Is this gaslighting?
Hello everyone, sincerely thankful for any kind advice here. I have worked for a few months and then quit my job despite the pandemic because I feel that my manager is toxic and is affecting my mental health such as I couldn’t sleep at night thinking that tmr will come soon and I have to face her again.
In my days working with her, she will get angry at multiple things that I do if I did not do it in the way that she expected. For example, at 9pm we receive a text message saying that the next day 11am our big boss wants to tell us something about our website and we all replied ok in the group chat. The next morning, she texted me asking why I did not take the initiative to prepare any reports on our website for 11am meeting and say that she kept quiet because she wants to see how proactive am I in this job, so things such as preparing a report should be what I have done instead of her asking me to do it. I was very confused because the message clearly was that our big boss wants to tell us something, not to discuss any reports? So I was forced to scramble through the analytics to come up with something and since the time is tight, I was very stressed. In the end, our big boss did not ask anything about the website analytics but just to inform us what he thinks we can do to make our website look better.
As I was constantly being told that I am a poor performer, cannot live up to expectations, I am very lazy, I am someone who thinks highly of myself that is why I will never change – I was told all these to a point where I start to think is there a problem with myself? I have heard that when this new manager just got promoted, she fired almost everyone in the department as “they won’t listen to her”, and after I quit, many others (including newcomers and old employees who worked for 10 years, 20 years) have also quit.
I am using this platform to ask is because until now I am still very confused – is it that I really have a problem? I am scared that this experience will affect my character negatively as every time my ex manager is unhappy with the things that I do, she wants me to write an essay to her, reflecting on what I have done wrong.
Subsequently, when I interact with others, I will keep thinking that I will do the wrong things and people will dislike me. Is this normal? Is this a kind of gaslighting when I was being constantly told that there is something wrong with me when there is not?
Thank you for any advice, I really hope to recover better mentally and move on with a normal life.