Autogaslighting: What it is and How it Affects Mental Health

Your friend cancels dinner for the third time, and something in your chest drops. Then the second voice arrives, smooth and reasonable: “You’re overreacting. People get busy. It’s not a big deal.” By the time you’ve finished washing the same mug twice, the feeling has been talked out of existence. You’re fine. Everything is fine. You just can’t explain why your jaw is so tight, or why you cried in the shower, or why a perfectly ordinary Tuesday feels like walking on glass. You’ve done what you do best: convinced yourself that what you felt isn’t what you felt.

That habit has a popular name, autogaslighting, also called self-gaslighting. It describes doubting, dismissing or rewriting your own feelings, memories and perceptions so that they stop being a problem. It isn’t a diagnosis, and no manual lists it. Yet therapists hear it constantly, in sentences like “it wasn’t that bad,” “other people have it worse” and “I’m probably just being dramatic.” Because it happens inside your own head, no one else can see it, and you can’t easily argue with someone who sounds exactly like you.

That’s what makes it slippery.

This article explains what autogaslighting is and how it affects mental health, where the habit comes from, what research says about the pieces involved, and how to start trusting yourself again.

It also marks the limits: where the term is useful, and where it risks turning ordinary self-doubt into a new thing to feel bad about. A label should help you see more clearly, not hand your inner critic one more weapon.

What is autogaslighting, exactly?

Autogaslighting is the habit of invalidating your own experience: telling yourself that what you feel, remember or perceive is wrong, exaggerated or unimportant. The word borrows from gaslighting, in which one person manipulates another into doubting reality, and turns it inward. You become both the person doing the manipulating and the person being manipulated.

Philosopher Kate Abramson described interpersonal gaslighting as an attempt to induce in someone the sense that their reactions, perceptions, memories or beliefs are so groundless that they deserve no consideration. The self-directed version borrows the same moves. “I’m too sensitive.” “I must have misremembered.” “I shouldn’t feel this way.” The content is different, and the target is the same: your trust in your own mind.

A few cautions are needed. First, self-gaslighting is not a clinical term. It does not appear in the diagnostic manuals, and there is no validated scale to measure it. Clinicians use it as a shorthand for several well-studied processes, particularly self-invalidation, minimization and emotional suppression. Second, the word “gaslighting” implies intent to deceive, and when you do it to yourself, there is usually no villain. It tends to be a learned reflex, an old strategy for staying safe or acceptable.

Third, many therapists note that self-gaslighting often develops after someone else did it to you first. People who were repeatedly told that their feelings were wrong or silly, by a parent, partner, teacher or boss, absorb that voice and apply it automatically. The external critic becomes internal, which makes the pattern feel like your own personality.

Take Lena, 28, whose manager once told her that being upset about a missed credit was “unprofessional.” Two jobs later, she feels a flash of hurt when a colleague presents her idea as his own, and she thinks, “Don’t be petty.” She says it in her manager’s tone. She doesn’t notice.

It helps to see the function. Dismissing a feeling can protect you from conflict, from rejection, from the effort of dealing with something painful. In the short term it works. Over months and years the bill arrives in other forms, which later sections describe.

Is it always harmful? Not always. Sometimes talking yourself down from a spike of anxiety is healthy emotion regulation. The problem begins when the dismissal is automatic, constant and applied to feelings that are accurate signals.

How is it different from negative self-talk or self-doubt?

Self-doubt asks, “Could I be wrong?” Negative self-talk says, “I’m terrible.” Self-gaslighting says, “What happened didn’t happen, or it doesn’t matter, or you don’t really feel that.” The distinguishing feature is denial or distortion of your own reality, not criticism of your character.

Notice what is happening in the last row. A harsh critic assumes you did something wrong, while a self-gaslighter erases the event. The critic says, “You failed.” The gaslighter says, “Nothing happened.” Both hurt, but the second is harder to detect because it feels like calm rationality.

Healthy reflection differs in tone and direction. It stays grounded in what occurred and asks questions. It accepts the feeling as real, even if you decide the reaction was disproportionate. Self-gaslighting shuts the inquiry down: it ends the conversation before it begins.

A useful test is to ask what the thought does. Does it help you understand, make a plan or repair something? Or does it make the feeling disappear while the situation stays unchanged? Understanding opens a door. Dismissal closes it.

