Community & Cultural Gaslighting: Protecting the Nervous System in an Age of Chaos

When communities are flooded with conflicting narratives—each emotionally charged and claiming exclusive truth—the nervous system enters a state of chronic stress. This phenomenon, known as cultural gaslighting, destabilizes our sense of reality by overwhelming the brain’s threat-detection systems while suppressing the prefrontal cortex responsible for discernment and reason. The result is widespread anxiety, polarization, and emotional exhaustion—not because people are weak or uninformed, but because prolonged exposure to contradiction and fear dysregulates the brain, vagus nerve, and stress response. What feels like confusion is often a physiological signal that coherence and safety have been disrupted.

Protecting the mind and heart in such an environment begins with regulation before reaction. A calm nervous system restores clarity, allowing facts to be separated from emotional manipulation and complexity to replace binary thinking. Grounding in local reality, slowing the breath, limiting exposure, and refusing outrage-driven narratives help preserve both compassion and strength. True resilience is not numbness or anger, but the ability to remain embodied, thoughtful, and humane—anchored in truth without surrendering to chaos.

Dr. Fred Clary, founder of Functional Analysis Chiropractic Technique and lifting/life coach/ gym-chalk covered philosopher talks about Community Gaslighting!