Much has already been written about gaslighting: it is when one person, for the purpose of exploitation, deliberately undermines trust in another person’s own perception and his ability to rely on himself. There is another phenomenon, already on the side of the “victim” of gaslighting: betrayal blindness, or blindness to betrayal. Male humor offers us a lot of examples. If you are caught cheating, lie, deny it to the last: it wasn’t me, it’s not what you thought, she started it first, I was set up, and so on. Such jokes (very unfavorably, by the way, characterize their translator) did not arise out of nowhere. If one is lying, then the other believes the lie. I wonder how this is possible. So, betrayal blindness arises when the value of the relationship and the fear of losing it are too strong, when the risk of breaking the relationship is so frightening that the only way to resolve this conflict is between what my eyes see and what my partner says - this is to stop believing your eyes, make yourself insensitive to your own anger and indignation, and switch “to your partner”, begin to understand and justify him: he is so worried, he is afraid of losing me, this is an accident, everything is not so simple, he repents and no longer will be. If as a child I often had to give up on myself, betray myself, believing my parents “this is for your own good, then you’ll say thank you, you’ll think “I don’t want”, there’s the word “need”, your mother tried to cook and you turn your nose up, parents to everyone they sacrificed for you, and you are ungrateful,” etc., then the habit of understanding others and betraying oneself will remain, and it will be difficult to trust oneself and one’s feelings, one’s perception of both external and internal reality. And another process complicates contact with one’s own feelings: this shame for my naivety. And if you can still forgive your naivety as a child: in the end, the child has no choice but to believe his parents, then it can be very difficult to forgive your naivety as an adult. You will have to admit the whole history of your own gullibility, that “I allowed myself to be treated like this.” This can be very embarrassing, and shame stops contact with one’s anger, thereby perpetuating dissociation.