In this episode of The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach Podcast, we’re diving into a topic that many of us don’t even realize we’re dealing with—self-gaslighting.
Now, you’ve probably heard of gaslighting in the context of relationships, but what about when we do it to ourselves? Yep, that’s right!
Sometimes we’re our own worst critics, especially when it comes to making important changes in our health, relationships, and work-life after breast cancer.
I’ll walk you through how self-gaslighting can show up in your life—like when you convince yourself that your healthy food choices are “too strict,” or when you stay stuck in relationships or jobs that no longer serve your healing because you think, "Maybe I’m just overreacting." Spoiler alert: you’re not! And I’m here to help you trust that inner voice that’s pushing you toward the life you truly deserve.
We’ll talk about how to recognize those subtle, yet damaging, moments when we downplay our needs or second-guess our instincts.
Whether it’s feeling like your food choices aren’t valid, ignoring relationship red flags, or sticking with a stressful job that drains you—it’s all part of the self-gaslighting cycle.
But don’t worry—we won’t just stop at identifying the problem. I’ll give you actionable tips to start trusting your instincts, embracing your emotions, and feeling confident in the changes you’re making to live a life you love.
If you’re ready to stop doubting yourself and start honoring the person you’ve become, this episode is for you. Tune in, and let’s work together to break free from self-gaslighting and step into a more confident, empowered version of yourself.
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Read the full transcript:
0:00
You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach, I'm your host, Laura Lemmer. I'm a certified life coach and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills on the insides and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis if you're looking for a way to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started.
0:33
Hey there. Welcome to better than before breast cancer. Episode 383
0:39
in the last episode of october 2024 because next Friday's episode will be the first of November. I cannot believe it. This year has just flown by, and I want to talk about something today that I have been noticing so much. And you know, it's a funny thing. So the term gaslighting, you've heard this term. I've heard this term. I don't remember when it started becoming really popular, but I remember hearing it, and I thought, I'm really not 100% sure what that term means. And then I'd hear people talk, and they'd say, Oh, they were gaslighting me so and so is gaslighting me. And I thought, I'm just not grasping, like, what exactly does gaslighting mean? And then something happened. I was reading something at some point, and it hit me, I was reading something about someone being gas lit. And I Oh, I get it. Gas lit is just another way of saying someone is minimizing your feelings, someone is invalidating your thoughts, right? Someone's trying to throw you under the bus. It's kind of like a red herring. Also, you feel a certain way, or you ask a certain question, and they're going to turn it back on you, rather than answer the question. They're going to make you think like one of those. It's a manipulation, basically. It's a mind beep, right? It's a mind F word, because you have a feeling, you have a thought, you're trying to express it, and they're gonna twist it and make you feel like you're not worthy. You can't say that. You don't have a right to feel like that. Once it really hit me,
2:16
I went, Oh, wow, gaslighting. I see this every day in my own people. I've done it to myself, and I started becoming really aware, hyper aware. Just stands out to me so much of the time now that we gaslight ourselves on a regular basis. And as I think about closing out this month of October, closing out this month of breast cancer awareness, and where my role is in this community, which is for us to create a life that's better than before breast cancer, for us to face this life threatening illness, stop check in with ourselves and say, am I living the life I want? Am I living the life I love? And if not, what do I want to change? What do I want to make better? What do I want to let go of? Right? And taking small steps toward that. And as I think about that process, which is a big process, takes a lot of energy and a lot of focus, and I think about how our own human brains gaslight us over and over again as we try to go through that process. So to wrap up this month, I'd like to leave you with an empowering thought about how to support yourself in moving forward, in treating yourself in the best way possible, and in creating the life you love. So I want to talk about how we gaslight ourselves, why we gaslight ourselves, and how we can stop doing that so that we can support ourselves a little bit more. So let me start off right away by just giving a clear definition of gaslighting. In case you're somebody who is also thinking like, not really sure that I'm very clear on it. So to be very clear, gaslighting is when someone makes you doubt your own reality, your own thoughts, your own feelings, someone makes you feel like you're irrational or that your emotions are not valid. You don't even have a right to them, and that someone, sadly and subtly even can be yourself. Yeah, we don't need another person to gaslight us. We're so good at doing it to ourselves, and as breast cancer survivors, we've been through so much such trauma, physically, emotionally, spiritually, that the last thing we need to do is doubt ourselves. Is we try to make lifestyle changes and we try.
