Gaslighting is Brutal

Have you ever had someone try to convince you that what you know to be true is, in fact, not true? How far did they take it? What were they trying to accomplish? Were they trying to gain control over you? Were they trying to dictate what reality is, and what it should feel like, for you?

We've all had the experience of disagreeing with someone about how an event happened or what took place, but what I'm talking about today takes it further than that. When someone tries to gain control over you, manipulating facts to distort your reality, that is called gaslighting. Gaslighting is psychological manipulation. The reason that someone does it to another person is to make them question their reality. If you can get someone to question their reality, it gives that person the power to manipulate them, control them, dominate them, or degrade them.

Sometimes a relationship may start off looking OK, but then over time, one person (because of personality issues such as extreme narcissism) will start to try to exert control the other person through gaslighting.

How does it work?

Gaslighting uses one of your biggest assets in life against you. This asset is your ability to figure out what is real. In order to assess reality, we have to be open to the outside world to take in input and data and use that to create our maps of what is going on. This begins in childhood. We are built to get reality in a relationship between our own experiences and the feedback from the external world through two processes: assimilation and accommodation.

Assimilation is the process of taking in new data.

Accommodation is shifting your view in response to the new data.

When the healthy functioning of this process is interfered with by gaslighting it can become dangerous. Imagine that you are a toddler, and you reach for the stove and your fingers get burnt. Healthy functioning would go like this: "Ow! That hurts. I'm not going to do that again!" And then you don't do it again because you know that touching the stove while it's on means you're going to get burned. A gaslighter will try to convince you that touching the stove doesn't hurt. They might say that the pain you're feeling is your fault, and other people don't experience that kind of pain when they touch the stove. They might encourage you to continue touching the stove.

You begin to question yourself and doubt one of the most grounding things we have in life–our own experience. It gives you correction and feedback that is based on a lie and therefore invalidates your truth.

Gaslighting operates in one direction. It is always used by the person trying to gain power over you, to talk you out of the hurt that they are inflicting upon you.

Gaslighters will make you feel confused, which can result in your view of yourself changing. You feel isolated. You start to question your own decisions, and you may even defend their bad behavior when people try to help you, or observe that you seem like you might be in a dangerous relationship.

Gaslighters will instantly negate your experience to make you feel like you didn't see what you saw, or didn't hear what you heard, or didn't feel what you felt. They will minimize and tell you, "It wasn't that bad." Or, "You're being dramatic."

You will only regain your power when you realize that all of these tactics are being used to make you question your reality, so that they can have control. Otherwise, they will gradually wear you down, and shrink your life.

We have a course on gaslighting on Boundaries.Me. It's helped a lot of people. If you find yourself in this situation, sign up for a free trial to learn tactics to counter gaslighting. No credit card required.