Another test: would you say it to a friend? If a friend told you her partner called her “crazy” in an argument, you probably wouldn’t answer, “You’re probably overreacting.” You’d say it sounds painful. The gap between what you offer others and what you offer yourself is data.

Also, doubting yourself is not inherently unhealthy. Good thinkers revise beliefs in light of evidence. The question is whether your doubt follows evidence or follows discomfort. Real doubt says, “Let me check the facts.” Self-gaslighting says, “Let me stop feeling this.”

What does self-gaslighting sound like in everyday life?

Usually like reasonable, even kind, phrases that cut the feeling off at the root. Because they sound like maturity or modesty, they rarely get questioned.

Common examples include:

• “It’s not that big a deal.” Minimizing a hurt, however large it was for you.
• “Other people have it so much worse.” Using comparison to cancel your right to feel pain.
• “I’m just being dramatic.” Reframing a valid reaction as an attention-seeking flaw.
• “They didn’t mean it that way.” Defending the person who hurt you before you’ve acknowledged the hurt.
• “I must have misremembered.” Surrendering your memory when someone challenges it, without checking.
• “I have no reason to be upset.” Demanding a justification for feelings that arrive uninvited.

The behaviors go beyond words. Self-gaslighting often shows up as laughing off something that stung, changing the subject when your own pain comes up, staying in a situation you know is bad because you can’t justify leaving, and asking others to confirm your reality before trusting it. Some people notice physical signs (a tight stomach, trouble sleeping) that contradict the verbal reassurance, as if the body were arguing with the mind.

Picture Omar, 45, after a family dinner at which his brother mocked his career. On the drive home he thinks, “It was a joke. He’s always like that. I’m too touchy.” He turns up the radio. At 2 a.m. he’s awake, replaying the moment, unable to say why.

The key signature is a mismatch: a strong internal signal (anger, fear, sadness, a gut sense that something is off) followed by a fast verbal override. The override is often in the form of “should”: I shouldn’t feel this, I shouldn’t mind, I should be grateful.

Spotting it takes a bit of practice. A simple prompt: when you notice yourself explaining away a feeling, pause and ask, “Is this my honest assessment, or is this me trying to make the discomfort stop?”

Where does the habit come from?

Most often from invalidation, early and repeated. Psychologist Marsha M. Linehan developed the idea in her 1993 biosocial theory of emotion dysregulation, which proposes that problems arise when a person’s emotional sensitivity meets an invalidating environment. In such an environment, a person’s communicated experiences and needs are persistently punished, trivialized, disregarded or dismissed.

Picture a child who says, “I’m scared,” and hears, “There’s nothing to be scared of.” Or one who cries and hears, “Stop being so sensitive.” Occasionally, that’s harmless. As a repeated pattern, the child learns something beyond the immediate message: that inner signals aren’t reliable, and that the environment knows better. Linehan called the result self-invalidation, a tendency to dismiss one’s own emotions and to look to others for cues about what to feel.

Her model was developed to explain borderline personality disorder, where it has received substantial research attention, though the evidence is mixed on how much invalidation matters compared with other factors, and measurement varies from study to study. Still, the core observation reaches much further. Researchers and clinicians describe self-invalidation in people who have anxiety, depression, trauma histories and, in some work, those who “mask” autistic traits to fit in. It is a human pattern, not a diagnosis-specific one.

Several family and social settings can teach it:

Households where emotions were mocked, punished or ignored. Parents who needed the child to be “easy” or “fine.” Religious or cultural messages that equate complaint with ingratitude. Schools or workplaces that reward toughness and punish vulnerability. Past relationships with partners who said, “You’re crazy,” or “That never happened.” Even well-meaning phrases such as “Look on the bright side” can teach children that sadness is unacceptable.

Imagine Kofi, 33, raised by a father who worked double shifts and treated complaint as weakness. “Kids who have food shouldn’t cry,” he said. Kofi became an adult who is generous and capable and who says, “I’m fine” in a flat voice the moment anyone asks how he is. It isn’t a lie, exactly. It’s the only answer he was ever allowed.

Nothing here assigns blame. Many parents who invalidate were invalidated themselves, or were trying to protect their children from a harsh world. Recognizing where the voice came from helps you stop mistaking it for the truth.