5:00
To process what we've been through and how we want to live our lives. So let's talk about self gaslighting, and what self gaslighting actually looks like. And I want to touch on three specific areas, specific three areas which are big areas that encompass a lot. One is how you nourish yourself. Two is relationships in your life. And the third, which kind of falls under relationships as well, is the work that you do. Because these are three really big categories that I see a lot of struggle. I see people put themselves through a tremendous amount of suffering, and I see these intelligent, intuitive, amazing women who know themselves but won't let themselves trust themselves. And so it's this internal battle of, I feel like I need this, and then the human brain going, No, you don't that's not okay. Thoughts like I'm probably overreacting. It's not that bad. I should just get over it. Sound familiar. I shouldn't be so emotional. I just need to be stronger. Why do I even care about this? Other people have it way worse than me. Yeah, sound familiar. I know it does. I've been there and I see it every single day. So whether it's deciding to shift a diet, step away from a healthy relationship, or make changes in a relationship or in your work life so that it works better for you and serves you, self doubt creeps in. And if you're not careful, self doubt turns into self sabotage, and that's where you talk yourself out of making those critically important steps to improve your life. And we want to stop that. So let's look a little more closely at these three examples. Let's look at food choices, and I bring it food first, because I don't know what goes on this organ in between our ears. Boy, it loves to just throw stories out. It loves to confuse you. It loves to make you think you don't know yourself, or you don't know what you need, or that some random person who has never met you and knows nothing about you knows what you need more than you do. Right? I see this happen all the time, so one of the most common things that I see us step into after a breast cancer diagnosis is food, and not only do we start rethinking the food we put in our bodies, but a lot of times we question even our choice to do that. So maybe you've decided to cut out processed food, I hope you have. Maybe you decided to cut out sugar, I hope you have. Maybe you've started eating more plants in your diet, more nutrient dense meals. And then you make these changes, and these changes feel good to you, and then this little voice creeps in.
7:51
Is this even making a difference? How important is this? And you notice you feel better. And in fact, I have clients are like, not only saying they notice they feel better. But they see, because we're working consistently, consistently on labs and on their program, they see their body is responding better, and the brain will still drag them back and say, Come on, other people get to eat that way all the time. You're fine. You don't need to be this strict. Come on, just a piece of cake here. Just it's a little more. It's okay. You can have it. We start testing the boundaries what we know to be good for us. That little voice inside our head, it causes you to question whether you really need to follow through with the changes that you already decided are good for your body. This is self gaslighting. You're invalidating your own choices, your choices that have made you feel good about your healing, because a part of you is listening to someone else outside of you, and you start to say, I'm overreacting. I'm being too rigid, I'm too hard on myself. Maybe they're right,
8:57
but let's flip the script on that a little bit. Let's come back to ourselves. I say this to my clients all the time, trust yourself, right? They ask me, What do you think I need? What are your thoughts on this? And my thought is almost always going to be the same. It's going to be tell me what it means to you, right? And I think sometimes maybe we need people to ask us that, that we need to say it out loud, what does this mean to me? So we can really understand what's happening, because our body has a tremendous amount of wisdom. And I say, when I'm working with people in their nutrition genome, when I'm working with people on their labs, when I'm working with people and constructing the lifestyle or building a business or career that they love, I ask them, What do you want? What does it mean to you? And sometimes it is the getting in touch with that and the saying it out loud that changes the whole picture, right? So what if we could trust our inner wisdom, the wisdom of our body, the wisdom of that still, small voice inside of us?
