We’ve been discussing gaslighting as an abuse tactic in two previous posts in response to this article by Yashar Ali who reassures us that we ladies are not crazy (thanks). In the first, Caperton dissects Ali’s message directly and the problems with male allies presenting problems analyzed by feminists as new and novel issues. In the second, I tried to clarify the definition of gaslighting and invited the readership to share their own personal experiences with this form of emotional abuse, for one because it’s a tool commonly used by abusers in abusive relationships, and two because it’s so often used against women. What bothered me was that Ali’s explanation of gaslighting chalked it up to what we commonly experience as everday sexism, when in reality gaslighting is a particularly insidious form of emotional abuse that primes abuse victims to accept increasing levels of abuse.
I discussed this briefly with Captain Awkward for her insight, in part because she so extensively discusses the importance of boundaries at her blog, and as she wisely put it in our correspondence, “You need a power differential (patriarchy, for example) for true gaslighting – it relies on power and stereotypes.” In a typical heteronormative abuse model, for example, this form of emotional abuse is often levied against women by men, and it works precisely because of prejudices about femininity and masculinity — that women are nervous, hysterical, less prone to intelligent reasoning, and need protected and corrected by a rational man who is not swayed by his emotions. Of course this isn’t true across the board — it happens frequently in abusive same-sex relationships and parent-child relationships (which exploits the child’s dependent status) as well.
Because gaslighting is part and parcel of a larger system of abuse, it can be difficult to tease out exact incidents and outcomes and differentiate them from the larger experience of the abusive relationship. Some commenters expressed confusion over lying versus gaslighting, and whether this is something that is always conscious or whether it can be subconscious as well. “Gaslighting” is a colloquial term and not a clinical one (Practitioners, is there an official recognition of this behavior?), so there is some disagreement on how it’s applied. For our discussion, I consider gaslighting to be a repeat, systematic series of lies that are designed to make the victim doubt her reality. It’s not one lie or two lies, it’s part of a pattern of abuse meant to make the victim more compliant to minimize the effects of abuse, accept blame, and accept the abuser’s version of events that are contrary to her own. In other words, it’s death by a thousand cuts.
Gaslighting can be intentional, such as with the example from the play and its movie adaptations, or the example I use here, where a partner purposely moves or hides your stuff to make you feel forgetful and untethered to your memory.
Gaslighting can also be an unintentional side-effect, as a classic outcome of living with a narcissist, or with a partner who is trying to cover up their pattern of abuse, or with the addict trying to cover up their addiction. It is done in order to preserve the … [gaslighter’s] vision of himself” as an honest and upstanding person without actually doing the things that would make it so.
Gaslighting can be physical or emotional. An example of physical gaslighting is the example from the movie or from my example in comments. An anonymous reader emailed me with this horrifying example of physical gaslighting:
I knew someone who lived in his mother-in-law’s house and would do things like reorder the kitchen cabinets (switching the plates to the opposite side of the room) to make her think she was going crazy in the hopes that he could have her committed to a home and he could get the house.
For a sidebar discussion, I’ve heard a practitioner say that this kind of gaslighting is so vindictive and insidious that if someone is pulling a physical gaslight on you and you’re able to identify it, drop everything and run the other way and never stop running from this person.
An example of emotional gaslighting is evident in the recollection of CurrerBell in comments, where the denial of abuse was encouraged in her childhood home in order to preserve peace with a trigger-prone mother.
It’s not limited to interpersonal relationships either. As smash points out in the comments, an example was highlighted recently in Ask Prudie where a guy is bullied by his coworkers, who tell him he has bad breath and harangue him about it at work, while his dentist and doctor tell him there is no issue at all.
Overall, gaslighting has the gradual effect of making the victim anxious, confused, and less able to trust their own memory and perception, which makes you less likely to fight back or feel confident accusing the abuser of bad faith later when he’s siphoning money off of you, for example, or isolating you from your friends and family. And later, when your work and school performance suffers because of the nagging dread you have at home, your abuser blames it on the shortcomings he’s defined you by, so it’s your fault that you’re stupid and unreliable, which is why no one likes you and you’re ugly and you can’t even pick up the cat right. The pattern of lying and denial is meant to make you more susceptible to validating their version of events, and it’s almost always a version where the abuser is the sympathetic party and the victim is a dumb, petty asshole for concentrating on who did what when. It’s meant to tear you down and it’s often effective because you are trying to fight fair with someone who is intentionally slippery. As part of a larger system of abuse, it makes you vulnerable to accept escalations of abuse AND attribute them to your OWN failure and not the ill will of the abuser.
About a dozen women wrote me privately and anonymously to share their experiences, and they had so much insight and wisdom and humor that I hope I do them justice and crystallize their experiences here. Because I think it’s tempting for us survivors to focus on the abuser, which can be detrimental for our recovery, I also asked them to recollect how they put the pieces back together after leaving the relationship. What follows below are bits and pieces of these anonymous conversations, both about gaslighting and abusive relationships in general. While I originally intended to focus on gaslighting alone, there were too many invaluable insights to pare them down.
This is a giant beast of a discussion on emotional and physical abuse and its affects on our mental health, and as such this is your neon, flashing trigger warning.
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