Relationship Advice
Welcome to the Relationship Advice community on Lemmy and Kbin!
The ideal place to ask for help with your relationships: romantic, friendships, we don't know what we are yet, co-workers or just human interactions in general.
Please make sure you read our rules before posting.
Rules:
Rules can be clicked on to be expanded.
1: Treat all users with respect. [!]
The goal of this community is helping OP and readers, not making fun of them. We are an inclusive community, any sort of disrespect towards ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, etc, will not be tolerated.
2: Mark sexual content as NSFW. [!]
Posts containing mentions or descriptions of sexual topics must be tagged as NSFW. This includes descriptions of sexual acts, requests for advice in the bedroom, explicit descriptions of your body and similar content.
3: All posts must be a request for advice.
All posts must be phrased as a request for advice or as a question. Sharing of stories, personal anecdotes, or past mistakes are only allowed if they're followed by a clear and relevant request for advice with the situation.
4: Provide sufficient and relevant information.
Your title and body need to contain enough information relevant to your situation, such as ages, genders, and the relationship between people mentioned. For privacy-related concerns, we recommend using fake names and broad general locations.
5: Comments must be on topic and relevant to OP.
Comments must be directly related to helping OP, asking for more information, providing relevant resources or otherwise relevant to the thread. Off-topic comments and remarks, suspicious attempts at gathering personal data from OP or other readers, or bullying will not be tolerated.
6: This is a community for requesting advice, not moral judgement.
Moral judgements, "AITA?" and other similar questions are better served by different communities.
Reddit reposts are allowed.
As a temporary measure and the result of a poll, Reddit reposts are allowed following an expanded set of rules: https://lemmy.world/post/317115
How are rules enforced and bans applied?
For the most part, this community operates under the assumption that users are acting in good faith and should be given second-chances for their mistakes. Posts and comments with very light rule violations, or otherwise undesired but mostly harmless content, can be removed by a moderator on a case by case basis without any further punitive actions.
For violations of our rules, we follow a “3 strike” system as follows:
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1st violation: 72 hours ban + moderator warning via PMs.
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2nd violation: 1 week ~ 1 month ban + final warning via PMs.
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3rd violation: 1 month ~ permanent ban.
The goal of this system is making sure users are made aware of their behavior before being permanently banned, but also protecting the community from any rule violations.
Exceptions:
While the “3 strike” system will be applied to the majority of situations, rules marked with a [!] in the sidebar signifies a rule that, if violated in an intentional, malicious or significant way, can warrant an immediate permanent ban regardless of the number of previous violations. This includes severe disrespect to users or groups, dangerous content, and similar.
Related communities:
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Adulting: !adulting@lemmy.world
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No Stupid Questions: !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
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Mental Health !mentalhealth@lemmy.world
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Whether or not you were specifically gaslit or not isn't terribly clear in your examples. If they were routinely trying to make you feel like you were the wrong one because "this is just how polyamory is" or denied things you witnessed happening on those dates as things either didn't happen or that your reaction was over the top towards them that would be a form of gas lighting. The implication that you are bipolar is sort of gaslighting but... Not exactly subtle. Pathologizing someone has moved to sit more in the more general "dick move" category in popular consciousness but what it functionally attempts aligns with the aims of gaslighting so whether you want to count it or not is kind of up to you. Not all lying is gaslighting and gaslighting isn't really more effective lying. Bad technique makes it ineffective and so obvious it doesn't fit with society's veiw of gaslighting being this kind of mastermind gambit so I find it more useful to distinguish gaslighting less in terms of how or how well it is being implemented but rather by what the person intends to achieve by it.
Basically as long as the person is ATTEMPTING (success or failure is irrelevant) to make you question and doubt that you yourself are a reasonable human with reasonable reactions who makes logical decisions and sane observations because to do so benefits THEM in some way at cost to you...they are gaslighting you.
If they legitimately do these things out of an actual concern for you and not just a way to try to absolve themselves of any responsibility for bad action and intent it is not really gaslighting... It's a couple of assholes who don't know what a healthy relationship is supposed to look like. Gaslighting requires deception which makes it kind of hard to prove if they stick to their guns that everything they did was sincere.
The vast majority of gaslighting works by establishing a false made up version of " normal" and then tries to tell you or demonstrate to you that you fall outside it. You are being told you are unreasonably jealous or forgetful or emotional to the point where the average person would find you difficult to empathize with. To actually be effective it usually needs to sever you from feedback from other people who can tell you that this version of "normal" they are trying to establish is actually complete horseshit.