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And what if you honored your decision by choice. You decide, I'm going to honor this decision to nourish my body with the foods that help it feel stronger and vibrant and healthier, because that's a choice I made and believe in if you're trying to make lifestyle changes with nutrition, here's a little tip, something you can try the next time your brain is trying to self gaslight you, you feel that doubt creeping in. What if you stop for a moment and we move from our brain down a little farther below the neck, and you ask yourself, what is my body trying to tell me? Right? Not what the brain is, because the brain is going to say, Come on, that creme brulee looks delicious. You know you're gonna love that cheesecake, right? But what is your body who you're here to support and shepherd and guide? What is your body trying to tell you? Is your body saying you feel drawn to doing something that serves it? Is your body's wisdom speaking to you, and are you choosing to trust it, or are you choosing not to trust it, right? So what does my body want? I bet you, you're going to get a different answer than what is my head telling me I enjoy. Those are two really different things. So can we get into the practice of getting our to know our body better, so that we're listening communicating. I often tell my clients the nutrition genome and your labs is your body's language. It's your body speaking to you, saying, Hey, here's what's going on with me. Here's what I need from you. It isn't something that we necessarily have to go into fear, to which we have a tendency to do we look at labs, or we think about scans, or like, oh my god, this is so scary. This is so scary. But what if we just changed our mind a little and said, No, this is me and my body communicating with each other. And what a blessing that we have the ability to see labs, what a blessing that we have the ability to have scans, to look inside of us. We can say, this is my body talking to me, but we can also just pick that up by tuning into ourselves, a little bit of silence, a little bit of quiet time, a little bit of trust. What is my body telling me? What does my body need now? And know that when you sense that sometimes people say to me, I don't know, the first thing that came to my mind was That's it. Trust it, right? Trust that. Allow yourself to trust yourself instead of invalidating yourself. Let's talk about relationships. Because, again, like I said in the beginning, three of the biggest areas I see and well, I guess if I say three biggest, I don't know what else is involved here. We got relationships, work and food, those are pretty big parts of life, but relationships can have a major effect on our wellness, on our mental and emotional wellness, and if we're having a negative effect on our mental and emotional wellness, it's affecting our physical wellness, right? But relationships are a tough one. They're tied to our sense of identity, belonging. We're worried about being judged. We've got cultural expectations, religious expectation, lifelong conditioning, and yet, after a cancer diagnosis, after a life threatening illness, when this veil is lifted off your eyes, it's like whoa. Hold on. Life is temporary. Life is short. Is this how I want to live it? Oftentimes, we can find that some of the relationships we're in no longer serve us in the way they once did in the way we need them to now, or that we've known this for a long time and we haven't been willing to make the change, which who knows what the change might be. Maybe the changes that relationship is not going to be in your life anymore. Maybe that relationship needs a tremendous amount of energy and work, because you love it, you treasure it, but it's just not working, and you need to fix it right. And maybe just the people around you don't understand this new version of yourself, this new much more aware, much more conscious version of you who now sees life differently, and so you feel that, and you know what you're like. This isn't working for me, but you gaslight yourself. You gaslight yourself with statements like I made before. Maybe I'm being too sensitive. Maybe it's not fair for me to expect this of them. I don't want to rock the boat. I don't want to have any conflict. I don't have any controversy. You know, all the things we say we feel so strongly we need or want something, and we talk ourselves out of it, gaslighting again and again.
14:38
I want you to really hear me say this. Sometimes my clients will say this situation came up and Laura heard your voice in my head. So I want you to hear this voice in my head. Whenever you start to gaslight yourself,
14:51
your feelings are valid. If you're feeling it, it's valid, it's true. It's what's happening right now. Right.