Whose tone do you hear when you tell yourself to calm down?

Does staying silent to keep the peace count as self-gaslighting?

It can, particularly when you convince yourself that you don’t mind. Psychologist Dana Crowley Jack described a related pattern in her 1991 book Silencing the Self: self-silencing, where a person holds back their thoughts, feelings and needs in order to maintain relationships and avoid conflict or rejection. Her interviews with women experiencing depression suggested that many were actively censoring themselves, devaluing their own experience and suppressing anger to preserve intimacy.

The underlying cause, in her account, was cultural. Messages about what a “good” woman, partner or mother does, such as put others first, be pleasant, don’t make demands, push people to judge their own needs by an external standard. The result is a split between the outer, compliant self and an inner self that goes unheard. Over time the inner voice weakens, and the person may truly stop knowing what they want.

That’s close to the heart of self-gaslighting. Silencing yourself isn’t only about not speaking; it can involve persuading yourself that there’s nothing to say. “It doesn’t bother me” slides into “I don’t feel anything.”

Jack and a colleague later developed the Silencing the Self Scale, which has been used in many studies. Higher self-silencing scores have tended to be associated with depressive symptoms, mainly in research with women, although the relationships are correlational, so they can’t prove that silencing causes depression. Some research has found similar links in men, and cultural expectations shape the pattern, so it isn’t uniquely female.

Consider Anjali, 36, who agrees to every holiday plan her in-laws propose. Each time, she tells herself, “I don’t mind. It’s easier.” Seven years in, she can’t recall the last time she chose how to spend a December weekend, and she has begun to snap at her husband over trivial matters, like how he loads the dishwasher.

The snapping is typical. Suppressed needs don’t vanish; they leak out sideways, as irritability, withdrawal, exhaustion or resentment.

Not all accommodation is self-silencing. Choosing to compromise because something matters less to you is healthy. The distinction is whether the choice was conscious and whether your preferences stay alive underneath. A good question: “Am I giving this up, or am I pretending I never wanted it?”

Why does the mind rewrite what happened?

Because holding two incompatible ideas hurts, and rewriting one is faster than sitting with the tension. Psychologist Leon Festinger proposed in 1957 that people experience cognitive dissonance, an uncomfortable state when their beliefs, attitudes or actions are inconsistent, and that they are motivated to reduce it.

The shortcuts for reducing dissonance are well documented: change the belief, change the behavior, or add a justification. In everyday emotional life, a favorite shortcut is to change the memory or meaning of the event. If “my partner is good to me” collides with “my partner humiliated me at the party,” one of those has to give. The easiest edit is: “It wasn’t humiliation. I was oversensitive.”

That edit protects something you need: the relationship, the family peace, your self-image as someone who chooses well. It can also feel like maturity. People often describe self-gaslighting as “being rational.”

Dissonance reduction isn’t a defect of weak minds. It’s a normal, automatic process, and experiments across many decades have demonstrated its effects on attitudes and justifications. What’s less clear, and worth stating honestly, is how neatly the theory maps onto the everyday habit of dismissing feelings. Festinger’s work concerned beliefs and decisions rather than emotional invalidation, so using it here is an application, not a proven mechanism. It’s a useful lens, nothing more.

Look at the cost side. Edits that protect a belief can leave you living in a version of events that no longer matches your experience. The body and the emotions keep registering what the story denies, and the gap shows up as tension, mood problems or a vague sense of not being yourself.

Imagine Pavel, 52, who has told himself for ten years that his business partner’s habit of taking credit is “just his style.” Last month the partner left him out of a client dinner. Pavel’s chest tightened, and almost immediately he thought, “It’s probably a scheduling thing.” He keeps the story intact, and an old ache in his shoulder flares up again.

The way out isn’t to reject comfort. It’s to notice when comfort is being paid for with accuracy.

Is hiding your feelings actually good for you?

Usually not as a default strategy. Psychologist James J. Gross and colleagues studied two common ways of managing emotion: reappraisal, which means changing how you interpret a situation, and expressive suppression, which means inhibiting the outward signs of emotion. In Gross’s 1998 review of emotion regulation, and in laboratory work with colleagues, suppression reduced visible expression but did not reduce the unpleasant feeling itself, and it increased physiological activation in some measures.

