After You’ve Been Gaslit at Work

The endless search for proof

When you’ve been gaslit at work, you often need a sanity check. For years, I thought my clients were sending me far more evidence than I needed to help them with their challenges at work. Then I realized why they do it. Because I did it too.

In the immediate aftermath my own workplace nightmare, I spent countless hours putting everything together. I made a timeline. I went back through old emails, over and over them. I pulled together my successes, including the praise I got from the very same board members who would later betray me.

Nobody was asking me to do this. Nobody even saw it. Not even my attorney.

At the time, I’m not even sure I knew why I was doing it except it felt like a balm. It gave me some sense of control over a situation in which I had none. I spent my career as a high performer and knew how to get shit done. So I was doing something, anything I could to try and make sense of what made no sense at all.

I also considered myself a pretty savvy political person. After all, I wrote an entire book about the politics of the junk food industry. I created and led a national association that lobbied government at the federal and state levels.

But somehow I was politically out-maneuvered in my own professional life? How can this possibly happen to me, what did I miss? I was on the hunt for any and all clues.

I wasn’t building a legal case. I was trying to prove my own reality.

I would find an email from two years earlier and think, oh, I should have seen that differently at the time. While I hate the phrase “smoking gun”, I must admit I did find it. The man who eventually ousted me actually put in writing, didn’t I want to step down as leader of my own organization? I know, I know. A thousand red flags and deafening warning bells that somehow I missed. But when you are in the middle of a busy career, it’s easy to let things like this slide. Plus, covert abusers are very skilled at making you think they are still your friend. At least this one was.

Pulling all the evidence together served two opposing purposes: on one hand, it was that balm, the antidote to all the gaslighting. Oh ok, this is what happened and why, now I get it. It’s not me, it’s them, what a relief.

But on the other hand, it also brings up the pain of self-blame: why did I miss it? How could I be so smart in all things political and miss what was happening to me? Because that’s how covert abuse works, you don’t see it until it’s too late.

Now I notice my clients also building the case against their employers in a way that is far more detailed than needed. I’ll ask for a basic outline of what happened and receive a litigation-ready mountain of evidence.

Overly detailed timelines. Endless email threads with HR. Slack screenshots on steroids. Performance reviews dating back years. Potential witnesses. All neatly organized in folders. It’s like they took a short course in paralegal studies.

While I don’t need most of it to achieve our goals, I understand the impulse. After you’ve spent months being told that things didn’t happen the way you remember them, that you misunderstood, that you’re the problem, you start looking for proof to validate your lived experience.

Not just to convince your employer. Often to convince yourself. That sanity check is what many people need before they can figure out what to do next.

Here is what I want to say to these folks: It did really happen to you. It’s not your fault. You don’t need a mountain of evidence to prove it. I believe you. Because it happened to me too.

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