Gaslighting is disrupting another person’s accurate perception of reality. That’s the simple definition. And as with everything in life, gaslighting sits on a spectrum, from benign to extraordinarily harmful.
Whether something is gaslighting, and how much it matters, comes down to three variables: how severe it is, how frequently it happens, and how conscious the person doing it is.
A Benign Example
Somebody says, “Hey, Will, you told me you were going to be here at 2:15.” I’m defensive, because I know that person is right, and I say, “No, I didn’t. I said I’d be here at 2:20, and I was here at 2:20.”
That is being dismissive of a shared reality, and in this example, knowingly. I know I said 2:15, but my neurotic behaviors get in the way, so I lie and insist we agreed on 2:20. That technically is gaslighting.
This is where the term gets overused.
When we overuse a term, it stops meaning much of anything at all.
When Frequency Changes It
If it happens continually, even these short little examples work like water torture, one small drop at a time, and they can build into something very significant.
You told me you were going to bring the silverware.
We explicitly had this conversation.
Each single instance falls into the benign. But with consistency, the person whose reality keeps getting dismissed or contradicted starts to develop a schema that they have a poor memory, that they can’t trust themselves and their own recall of reality. This is where the benign, with a frequency variable, turns into something that’s not benign at all.
The Extreme End
At the other end are the overt forms, at the level of abuse.
Somebody is having an affair. He comes home with lipstick on his neck, and his wife calls him out. She was tracking his phone. He was at another woman’s house. He smells like perfume.
Honey, I’m so sorry. This is really concerning for me. I know your mom had bipolar. Do you think some of this has to do with that? I know we wanted to get you a therapist and weren’t able to, and you really haven’t been sleeping well lately. I think you’re being delusional, and your jealousy is rooted in your severe emotional instability.
That is gaslighting in its most severe sense, right off the bat.
Or a man in a domestically abusive relationship beats up his wife, and then contrives a story in which somehow it was her fault.
Gosh, I wish you didn’t make me do that. I care for you, and I want to make sure you know not to be such an idiot, because it’s dangerous for our family. That’s why you make me do these things to you.
This end doesn’t require a high level of frequency. The injury and the gaslighting are immediate.
Severity and Frequency Together
At the benign end, frequency is what turns it into harm. At the severe end, once is enough.
Three Kinds of Gaslighting
Here’s where it gets super complex. Gaslighting falls into three categories, by how conscious it is.
One: Unconscious and Genuinely Mistaken
The first person gaslights completely unconsciously. They are denying the reality of the person in front of them, but they are legitimately mistaken themselves.
Somebody is waiting at the movie theater. After twenty minutes, they call, and the other person says, “No, we said we were going to the museum.” And they actually believed they were going to the museum.
To some people, not only is that benign, it feels almost excessive to call it gaslighting, because it’s really just misperceiving. The result is still a low level of gaslighting, because it disputes somebody’s access to an accurate perception of reality.
Two: Unconscious, but It Feels Like It Should Be Conscious
The middle one is unconscious, and it feels like it should be conscious. From the outside it looks deliberate, because it is so consistent and so convenient, yet in the moment it runs automatically. Here the gaslighting is a result of neurotic behavior. By simple definition, neurotic behavior is when we automatically act to avoid, repress, defend, countercritique, or blame, in order to protect ourselves from discomfort, specifically shame.
Take the museum again. Say we carry so much shame about how often our misspeaking, maybe from ADHD, causes real-life problems. We order the wrong color thing all the time. We arrive late all the time. That shame about a continual variable in ourselves runs so deep that we automatically, and largely unconsciously, defend against somebody’s perception when they tell us we messed up again.
You said you’d be here.
No, I didn’t.
We didn’t premeditate that excuse. We are underdifferentiated, with a low tolerance for emotional difficulty, and we gaslight through defensiveness, blaming, and avoiding.
Three: Conscious and Calculated
The last is the most critical, and it is where the word really belongs when we use it at its most severe. It is a conscious, invented, premeditated, often calculated and continual method of disputing somebody’s reality, so that they can be controlled or oppressed, or so that the person doing it can avoid consequence, as in the affair.
As a therapist, I see this a lot. Somebody is anxious, or has a mom with a personality disorder or another condition like bipolar, and their partner uses the existence of mental health struggles, in the family or in the individual, as a continual mechanism for avoiding responsibility. Even with all the obvious signs that something is wrong:
It’s not that I’m doing anything wrong. It’s that you have an anxiety disorder.
