What Is Gaslighting?
Gaslighting is a type of psychological abuse where one person or group manipulates another, making them question or doubt their own mental health. When you are being Gaslit, you start doubting your memory, perception, and judgment. Every time you try to advocate for yourself, the Gaslighter will turn the situation around and have you start questioning yourself. Over time, you start to believe that your own memories and thoughts are unreliable.
Common Gaslighting Tactics
Withholding occurs when your partner or a group of people pretend not to understand or listen to you. They might say something like “You’re confusing me with this…Don’t talk to me about this again.”
Countering happens when your partner or a group of people continuously question the person’s memory of events despite evidence. An example of this might be, “you’re remembering things wrong again.”
Blocking or Diverting occurs when someone deliberately changes the subject and or shuts down their partner completely by redirecting the topic to something they are interested in. “You’ve been watching too much reality TV.”
Trivializing is the tactic used to make someone feel like their feelings are unimportant. Examples of this include “When did you get so sensitive?” or “Why do you always have to make a big deal out of nothing and ruin my fun.”
Forgetting or Denying is used as a way to pretend to have forgotten what has actually happened. “What are you talking about…that didn’t happen?”
The Subtle Ways It Surfaces
It usually starts very subtly with a partner or group undermining someone’s judgment by accusing them of being “oversensitive” or “overreacting to issues.” Usually the gaslighting appears as a joke or genuine concern for someone’s wellbeing. As the situation progresses, the gaslighter gains more control, and the victim feels more out of control and powerless.
Gaslighting in Addiction
Often in a relationship with an alcoholic or other addiction, the addict becomes very good at these gaslighting techniques, and the victim over time starts to question their own sense of self. The longer the dance of addiction takes place, the more powerless the victim feels, and the more they start to question their own “craziness.”
As an adult child of an alcoholic and previous wife of an alcoholic I found myself within this dance often. There were days when I questioned my own reality and my perception of “how bad things really were.” The more someone told me “it was my problem and all in my head” or denied the behaviors and events that I know I witnessed, the more I questioned my intuition and my perception.
The Only Way Out
In order to start to trust yourself again, you need to be willing to bring the shame into the light and share your experience with someone you trust. When we are too close to the situation, our ability to see what others see is muffled. Shame keeps us isolated, and therefore we only have our own perception and the perception of the gaslighter to go off of.
In order to break free, one needs to keep a record of events so that they can start to recognize that they didn’t remember wrong! Once an individual can start to hold their reality as truth and set boundaries with a gaslighter, they will begin to heal and regain their sense of self. This often requires help from a therapist and other safe people to help someone break free.
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