It wasn’t that long ago that someone accused Assertive Spirituality, once again, of having “TDS”—you know, “Tr*mp Derangement Syndrome.” And every time we post in support of trans folks, some right-wing troll seems to pop up to argue that trans people and those who support them are “sick in the head.” (For the record, both things are ridiculous in the ways I’m about to outline.) In this week’s blog post I plan to unwrap a few of the layers of these kinds of moral disgusts about mental health concerns and what is going on when the right chooses to pathologize the opposition. Naturally, the layers of irony are incredibly deep here—we’ll get into that. By the end I’ll get into how we can cope with it and assertively respond to it.

My Background and Standpoint

As always, I’m looking at this as a former pastor’s kid from a right-leaning semi-moderate denomination who went on to become a scholar of communication with a focus on stress, trauma, and conflict communication.

Why What I Teach Matters Here

Here’s how that latter thing applies here: it’s a hugely widespread fear students have about public speaking. Since the base courses in my area are designed to help address those fears, I naturally started studying the ways that our visceral responses affect us and how we communicate, especially those regarding things like stress, shame, shadow and trauma.

Unshaming the Visceral Aspects of Life…So We Have More Agency Over Them

So yeah, a lot of what I do in the classroom—based on good evidence—is to “unshame” the idea that we have emotions and fears about things, while asserting that there are things we can do about our emotions and visceral responses as they come up if we’re more aware of them.

I frequently use the sentence “Our brains try to help protect us, but sometimes in misguided ways.”

I also point out regularly that this stigma we place on things like trauma therapy is so objectively odd—I mean, when you look at it, no one feels weird about going to physical therapy when you hurt a muscle, so it’s strange from a rational perspective to think that people think it somehow shameful to go to trauma therapy when their stress responses get stuck in response to past events.

Took Me Awhile to Get There—Because I Was Raised on the Right

The thing is, of course, that these viewpoints took me a long time to arrive at, and I’m realizing at least part of that’s because of my right-leaning background.

See, it took me years to realize how much the rhetoric of the right depends on flat out gaslighting reasonable others to try to make the reasonable folks feel like the unstable ones.

Painting vulnerable groups as particularly unstable is part of the whole package as well.

A Refresher on Gaslighting

If you haven’t heard about what gaslighting means, I’ve talked about it before, notably here. The term originated with a movie in which a husband manipulates things like lighting to try to convince his wife that she was going crazy by telling her nothing was going wrong.

Unfortunately, this is what is going on at the base when the right pathologizes the left.

See, too often this kind of rhetoric is that of a bully who, like the husband in the movie, is trying to make the reasonable people who don’t share their viewpoints that yes, they are the crazy ones.

Who Are the Pathological Ones????

On top of that, however, it’s important to note that both in the Gaslight movie and in real life, it is the right-wing bullies here who are pretending to be reasonable but are instead irrationally actively causing distress without expressing empathy for their victims.

Which, let’s be clear, is a pretty pathological thing to do.

Blaming the Victims…

And not just the kind of pathology like oh! Look! Of course that group of trans people needs some help working through their uncertainties around their gender identities, especially in a society where a**hats like these right-wing gaslighters are trying to make things as difficult for them as possible in every possible way.

It’s not like the kind of pathology of PTSD, where women who are in abusive relationships end up needing reasonable help healing from things like sexual abuse as well as the natural negative effects of emotional abuse like, you know, gaslighting.

How Our Broken Systems Play into the Abusive Bullies’ Games

Nope, the kind of pathology that chooses to make a person suffer and enjoys it is a much worse kind of disease, and much harder to treat than those other natural consequences of living in a society whose systems entirely too often don’t counteract bullies and abusers.

The Connections Between Interpersonal Abuse and Fascism

Speaking of abusers, this kind of gaslighting that happens in fascism is the same technique you’ll see a lot in abusive marriages as well.

