For a long time, I thought the problem was me.
Not in a dramatic way. Not consciously. Just quietly and persistently. I learned to override what I felt in my body because everything around me looked correct on paper. The language was polished. The values were articulated clearly. The leadership smiled in profile photos that suggested certainty and competence.
And yet, something never settled.
I remember leaving meetings with a low level tightness in my chest that I could not immediately explain. Nothing overt had happened. No one had raised their voice. No boundary had been crossed in a way that could be easily named. Still, I would walk away feeling slightly disoriented, as though I had missed something important but could not quite identify what it was.
So I told myself to ignore it.
I told myself I was being professional.
Over time, those moments accumulated. Emails that felt misaligned with what had been said verbally. Decisions that shifted without explanation. Feedback that did not match the reality of the work being delivered. Each instance on its own seemed minor. Together, they created a quiet confusion that began to erode my self trust.
At first, I framed it as stress. High pressure environments are demanding. That is normal. Then I framed it as personal responsibility. Maybe I was not communicating clearly enough. Maybe I needed to adjust my approach. Maybe I was expecting too much consistency.
What I did not consider was that my body might be noticing something my mind had been trained to dismiss.
There is a particular kind of conditioning that happens in professional environments. You learn early that emotions are inconvenient. Intuition is unreliable. Discomfort is something to be managed quietly so you can keep functioning. You are rewarded for composure, not for naming what feels off.
So when your body reacts, you learn to correct it rather than listen.
I now understand that this is often how workplace gaslighting begins. Not with blatant lies, but with subtle misalignment. With enough polish to make you question yourself. With just enough plausibility that you assume the confusion must be internal.
I remember the moment I began to seriously doubt my own perception. A decision had been made that contradicted everything previously discussed. When I asked for clarification, the response was calm, polite, and dismissive. The implication was that I must have misunderstood. That the conversation had never unfolded the way I remembered it.
I walked away feeling embarrassed for having raised it at all.
That feeling stayed with me longer than it should have.
Over time, I noticed how often I replayed interactions in my head, searching for where I might have gone wrong. I softened questions before asking them. I delayed raising concerns until I could no longer avoid them. I became more careful with my words, not because I lacked confidence in my work, but because I no longer trusted how reality would be received.
This is the hidden cost of environments where psychological safety is spoken about but not practised.
You begin to fragment yourself.
What makes this particularly difficult to identify is that nothing appears overtly wrong. The organisation still functions. Meetings still occur. Deliverables are still produced. From the outside, it all looks intact.
But inside, you feel yourself shrinking.
I have spoken to many people since who describe the same experience. They say things like, I cannot put my finger on it, or I feel like I am losing confidence for no clear reason, or I keep being told everything is fine but it does not feel fine.
What they are describing is not weakness.
It is dissonance.
Your nervous system registers inconsistency before your conscious mind has language for it. It notices when words and actions do not align. It notices when accountability is selectively applied. It notices when concerns are acknowledged verbally but dismissed structurally.
And when you repeatedly override that information, you pay a price.
For me, the turning point came not through confrontation, but through exhaustion. I realised I was spending more energy trying to make sense of things than actually doing my job. The mental load of constant self correction had become heavier than the work itself.
That was when I began to ask a different question.
Instead of asking what was wrong with me, I asked what I had been trained to ignore.
I began to trust that discomfort was not an inconvenience to be eliminated, but information to be examined. I stopped assuming that confusion automatically meant failure. I allowed the possibility that the environment itself was misaligned.
This shift did not happen overnight. It happened slowly, as I learned to sit with my own perceptions without immediately discrediting them. As I noticed how often clarity arrived once I stopped explaining away what I felt.
What I know now is this.
When something consistently feels wrong in a professional environment, it is worth paying attention to that feeling. Not in a reactive way. Not in a dramatic way. But with curiosity and self respect.
Gaslighting does not always come from malicious intent. Sometimes it comes from systems that prioritise appearances over integrity. From cultures that value control over transparency. From leadership that avoids discomfort rather than addressing it.
And when you are inside those systems long enough, you can begin to doubt the very instincts that once kept you safe.
If you have ever found yourself questioning your own experience despite clear internal signals, I want you to hear this.
You are not imagining it.
And learning to trust yourself again is not rebellion.
It is recovery.
Copyright © 2026 Lynette Diehm.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced without written permission of the author.
