MomSkoop
Have you ever caught yourself doubting your own feelings or dismissing your instincts?
Sometimes the person questioning your reality isn’t someone else—it’s you.
Self-gaslighting happens when we invalidate our own experiences, emotions, and truths without even realizing it.
Recognizing these patterns is the first step toward trusting yourself again.
1. Rewriting Your Own Memories to Make Other People More Comfortable
Ever find yourself changing the story of what actually happened just so someone else doesn’t feel bad?
You might remember a hurtful comment clearly, but then soften it in your mind because confronting the truth feels too uncomfortable.
Your brain starts editing the past like a movie director cutting scenes.
When you reshape your memories to protect others’ feelings, you’re teaching yourself that your version of events doesn’t matter.
Over time, you lose confidence in what you actually experienced.
Your reality becomes negotiable, and that’s a dangerous place to live.
2. Treating Your Emotional Reactions as Data Errors Instead of Information
Your heart races during a conversation, or tears well up unexpectedly.
Instead of asking why, you label it as a malfunction—something broken that needs fixing.
Emotions aren’t bugs in your system; they’re signals trying to tell you something important about your environment or relationships.
When you dismiss feelings as glitches, you miss crucial information about your needs and boundaries.
Sadness might be showing you what matters.
Anger could be pointing to a violated limit.
Treating emotions like mistakes means ignoring your internal GPS when you need it most.
3. Requiring Excessive Proof Before You Allow Yourself to Believe Your Own Experience
Did that really happen, or are you overreacting?
You replay conversations like a detective searching for evidence.
One instance isn’t enough—you need a pattern, witnesses, maybe even documentation before you’ll trust what you felt was real.
Setting the bar impossibly high for your own experiences means you’re always second-guessing yourself.
While healthy skepticism has its place, demanding courtroom-level proof for your own feelings is exhausting.
Your experiences are valid even without a jury’s approval.
Sometimes your gut knows before your brain can build the case.
4. Calling Your Intuition Overthinking Only When It Challenges Your Habits or Relationships
Something feels off about a friendship or situation, but you quickly label that feeling as overthinking.
Funny how your intuition only becomes problematic when it threatens the status quo.
When it confirms what you already believe, you call it wisdom.
Selective dismissal of your inner voice is a clever way to avoid uncomfortable changes.
Your intuition doesn’t need to be perfect to be valuable.
If you only trust it when it’s convenient, you’re not really trusting it at all.
Pay attention to what makes you rush to the overthinking excuse.
5. Trusting External Feedback More Than Repeated Internal Patterns
Your body tells you the same story again and again—exhaustion after certain interactions, tension in specific environments.
But when someone says you’re fine or that you’re being too sensitive, you believe them over your own repeated experiences.
External validation becomes the only truth you’ll accept.
Patterns are data.
When your system consistently responds the same way, that’s not coincidence—it’s communication.
Outsourcing your truth to others means you’ll always be waiting for permission to trust yourself.
Your internal patterns have been with you longer than any outside opinion.
6. Minimizing Ongoing Harm Because No Single Moment Feels Bad Enough
Each incident seems small on its own—a dismissive comment here, a broken promise there.
You tell yourself it’s not abuse because nothing dramatic happened.
You’re waiting for a big, undeniable moment to justify your discomfort, but harm doesn’t always arrive with sirens.
Death by a thousand paper cuts is still death.
Chronic low-level mistreatment wears you down just as effectively as one big blow.
You don’t need a catastrophe to validate that something isn’t right.
Sometimes the pattern is the problem, not any single piece of it.
7. Using Productivity or Logic to Bypass Grief, Anger, or Disappointment
Something painful happens, and you immediately jump into solution mode.
Make a plan, create a spreadsheet, optimize your way out of feeling.
Productivity becomes a shield against emotions that demand to be felt, not fixed.
Logic is brilliant for many things, but it can’t process grief.
When you use busyness to avoid disappointment or anger, those feelings don’t disappear—they just wait in the basement, getting stronger.
Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is absolutely nothing except feel what’s true.
Emotions need space, not strategies.
8. Assuming Discomfort Means You’re Wrong Rather Than Misaligned
A relationship or job makes you uneasy, and you immediately assume the problem is you.
Maybe you’re too picky, too sensitive, too demanding.
Discomfort becomes evidence of personal failure rather than a sign that something doesn’t fit.
Not everything uncomfortable is wrong, but not all discomfort means you need to change yourself either.
Sometimes you’re not broken—you’re just in the wrong place.
A shoe can be beautiful and well-made and still hurt your foot.
Misalignment isn’t a character flaw; it’s valuable information about fit.
9. Delaying Self-Trust Until Some Future, More Qualified Version of You Arrives
You tell yourself that once you’re wiser, more experienced, or more healed, then you’ll trust your judgment.
Future You will have it all figured out, so Current You should just wait for instructions.
Self-trust becomes something you earn through suffering rather than something you practice now.
That magical future version of you who has all the answers?
She’s built by trusting yourself today, not by waiting.
Every time you honor your current instincts, you strengthen that muscle.
You don’t become trustworthy by doubting yourself into submission.
10. Framing Self-Betrayal as Maturity, Patience, or Being the Bigger Person
You ignore your boundaries and call it growth.
You silence your needs and label it patience.
Abandoning yourself gets dressed up in virtuous language—being mature, taking the high road, showing grace.
But there’s nothing evolved about consistently choosing everyone else over yourself.
Real maturity includes self-respect.
Being the bigger person doesn’t mean making yourself smaller.
Sometimes what looks like patience is actually fear of standing up for yourself.
Check whether your virtue is actually just self-abandonment wearing a nice outfit.
True growth includes you in the equation.