In plain terms, you look calm and your body doesn’t. Other studies connected habitual suppression with poorer memory for the event, less social closeness and worse mood. Reappraisal, in contrast, tends to lower both the experience of negative emotion and its physiological signs, at least in lab settings.

Self-gaslighting often blends the two. Sometimes it’s reappraisal in disguise (“It’s not really that bad”) that is accurate and helpful. Other times it’s suppression with a justification attached (“I shouldn’t feel this, so I won’t”). The first can reduce distress. The second keeps it running underground.

An important caveat: much suppression research uses short experiments with students watching film clips, which may not capture years of living with a habit. Context and culture also matter. Suppression may carry fewer costs in settings where emotional restraint is the norm and shared, and it can be sensible in a job interview or a hostile workplace. The problem is chronic, automatic use.

Think of Jun, 30, an ER nurse who learned to stay composed during crises. It serves her on shift. At home she hears her partner describe a bad day and finds she has nothing to say, because the switch that quiets feelings at work now sticks. She says, “I’m just tired,” and she is.

Which feelings do you hide first when they arrive: anger, sadness, fear or need? Each has its own typical disguise. Anger hides as “it’s nothing,” sadness as “I’m fine,” fear as “I’m being silly,” need as “I don’t want to bother anyone.”

How are impostor feelings and cognitive distortions involved?

They are close relatives. Self-gaslighting often rides on cognitive distortions, systematic errors in thinking, and on the persistent sense of fraudulence known as the impostor phenomenon. Both teach you to distrust accurate information about yourself.

Psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck, founder of cognitive therapy, described patterns of distorted thinking in his 1976 book, including arbitrary inference (drawing conclusions without evidence), selective abstraction (focusing on one detail), overgeneralization, magnification and minimization, and personalization. Several fit self-gaslighting neatly. Minimization shrinks your pain (“it’s nothing”). Personalization takes blame that isn’t yours (“I must have caused it”). Overgeneralization turns one event into proof (“I’m always too sensitive”). When these run automatically, they feel like facts.

Then there is the impostor phenomenon. Psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne A. Imes described it in 1978 among high-achieving women who, despite objective success, believed they were intellectual frauds who had fooled everyone. They attributed success to luck, charm or effort, never ability. Later research found that it affects people of all genders and many backgrounds, and that it’s linked to anxiety and depression, although the studies are largely correlational and measures vary.

Impostor feelings are self-gaslighting about competence: you receive evidence (a promotion, praise, results), and you rewrite it (“They were just being nice”). The mind refuses to update.

The pieces reinforce each other. A distortion (“I always overreact”) justifies the dismissal of a feeling. The dismissal prevents you from gathering evidence that might correct the distortion. Meanwhile impostor feelings tell you your perceptions are unreliable anyway, so why trust them?

Take Tamar, 26, in her first year as a junior analyst. Her manager praises her report. She thinks, “He’s being polite; wait until he finds the errors.” She rechecks the work for hours, finds none and concludes that she must have missed them. She doesn’t register that she has now dismissed both the praise and the evidence.

Cognitive behavioral therapy targets precisely this: catching the automatic thought, naming the distortion and testing it against evidence. It’s among the best-studied approaches for anxiety and depression, and it adapts well to this problem.

How does self-gaslighting affect mental health?

Over time, it is linked with distress rather than relief. Because autogaslighting isn’t a formal diagnosis, there are no studies of “self-gaslighting” as such. What the research does show is that its component habits (self-invalidation, self-silencing, emotional suppression and chronic self-doubt) are associated with a range of problems. Treat the following as plausible and partly supported, not proven for this exact pattern.

The most commonly reported effects include:

• Anxiety and constant second-guessing: when you can’t trust your reading of events, everything feels uncertain and you check, ask and rehearse more.
• Depression and low mood: unacknowledged losses and anger turn inward, and research on self-silencing links it with depressive symptoms.
• Emotional numbness or disconnection: turning down feelings often turns down everything, including joy.
• Difficulty making decisions, since you have learned to distrust your preferences and your gut sense.
• Staying in harmful situations because you’ve talked yourself out of the evidence that they are harmful.

