Circle of Candor ·
by Juju
I used to think “gaslit” was just about people — lovers, parents, bosses — twisting your truth until you doubt your own reflection. But lately, I’ve been wondering if maybe the biggest gaslight isn’t personal at all. Maybe it’s the one we were all born into — a collective illusion, so well rehearsed it made us question our pain before we ever named it.
I came across Dr. Joy DeGruy one night while doing homework — or maybe while trying to understand myself. Her work on Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome felt like it was talking straight to the marrow of generational ache. She wrote about how trauma doesn’t just end when the violence does. It travels — in our DNA, in our parenting, in our silence. Reading her made me realize: being told to “get over it” is its own kind of gaslight. Whole communities were taught to move on from wounds that never got a chance to close.
Then I found Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart’s work on Historical Trauma. Her words carried the kind of truth that hums in your bones — the kind that doesn’t need translation. She said grief can echo through bloodlines when the world never lets you mourn. And I thought of my own people — Caribbean, colonized, proud, and quiet. We learned to laugh loud, work hard, and call survival “strength.” But under all that rhythm and resilience, I can still feel it — that uncried grief. That’s how you know the gaslight worked: when you call your pain “normal.”
The Inheritance We Never Asked For
(Dr. Joy DeGruy & Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome)
When I found Dr. Joy DeGruy’s work, I didn’t expect it to shake something loose in me.
She calls it Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome — the idea that the trauma from slavery and generations of dehumanization didn’t just end; it changed shape. It shows up in how we move through the world, how we love, how we raise our kids, how we fear.
That line stopped me.
Because if trauma can be passed down, then so can the lies attached to it.
Maybe gaslighting isn’t just something that happens between two people. Maybe it’s what happens when entire communities are told, “You’re overreacting,” or “That’s all in the past,” or “Be grateful—it’s better now.”
That’s gaslighting on a larger scale.
It’s how whole generations are taught to question their pain and call their strength rebellion.
Dr. Joy talks about how this kind of damage leaves something she calls vacant esteem — that deep sense of not feeling good enough, no matter what you achieve. And it turns into anger that lives under the skin, or a quiet habit of shrinking yourself so you don’t seem “too much.”
She says healing starts with truth.
And I think maybe that’s what breaking the gaslight really is—stopping the performance of pretending the fire never burned.
When People Are Told to Forget
(Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart & Historical Trauma)
Another name that stayed with me was Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart. Her work on historical trauma made me pause the same way Dr. Joy’s did. She writes about how grief can echo through bloodlines when the world never lets you mourn. And that hit me deep. Because my people carry grief too — unspoken, unmourned. We call it strength, call it resilience, but sometimes it’s just silence that got passed down wearing a brave face.
It made me think about the Caribbean, about colonization, about how many of us were taught to smile through pain and say “we good” even when we weren’t. We learned to keep moving, to work, to laugh loud, and to dance over the cracks. But under all that rhythm, the ache still hums.
Dr. Brave Heart calls it unresolved grief — the kind that hides inside families for generations. And when you’re told to “move on” from what your ancestors never got to bury, that’s not healing. That’s gaslighting disguised as progress.
What I love about her teaching is that she doesn’t talk about healing like it’s a solo mission. She says it’s about coming together — through ceremony, through storytelling, through remembering out loud. Healing, she reminds us, happens in community, not in isolation. It’s about remembering together, not pretending apart. That’s not rebellion. That’s reclamation.
The Gaslight in the Mirror
By the time I got to this part of my healing, I started noticing something hard to admit — I wasn’t just gaslit by others; I’d learned to do it to myself.
When you grow up in a world that teaches you to question your own pain, you start doing it out of habit. That’s the quietest kind of gaslight — the one that lives in your head and speaks in your own voice.
It sounds like this:
“Be strong—don’t make a scene.”
“Smile through it; nobody likes a complainer.”
“You’re lucky compared to others.”
And every time we repeat those lines, we dim a little more of our own truth — just to keep the peace inside a system that taught us to doubt it.
Dr. Joy and Dr. Brave Heart both remind me that this kind of self-doubt was something we were taught to survive. To stay small. To stay safe. But it was never meant to stay forever.
So I’ve been learning to rewrite that code — to stop calling my awareness “too much” and start calling it wisdom.
That’s what I mean when I say I’m recoding myself.
Learning to recognize that my sensitivity is intelligence, my reflection is growth, and my solitude is strength — not a punishment.
Healing doesn’t stop with self-awareness. Once you start seeing your own patterns clearly, the next step is learning to hold that truth—gently, without shame, and without running from what it shows you.
Learning to Hold the Truth (The Path Forward)
Healing doesn’t stop with self-awareness. Once you start seeing your own patterns clearly, the next step is learning to hold that truth—gently, without shame, and without running from what it shows you. Maybe healing isn’t about fixing what’s broken. Maybe it’s about seeing what’s true—even when it hurts, even when it humbles us.
The more I sit with these teachings, the more I realize healing is something we do together—in conversations, in truth circles, and in the small, holy moments when somebody finally says, “I went through that too,” and you don’t feel crazy anymore. Dr. Joy taught me that truth is medicine. Dr. Brave Heart taught me that grief is sacred. Together, they remind me that naming the wound isn’t weakness—it’s how we stop the gaslight. Because pretending the pain didn’t happen doesn’t make you strong; it just makes the silence louder.
I think about that a lot when I write, when I speak, when I breathe. Healing doesn’t mean the story ends—it means the story finally gets told right. So maybe the real question isn’t who dimmed the light, but what truth are we brave enough to keep lit—together?
And maybe that’s where the work begins: in keeping the flame alive, in passing it forward. Every time we name what hurt us, we make it harder for the lie to live. Every time we tell the truth—in a circle, in a journal, in the quiet of our own reflection—we turn the gaslight down and let the soul breathe again. That’s what these women showed me. That healing isn’t a performance. It’s a remembering. It’s how we reclaim what was ours before the world tried to rewrite it.
I’m still unlearning the stories that taught us to doubt ourselves—and learning, every day, how to trust our truth again.
~ Juju 💜
In Gratitude
This reflection was inspired by the groundbreaking work and wisdom of Dr. Joy DeGruy and Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart—two women whose teachings remind us that truth and grief, when held together, can light the way home.
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