Check out Why Does He Do That? By Lundy Bancroft if you need some insight into that phenomenon. Unfortunately, as you’ll see if you read it alongside an excellent work on fascistic rhetoric like How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley how similar the techniques are between the two.

Thinking about Disease More Widely

The truth, of course, is that when we’re talking about pathology, we’re talking about disease, which is itself a complex issue when we’re looking at it in the context of society.

In reasonable perspectives, we all surely can understand that we socialized into perspectives that can make things worse for ourselves and others when it comes to diseases, whether those of mental or physical health or both, since they’re so carefully intertwined.

Where Moral Disgusts Make Things Worse

The truth is that these moral disgusts we place around a lot of kinds of diseases actually make everything worse. (I’ve talked about moral disgusts before in a series starting here.)

It Hurts Everyone When Bullies Aren’t Trained to Deal with Emotions

Another related truth is that the bullies in the past—especially those who have been taught not to look at their emotional or visceral lives—have made things so much unnecessarily worse for the rest of us through their gaslighting actions.

This has created systems where those with the really unhealthy mental health pathologies and/or are just really awful people have created more and more problems for those who would otherwise been healthy while being so busy protecting themselves by convincing everyone else that the victims were the crazy ones and to blame.

As noted before, this happens on so many different societal levels, from personal relationships to group identities up to and including fascistic rhetoric and the policies that come with it.

Why It’s So Hard for Reasonable Peops to Deal with All This Gaslighting from the Right

The crazymaking side of this, of course, is that those who are at fault for all of this—and those who ally themselves with them—are the last people who will admit that they are to blame for hurting others.

Those who are at fault for this are like the husband in Gaslight.

Those of us who are reasonable need to support one another and ourselves by reminding ourselves and each other of this.

What We Can Do

We also need to remember in the middle of this that all of the things it takes to create and maintain mental and physical health and well-being are not the problems either.

Whatever is available and accessible to you, if you’re facing challenges, whether it’s on the personal or political level, is a good thing to take advantage of.

It’s helpful to remember that the goal of these gaslighting techniques is to break us down and make us feel and be unresourced and unsupported.

The More We Can Support and Resource Ourselves and Others the Better It Will Go

The more we can work to do the things it takes to support and resource ourselves and each other, the more stamina we’ll have on this challenging journey of resistance of bullies, including those related to encroaching fascism.

Don’t Assume We Have No Agency To Make Things Better

And while we’re at it, a big part of the gaslighting is designed to try to convince us that the bully has more power than they really do. I talked about this in the last blog post.

It’s so important to remember that we are the reasonable ones, and that we still have things we can do to fight back against so many unhealthy tactics.

I’m going to leave it there for now.

A Final Charge

Go team #AssertiveSpirituality! Let’s continue to do what we can where we are with what we’ve got to keep speaking back against the toxic crap toward a healthier world for us all. We can do this thing.

Want to help keep this work going? It’s been 5 years of this project, and I finally have tip jars set up at Venmo and PayPal so you can help keep the lights on and such (THANK YOU for whatever you can do!). Here’s the info:

Venmo: @assertivespirituality

PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=Q2QWKELCNATBE

Looking for more resources toward speaking up for what’s right and dealing with the conflict that results?

Boy, do we have got a free “Assertive Spirituality Guide to Online Trolls” for you. It actually helps you with conflict both online and off. To get it, sign up for our email newsletter (either in the top bar or by checking the appropriate box when commenting on this article). Once you’ve confirmed your email address, we’ll send you the link to the guide in your final welcome email. You can unsubscribe at any time, but we hope you’ll stick around for our weekly email updates. As soon as we feasibly can we’re hoping to offer more online courses and other support resources for those advocating for the common good, and if you stay subscribed, you’ll be the first to know about these types of things when they pop up.

Want More Specific Help Applying This Kind of Thing? Message Me at the Assertive Spirituality Facebook Page.