And that’s calculated.
The Source: When We Can’t Tolerate Our Own Discomfort
What’s so hard is that it is often the second kind, the unconscious neurotic behavior, that does the most damage. And it is probably one of the most important aspects of gaslighting: other people’s inability to tolerate their own discomfort. That intolerance leads to automatic neurotic behavior, the blaming, the defensiveness, the minimizing, and that becomes the source of the gaslighting.
An inability to tolerate our own discomfort becomes the source of the gaslighting.
Say we asked somebody whether they remembered to change the tires on our car. Then we had a really scary moment. The snow tires weren’t on, we skidded out, and we almost got into a horrible accident. And they say:
Oh, what are you making such a big deal out of this for? Clearly this was just because you started the turn late.
As opposed to: I forgot to change the tires.
There is blaming within that, and minimizing. The forgotten tires are too uncomfortable for them to look at, so the conversation moves to how we took the turn and how big a deal we are making of it. For the person on the receiving end, that is the source of the gaslighting.
The Parentified Child
Another huge example, and a very common one, is the parentified child who believes there is something fundamentally wrong with them. They’re controlling. They’re anxious. That is the belief. Underneath it, their parents never took responsibility for their own behavior.
Three Kinds of Emotionally Immature Parent
These parents generally fall within three main categories, and oftentimes it’s all three.
The first is a kind of Peter Pan syndrome, a failure to launch. They didn’t develop through the stages necessary to become a responsible parent, an adult, somebody who can provide the structure and safety needed for the proper development of their kid.
The second is substance abuse, like alcohol.
The third is an otherwise chaotic lack of responsibility.
All of these essentially fall within a category of severe emotional immaturity. And to put it very directly:
Kids need to depend on a structured, predictable adult in order to grow into independence.
What often happens instead is that the child becomes the one watching for the dangers the adult misses.
What the Child Asks
The kid in the back of the truck is kind of worried about whether we filled up with gas. They’re only eight years old, and they’ve already been broken down on the side of the road more times than most people will experience in a lifetime. I’ve never had it happen to me, incidentally. I know somebody who has had it happen more times than they can count.
Hey, did we fill up with gas?
Dad, did you remember to tie down the thing in the back? I wouldn’t want it to fly out.
Let’s make sure we have a plan, so it fits our schedule and we all arrive on time.
Will you make sure it’s cooked this way? Because of my food allergy.
Can we leave now, so I get to my friend’s birthday party on time?
These are all perfectly reasonable.
What the Child Is Told
In all of these, the adult responds:
Stop being so controlling.
God, why are you so difficult and anal?
They are dismissed. They are name-called. The problem is located in them, as opposed to in the parent.
If somebody is suggesting that we all take a ride in a car with a leaky gas tank, noticing the leak is what gets called controlling. The child has to take responsibility for the parent’s inability to look at the fundamentals of creating a structured and safe environment. All of these just add up.
What the Child Concludes
Through life, that child internalizes this: my anxiety is the result of my own controllingness, or of my own malfunctioning physiology.
The more scientifically correct hypothesis is different. If we are constantly broken down on the side of the road, nobody respects our boundaries, we don’t know whether the food being served to us is going to make us sick, and all of it is dismissed and blamed on us, of course we are going to be anxious.
What the Parent Can’t Face
The reality is that there is a catalog in the parent. I drink too much, and I dropped the ball. I fed my kid something, and they got sick. We’re in another dangerous situation because I didn’t adequately prepare.
They either need to have the tolerance to face their guilt and their shame about this reality, or they become infinitely more neurotic. Meaning, they blame it on the kid.
Perhaps the Most Violent Form of Gaslighting
This is incredibly damaging when it happens to an adult. But a child’s self-concept is largely formed by the shared perception of the parent. We learn who we are, in large part, by how the people raising us see us. So this is perhaps the most violent form of gaslighting.
What’s hard in these instances, almost harder than what we would all view as the worst case, the premeditated and calculated kind, is that when the child attunes, the dissonance is not nearly as apparent. When the person gaslighting us seems to believe their own story, it is very hard for a child not to internalize it into their own self-concept and their own identity.
So they feel that they are the problem. They feel that they’re controlling, as opposed to the reality that their parents were highly emotionally immature, chaotic, or both.
Taking the Narrative Back
Recovery requires the child to re-narrate, to take power back over a narrative that was stolen from them during the most crucial developmental stage of forming a self-concept.
That can become a trauma of its own, one that needs its own recovery.
