🤥 Seeing Through the BS and Gaslighting
If you are a good girl (and boy), you definitely need this skill!! 💪
Welcome back to The Microdose Diet a newsletter about personal and professional development using alternative medicines, such as microdosing psychedelics. 🍄
I have been playing with writing on gaslighting for a while now, and the nudge I needed happened to me the night before I started this newsletter. For the longest time I believed everything I was told. I could not see through the lies, BS and manipulations of others. I don’t tend to lie, even white lies I do my best to avoid (which sometimes put me in “interesting” situations I have to admit), so I assumed, wrongly, that people were operating along the same lines.
Thankfully, once again for me, millennials, especially millennial women, put in focus these gaslighting behaviors for what they truly are - misbehaviors. After decades of passivity and guilt, I started questioning what I heard and what I was told, by the media, but also by the people “close” to me. And I realized that there were many people exaggerating their accomplishments, turning tables and plain lying.
The stories below are cautionary tales that if you are not careful you will end up being caught up in guilt, smallness, and misinformation by unscrupulous manipulative people! Hopefully you can follow the same easy strategies to avoid the smoke and mirrors and see right through the BS.
Watch or listen to this post and get the upper hand on gaslighters! 🙌
On one hand I have had a very good radar for BS due to my very intuitive nature, but on the other hand this radar had been so messed up with that it was not very helpful. My parents (God bless them nonetheless) are both pathological liars; they are not “bad’ people but they are extremely manipulative in their own way. My father, the typical strong man, would shamelessly lie to your face with the most outlandish lies and if you were to start ever so slightly to push back he would scream - the basic male bully from the 50’s. My mother was more subtle and infinitely more damaging to me by being my only caregiver (my father having pretty much abandoned the ship after their split when I was 2) and my main female role model. She used a very interesting mix of gaslighting and bullying to keep me in check, while herself being caught up in the female conditioning of the 50’s. I never knew what was true and what was not, and this really fuck up your head and your BS radar when you are a kid!
So, when a decade ago, millennial women started overtly pushing back and calling out on the BS and manipulation they were supposed to accept with a smile this was the eye-opener I needed. I still get caught in BS and gaslighting sometimes, but less and less. And now I know that when I feel that queasy feeling in my gut, something is wrong. ❌
🤔The Boss - Strategy 1, “Really?!”
A few years back I worked for a large Canadian bank and after a few months of a very challenging situation with my boss, I decided to bring it to his boss and to HR. It was the first time in my life I had ever had a difficult relationship with my boss and I was at a loss.
The guy would scold me if I were to speak up in meetings or be somehow visible in any ways, while criticizing me behind my back for not speaking up. He would blatantly lie to me, retain information, and try to manipulate my team against me. It was a total mindfuck.
However, this was also my first real conscious realization that someone was purposefully gaslighting me (a word and concept I unfortunately didn’t know at the time). In order to finally wake up from the deep slumber my conditioning had put me under I used Joe Dispenza’s technique: “Really?!”.
The “Really?!” strategy is pretty simple, it entails looking at a situation and asking yourself “Really?!” when something sounds fishy. I have a couple of anecdotes from that time. At one of my dreaded 1-on-1 with that lunatic he started going on-and-on on the fact that HR was worried because of my visibility outside the bank. This is when I started using “Really?!”. Why on earth would HR be, first, even aware of the fact that I was asked to speak at conferences and, second, be worried about that? This was a lifeboat for me. Realizing that this guy has been lying to me all along, playing on my “good girl” conditioning, was extremely liberating. No, I was not doing anything wrong. He was just threatened by me and his way of dealing with it was to lie, gaslight and bully. Nothing to do with me really. I subsequently learnt that another VP had resign the year before I joined in similar conditions.😒
After a year of this fuckery when my signing bonus could not be clawed back and multiple discussions with HR & my hierarchy went nowhere (spoiler alert: they knew my boss was a liar and a bully; I was told to deal with it) I decided to save myself and resign. To celebrate my departure I organized a party, this is customary in Europe and I didn’t think twice of it. This pushed him over the edge as, in his little mind, everything was done vis-à-vis himself. So he thought I was throwing a party not to celebrate my time there, my new opportunities and to spend time with the people I appreciated. No, I was organizing a party against him. And that, my friend, is the issue with manipulative people, they think everything is about them, that everyone is like them and that there is always a play. That’s what makes them so dangerous to the benevolent people in their orbit. As I sat down for my last 1-on-1 with him I noticed the print-out of the invitation to my party in evidence on his desk. He had gone through every name! And then came the last lie: “HR is worried about your party, you invited a lot of senior people and that worries them.” To that I answered: “I would think they have better things to do than go through the list of guests for a good-bye party” and I left him there. I had been able to play “Really?!” in real time, which I admit is still an uphill battle for me, as I am still doubting my radar, but less and less. 😁
This guy was a walking catastrophe but I have to give it to him that he really woke me up. On one hand I would have liked better not go through that harassment, but on the other hand it was what I needed to say: “Really?! Stop it! I see your game and I am not playing it anymore!”,
↩️ The Tycoon - Strategy 2, “Flip the Script”
I love to read and listen to biography and memoirs, I find them to be very insightful. Especially the ones from athletes, musicians, and actors. I did stop listening to business tycoons manipulating the facts to make them look amazing!