15:00
Right? Certain relationships can drain your energy. Certain relationships may not be supporting your healing, and you may see that, and it's okay for you to see that. It's okay for you to acknowledge that you don't have to gaslight yourself into thinking that you have to tolerate toxic relationships, because your brain will find a story to create guilt or fear or obligation for you, right? If you feel this, if you know, if your body says to you,
15:33
this doesn't feel good, then it's valid, right? And exploring that, just letting yourself, you know, I often have to remind people this just because you feel something you're like, I don't like this. It doesn't mean that you got to just like, say, I divorce your face again to whoever it is you may want to, and that's okay if that's what you feel. But it doesn't mean that everything has to change right now. It can just mean that you first have to even get clear on what you're thinking. Why do you feel like this isn't working for me, right? Clean up your thoughts and really look at them, not question and gaslight your thoughts, but get clear on your thoughts, two very different things, right? So getting clear on your thoughts is like, oh, that didn't feel good. Why didn't that feel good? A lot of times we'll have a habit of going to because we're conditioned to think this way. I didn't feel good because they said or did this thing. They said these words, they did this action, when most of the time it's I don't feel this way. Because ask yourself me, what? Why don't I? Why didn't I like that? I believe I deserve to be treated with more respect than that. I believe that I'm really trying to bring a lot of positive energy into my life and and this person just the negativity comes off them so powerfully, I need a Captain America shield to protect myself when they're around right clean up your thoughts into understanding why you feel the way you feel. Because our feelings are based on our thoughts, not on someone else's words or actions, right? So, by trusting your own instincts again, by noticing that something feels heavy, right? By noticing that you feel depleted when you walk away from somebody rather than feeling uplifted, that's worth paying attention to. That's not something we need to question. And you know, you deserve to be around people who support your growth and your healing, and not those who hold you back or make you question your sense of self worth, right? Anytime that you're with someone and you think, wow, I just don't feel like my life is more because of this relationship. It's okay to think that and explore it, right? We can take our time to explore things without completely changing things overnight. And I think that realizing that and holding on to that hopefully lessens a little bit of the fear, because there's a lot of fear around human interaction and how it should go. You can take your time, you can find someone else you trust to discuss it with, but just know that your feeling is valid and it's worthy of exploring, and you can come up with whatever decision you want after you explore it, but don't gaslight yourself into saying you don't have a right to feel that way. Let's talk about work. So
18:30
many of us are juggling careers. When you start a business, I see so many survivors who look at their and I just don't have a better word, so I see somebody else who's been diagnosed with cancer, gotten a cancer diagnosis, and now they're like, Hmm, this job isn't fulfilling anymore. Or worse than that, this job is killing me. This job is so toxic and so negative, and I don't like this job in my life. Or they're also saying, Wow, maybe I love my job, or I love what I do, but I also want something more. Now. I want to create something of my own. And then we go into second guessing ourselves. Maybe you started thinking about whether or not your job is still fulfilling or whether it aligns with the life you want now after cancer, and then the self gas lighting voice pops up and it says, I should just be grateful for this job, even though it's stressful, I'm not in a position to make changes right now, so I just have to hang in there and keep taking it. Who do I think I am? Who do I think I am to be thinking that I can do something else, that I can try something new at my age, at this stage of my life, am I crazy? Right? All the self doubt, all the gas lighting comes up, work is such a big part of our identity that even you know after retirement, oftentimes people really struggle with retirement. Because who are you now if you're not that person, right? That person who every time you.
