Gaslight

I'm still stuck on this concept of how memory is created and the various ways it is changed both at the time it is initially stored and each time it is recalled.  Last summer as everything was falling apart and my ex-husband and I were having many conversations, often ones that would just go in circles, I remember feeling like he was re-writing our history.  His accounts of some events were so skewed from my memory of those same accounts.  (And later I discovered were quite skewed from the way I described them in my journal at the time.)  

How much of those discrepancies are just normal remembering events differently vs. filtering them through a skewed world view vs. intentionally re-writing them to turn the blame and responsibility back on me?

As I was talking about this with my therapist today, she asked if I had ever seen the movie "Gaslight".  Until that moment, I had forgotten about this moment.  On July 6 (I looked it up in my Amazon orders) last summer, my now ex-husband and I watched Gaslight together.  That was 9 days before he finally called it quits, although I'm sure his mind had already been made up before this all started in late May.

By this point, he was probably 6-8 weeks into watching YouTube videos about relationships.  I'm sure it was one of those videos where the term gaslighting came up.  He tried to tell me I was gaslighting him, although I don't recall him giving any examples, which is what I think prompted him to want to watch the movie.

As I sit here today I realize how much his re-writing of history and using distorted memories to justify why I was to blame made me doubt myself and my own memories.  Isn't that the very definition of gaslighting?  Even turning on the movie to watch with me was a way to gaslight me into thinking I was the problem.

Sometimes, I try to put myself back in my mind last summer.  From a perspective of some hindsight, I wonder how I made it through that summer.  I remember feeling so off-kilter, like I was living in some alternate universe where nothing made any sense.  I knew he was unfairly blaming me and distorting events from our past but I didn't know what to do about it.

And I remember a strong sense of wanting to hold him accountable in any way I could - and the one way I could do that would be to make him be the one to leave if that is what he truly wanted.  It was he who was destroying our marriage, he who had decided not to grow up, he who had decided not to invest in it, he who had put on a front and lied to me for two decades.  I wasn't going to be the one to fix that by making the decision to leave or being the one to file the divorce paperwork.  And I think that was the right approach.  If I had walked away from the marriage without having time to process, I think I would have had regrets and had an even harder time healing.