A few years back, I remember being in an hotel in Vancouver working out at their gym (it happens rarely enough that I have a vivid memory of it 😄), listening to one of Richard Branson’s memoirs. As he was going on-and-on about his past ventures, I thought that it was impressive, but at the same time it was so overtly “kind and compassionate” that I started wondering how much of that was true. Then he came to talk about the crash of Virgin Galactic’s spaceship. And even this tragedy he was able to turn into a positive for himself. That is when my second strategy came to play: “Flip the script”. If I were the one writing my memoir, wanting it to sound more like an hagiography than a biography, could I do it? I quickly realized that yes, I could make my life and career look pretty impressive (notwithstanding the billionaire status). 20/20 insight, when you have all the past facts you can make them fit in a great storyline pretty easily.
I had the exact same scenario plays out last month, when I was listening to “Outlive” from Peter Attia. The author starts the book by extensively exposing his credentials. And I understand, that one wants to assert their expertise, but this was really getting a bit on the nose. Until the moment he recounts that as a young employee at McKinsey (where else?) his senior partner gave him the responsibility to explain to clients (senior bankers) that the real-estate market was doomed and them with it (Yes, Attia and McKinsey knew before the financial crisis that there was going to be a financial crisis. It is like with the movie The Sixth Sense, everyone understood from the get-go that Bruce Willis was already dead.🙄). Visibly the reason given by his boss for that awkward decision was that “as a MD he was used to give bad news to people”. That is when I used strategy 1 and 2 combined. “Really?! The senior partner at McKinsey asked you, a junior, because you are so great at communicating (a skill we all know MD excel at) to present to banking executives their demise?! Or did he really ask you to say 5 sentences to present the numbers you had crunched?” Which one is more likely? Then I flipped the script, remembering a similar situation that had happened to me. In my young years, I had been asked by my boss, fresh out of B School, to crunch numbers for a massive fiscal control and to present them to the team of public servants auditing us. However, this was not because I was so amazing. It was more because he didn’t know the numbers and more importantly he wanted to cover his ass if things were to go South. In that context, the combination of Strategy 1 & 2 confirmed what I intuitively sensed first - the author was full of it, or at least totally un-self-aware. Needless to say I didn’t finish that book, the author having lost all credibility in my eyes.
🧭 The Contact - Strategy 3, “Trust your Gut”
This is where I am the most proud of myself as the 2 protagonists in this category were pretty formidable for two reasons. First, I didn’t know them personally. Second, their job title and background gave them quite a bit of clout.
The most recent experience was with a contact I had been put in touch by a dear friend, as I am exploring a partnership with a brand for my book and speaking engagements. This individual was a retired executive and was kindly willing to chat with me to give me pointers, which I was very thankful for. I had texted him, as instructed by my friend, and I had not heard from him as he apparently was “at the cottage”. Nothing here, I don’t email or text much when I am myself on VK and so I left him in peace, waiting to reconnect after his trip. A week later this text, I wrote a post on Linkedin to show the outfit I decided to wear for the cover of my book explaining that it has been a challenging decision for me to put a picture of myself on the cover. I went on to thank all the people who helped me choose my outfit, as well as my friend and this person for supporting me in exploring a relationship with this brand. A pretty innocuous post aiming at showing my outfit, thank my supporters and put myself in front of the brand in their clothes.
