellation of behaviors. Self-importance disguised as strength. Fragility hidden under control. A need for admiration. An allergy to accountability. And an inability to maintain stable, reciprocal love.
This is what it looks like.
This is what it feels like.
This is how it harms.
And naming it is how I finally stop carrying it.
They were all right, and Icarry the torch for myself and others:
“It’s  nothing a good therapist can fix later in life!”
-Ed/Eddie/Dad/Friend/Grandson/HEALER
Elemental Healing Therapy.
Healing and Recovery
Nervous System and Clinical Work
Elemental Healing Therapy