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Met someone for X amount of years, they said, What do you do? And you said, I do this, right? This is my job. This is what I do. And now you say, I'm retired. What does that mean to you? Right? So even retirement can have a big influence here on what we decide to do for work, because work in our life doesn't necessarily mean a paid job, right? Work in our life is anything we do to give our gifts back to the world, whether it's volunteer, whether it's paid, whether it's entrepreneurial or whether it's under employment, right? So it's a big part of our identity, and anything that's that big of a part of our identity is okay to re evaluate, right? Reevaluating it does not necessarily mean you're going to leave it. You may reevaluate it and say, I just want to think about it differently. I want to handle it differently. I want to negotiate my schedule differently. Or you may say, I don't want this. Who knows, right? But it's okay to reevaluate it. It's okay to notice that you feel something has shifted here, and to ask yourself, Is your job? Is your career? Is your business? Is it adding stress to your life? Is it pulling you away from self care, which is critical, and it's okay to check in with yourself and ask, where do I really want to be right? We can be curious. We don't have to talk ourselves out of exploring new possibilities just because it feels uncomfortable or uncertain. We can explore them right and give ourselves space and grace to play with it and say, What do I think about this? Do I just need a vacation? Am I taking enough vacation time? Am I one of those people who has maxed out on vacation time? And so now my boss is saying you can't even accumulate more until you take a vacation. Please take a vacation or gift those hours to someone who will take a vacation, like the vacation time lets you go do life. Go to your life, right? Sometimes we stay so stuck in jobs or careers that aren't fulfilling because we don't believe we deserve something better. We're afraid we won't find something better. We're afraid of the unknown. But what about instead of gaslighting yourself with self doubt, you started to get really curious and said, what would it look like if I trusted my instincts here? What could it possibly look like if I pursued something that really lit me up? What would my life be like if I woke up every morning and I thought, Wow, I'm so excited for this today. I'm so looking forward to this, right? And again, I'm not saying change has to happen overnight, but it starts with being honest with yourself and not gaslighting yourself out of making changes that can improve your well being and your happiness. So what do you do? How do you stop gaslighting yourself? One is give yourself permission to acknowledge your feelings, no matter how small, no matter how irrational you might think they are, they're your feelings. And if something doesn't feel right to you, give yourself the space to listen to it, to question that inner critic, right when that voice of doubt pops up, ask yourself, Is this thought helping me? Is this thought holding me back? Is this thought gaslighting or invalidating what I feel like challenge our own thoughts and do that thought work on them? Talk to someone you trust, not someone who's going to talk you into what they think is right for you, but someone who's going to help you talk it through right? Sometimes we need an outside perspective to remind us that we're not over acting, and that perspective can come through someone asking you good questions, and then you get to share your thoughts with them and just explore that yourself out loud, that can be really helpful. And the foundation of that, the bottom line of that, is be compassionate with yourself. Practice self compassion. Be gentle, not judgmental. If you find yourself questioning your instincts, doubting your decisions, gaslighting yourself, remind yourself you're doing the best you can with what you feel, with where you're at, with what you know. Remind yourself that it's okay to be uncertain, but what's not okay is to silence yourself, to silence your inner wisdom, to ignore yourself, but listen and explore and be curious. If you want to create a life you love, allow yourself to be curious, because healing is not just about food. It's not just about the physical body. It's about the mind and the spirit and the mind.
25:00
In the spirit are a little more subtle, a little quieter. Well, sometimes the mind is not quiet at all, but the way that it's impacting us, we don't see we're so used to it, right? And this part of the healing process of trusting yourself again, whether it's with food or relationships or work, it's so important, because your instincts matter. What you feel about any kind of a treatment you're undergoing, what you feel about any kind of a diagnostic you want, what you feel about anything that's asked of you don't gaslight yourself out of making changes you know deep, deep down feel right to you. Don't gaslight yourself out of acknowledging that something you feel doesn't feel right to you, and knowing you get to explore that right. I think that this whole understanding gaslighting yourself and becoming more and more aware of it, and really stepping into developing self trust is going to launch your next year into something amazing, right? It's a process. It's step by step, but you can do it. You can totally trust yourself. And if you're someone who's feeling stuck right now, if you're feeling unsure of what you want to create for yourself, or if you feel like I know what I want to create, but I don't think I deserve it. I don't know how to do it right. I hope this has given you some food for thought, because trusting yourself, even when it's scary, is that first step toward creating the change that you want. And if you want some help with that, come and find me at the breast cancer recovery coach.com
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