Relationship effects follow. People who can’t name their own needs have trouble asking for them, so partners and friends guess, and often guess wrong. Resentment builds quietly. Others may experience you as hard to read or distant, since you present a calm surface over a lot of activity.

The body keeps a record as well. Chronic emotional suppression and stress are associated with sleep trouble, tension headaches, digestive problems and fatigue, though these symptoms have many possible causes, and a doctor should check persistent ones.

For people with trauma histories, there’s another layer. Survivors of abuse or neglect often learned that believing their own perceptions was dangerous. Dismissing their memories can feel like safety. When self-gaslighting is tangled up with post-traumatic stress or a history of emotional abuse, the pattern is harder to shift on your own, and trauma-informed therapy is usually appropriate.

Consider Hannah, 41, who for years told herself that the way her ex spoke to her was “just his temper.” After the relationship ended she found herself unable to choose a restaurant or say what she wanted for her birthday. The relationship had been over for eighteen months. The habit hadn’t.

Not everyone who dismisses feelings develops a disorder. Many people do it for years and manage fine, with a background hum of tension. The risk rises when the pattern is intense, long-lasting or combined with other stressors, and it’s reasonable to look at it before it gets that far.

How can you stop gaslighting yourself?

Begin by treating your feelings as data, not verdicts. You don’t need to act on every feeling or agree with every thought. You just stop deleting them before you’ve looked at them. Think of it as rebuilding a habit of trust, in small, repeatable steps.

Here is a sequence many therapists use, adapted for everyday life:

1. Catch the override. Notice the moment a feeling is followed by “but it’s nothing” or “I’m overreacting.” Label it silently: “That’s the dismissal voice.”
2. Name the original feeling. Try a simple sentence, “I feel hurt,” “I feel scared,” “I feel angry,” without adding a reason or a verdict.
3. Check the facts, not the judgment. Write down what actually happened, as a camera would record it. Then write what you felt. Keep them separate.
4. Ask what you’d say to a friend. If someone you love described this event, what would you tell them? Say it to yourself.
5. Keep a short log. A few lines at day’s end about what happened and how you felt. Over weeks you build a record that counters the urge to rewrite.
6. Test your perceptions in safe places. Share a feeling with a trusted person and see what happens. Often the reaction is calmer than the one you’ve been giving yourself.

Underneath all of this is a tone problem, and psychologist Kristin Neff offers a framework for it. In a 2003 paper she defined self-compassion as having three parts: self-kindness rather than self-judgment, a sense of common humanity rather than isolation, and mindfulness rather than over-identification with painful feelings. Self-compassion is not self-pity or excuses; it’s responding to your own pain the way a decent friend would. Research has linked it with lower anxiety and depression, although most studies are correlational and self-report-based, and benefits seem real but modest.

Practical self-compassion is simple. Put a hand on your chest and say, “This is hard.” Remind yourself that other people feel this way too. Notice the feeling without arguing with it.

Expect resistance. The first weeks can feel awkward, even dangerous, since the old habit was protecting you from something. Feelings may arrive stronger when you stop shutting them down. That is a sign the system is working again, and it usually settles.

Picture Mateo, 39, who kept a two-line log for a month. On day nine he wrote: “My brother joked about my job again. I felt small. I told myself it was nothing.” Reading it back a week later, he noticed the pattern, texted his brother, and had the first honest conversation they’d had in years.

When should you get help? If the habit is tied to trauma, if you feel numb or hopeless for weeks, if you’re staying in a harmful relationship because you doubt your own perceptions, or if the steps above feel impossible. A therapist or licensed counselor can help, using approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy (which Linehan developed to teach validation and emotion skills) or trauma-focused therapy. A primary care doctor is a reasonable first stop if sleep, mood or physical symptoms are involved. If you ever feel unsafe, in a relationship or within yourself, contact local emergency services or a crisis line.

Go slowly. You learned this over years. You can unlearn it at the same unhurried pace.

FAQs about Autogaslighting

What is autogaslighting in simple terms?

It is the habit of doubting or dismissing your own feelings, memories and perceptions so that you stop feeling or noticing them. You tell yourself you are overreacting, that it was not that bad or that you must have misremembered, even when your body and emotions say otherwise. The term is a popular one, not a clinical diagnosis, and it borrows from gaslighting, in which another person makes you doubt reality. Many therapists see it as an internalized version of that, often learned from earlier experiences of being dismissed or invalidated.