Well, visibly, I had crossed a line in mentioning his name in my thank yous as I guess in hindsight he was not planning on ever talking to me and certainly not helping me. He was actually actively ghosting me versus being away “at the cottage”. Not 5 minutes after the post came up he sent me a nasty text that he was at the same time reading my text from 8 days ago and the LinkedIn post and that he was ALARMED considering he had no idea what I was talking about and why I was thanking him for. My first reflex I admit was to shrink and think “OMG! What I have done? What a bad girl I am!”. And then I used Strategy 3, I listened to my gut and realized that he was gaslighting me. Using my offensive “thank you” as a justification that he would absolutely not talk to me now, while blatantly lying that he had seen both messages at the same time and had had no context given by my friend. Com’ on! It is not written dummy on my forehead (at least not totally anymore). And as if it was not enough to patronize me he put my friend who connected us in the middle of the situation. I did apologize to him and removed his name from my offensive “thank you” post to placate him, but I was not a happy camper to have been disrespected and manipulated at the same time. In the past I would not have asked myself twice what was happening - I was wrong and deserved to be scolded. Now, not so much! My friend did confirm that she obviously gave him the context when giving me his contact information. Considering that he was introduced by my friend I could not give him a piece of my mind, but it has still been a valuable experience. I know now that I will, more than ever, use Strategy 3 and “Trust my Gut”!
How do you trust your gut? Easy, if it doesn’t feel right, something is not right. And please, pretty please, if you are feeling guilt ask yourself; Who is talking? Who is this guilt serving?
The second protagonist is what I would guess we call a “public figure”. I had called him out publicly for the lack of representation of Canadian women in his coverage of the tech news. In the last article, 8 people were showcased - 7 men and 1 US-based women. This didn’t go down well with him and that is one thing I learnt with gaslighters: they will do everything they can Not to take responsibility. This could have been such a great move for the publication and the author to answer that, yes they had dropped the ball and that they will be more mindful in the future to present an equal number of men and women in their industry articles. But no that is not the route they chose. First strategy the journalist used was bullying (ordering me harshly to call him). When he realized I was not going to get any he went to strategy 2, the table turning (I was demeaning to the US woman who had been interviewed by saying no Canadian women had been interviewed 🙄). Finally, when I called him up on his gaslighting and was showing no remorse for my oh so unkind words and bad behavior - because being blatantly sexist is OK, but calling off someone for it is not - he had no choice but to admit they dropped the ball and that they will strive to do better (which they did not do obviously). Here too Strategy 3 was very helpful to help me stick to my guns, despite the pressure applied from someone, some might say, more “powerful” than I.
It is not easy to call out a manipulator, gaslisghter, bullshiter, on their behavior, and you don’t necessary have to. But you have to see through their behaviors so you don’t end up playing small, being invisible, apologizing, feeling guilty, or in summary being a good girl (or boy sometimes too!)! You, like me, have encountered many unscrupulous people who took advantage of our kindness, naivete, but mostly our conditioning to play nice. It is not about looking for conflicts, but it is about being respected as an intelligent person who has feelings too. I am personally tired of feeling guilty for not being a doormat and for wanting to be respected. If you are too, please use your discernment and these strategies to spot the gaslighter and beat them at their game. Forewarned is forearmed. 😁
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About The Microdose Diet
The Microdose Diet by Peggy Van de Plassche focuses on personal and professional development using alternative medicines, such as microdosing psilocybin, tapping meditation, journaling, guided meditation and visualization ✨
I am Peggy Van de Plassche, a former banker and VC who spent 20 years in the financial services and technology industries. I now speak and write about the benefits of alternative medicines, such as microdosing psilocybin, for professional and personal growth. I created The Microdose Diet - the 90 Day Plan for Success and Happiness🍾 My book will be published in 2024.
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This newsletter is designed to entertain and inform, not provide medical advice. You should always consult your doctor when it comes to your personal health or before you start any treatment 🩺