Is self-gaslighting a real psychological condition?

No. It is not a diagnosis, and it does not appear in standard diagnostic manuals. Clinicians use the term informally to describe several documented processes, including self-invalidation, emotional suppression, self-silencing and cognitive distortions such as minimization. Those pieces have been studied separately and are linked with anxiety, depression and other difficulties. Because there is no validated measure for self-gaslighting itself, claims about how common it is or exactly what it causes should be treated cautiously. Its value lies mostly in giving people a word for a familiar experience.

Why do I gaslight myself?

Usually because you learned that your feelings were unwelcome, unsafe or inconvenient. Children who are told they are overreacting, being dramatic or have nothing to cry about often grow into adults who say the same things to themselves. Relationships in which a partner, boss or family member denied your experience can reinforce it. Dismissing a feeling can also protect you from conflict, rejection or painful decisions in the short term. That is why the habit persists even though it costs you. Understanding where the voice came from tends to loosen its hold.

How do I know if I’m gaslighting myself or just being realistic?

Ask whether your thought follows evidence or follows discomfort. Realistic appraisal looks at the facts and may conclude that a reaction was larger than the event warranted, while still accepting the feeling as real. Self-gaslighting shuts the question down quickly and often denies the event or your emotion altogether. Other clues include using words like should and shouldn’t, comparing yourself with people who have it worse, defending the person who hurt you before acknowledging the hurt, and feeling physical tension that contradicts your reassurances. If you would answer a friend more kindly than you answer yourself, take note.

Can autogaslighting cause anxiety or depression?

It can contribute, although the research is about its components and not about self-gaslighting as such. Self-silencing has been associated with depressive symptoms, particularly in studies of women. Emotional suppression is linked to higher physiological stress and less social closeness, and chronic self-doubt feeds worry and indecision. These associations are mostly correlational, so they do not prove that the habit alone causes a disorder. Most likely it interacts with other factors such as stress, history and biology. Still, many people notice that mood and anxiety improve as they begin to acknowledge what they feel.

Is self-gaslighting related to trauma or abuse?

Often, yes. People who experienced emotional abuse, neglect or repeated invalidation may have learned that trusting their own perceptions was dangerous, and they may internalize the abuser’s voice. Dismissing their own memories or reactions can then feel protective. Not everyone who self-gaslights has a trauma history, and ordinary upbringing with dismissive messages can be enough. When the pattern is tied to trauma, it tends to be sticky, and trauma-informed therapy is usually more effective than self-help alone. Support from a skilled therapist makes it safer to revisit experiences that were previously shut down.

What are the first steps to stop gaslighting myself?

Start by noticing the moment you override a feeling, then name the original feeling without a verdict. Separate what happened from your interpretation, perhaps by writing both down. Ask what you would say to a close friend in the same situation, and say it to yourself. Keeping a short daily log builds a record that is harder to rewrite. Practicing self-compassion, such as acknowledging that something is hard without judging yourself, also helps. Expect the work to feel awkward at first. Small repeated steps matter more than dramatic changes, and a therapist can help if you get stuck.

Can therapy help with self-gaslighting?

Yes. Cognitive behavioral therapy helps identify and test automatic dismissive thoughts and distortions. Dialectical behavior therapy teaches validation skills and ways to tolerate emotion without suppressing it. Trauma-focused approaches help when the habit stems from abuse or neglect, and compassion-focused methods target the harsh tone. A good therapist will not tell you what to feel but will help you trust your own signals more. Progress is usually gradual over weeks to months, with setbacks during stress. Many people report that simply having someone take their experience seriously begins to change how they treat it themselves.

Bibliography

• Abramson, K. (2014). Turning up the lights on gaslighting. Philosophical Perspectives, 28(1), 1-30.
• Beck, A. T. (1976). Cognitive therapy and the emotional disorders. International Universities Press.
• Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241-247.
• Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.
• Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271-299.
• Jack, D. C. (1991). Silencing the self: Women and depression. Harvard University Press.
• Linehan, M. M. (1993). Cognitive-behavioral treatment of borderline personality disorder. Guilford Press.
• Neff, K. D. (2003). Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85-101.