Gaslighting is a Social Disease

Why that matters and what we can do

I think I was in Grade 2 when I trudged home from the park, bawling my eyes out. It was a balmy May long evening, only a few short weeks before the solstice, so dusk lingered on the prairies. My parents were hosting an aunt and uncle over for pie and coffee.

“My arm is broken,” I sobbed, cradling it to my chest.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” an authoritative voice replied, firmly but not unkindly.

“Why don’t we take a look?” my uncle suggested as my crying went on and on.

They finally pulled back the arm of my sweater; I still remember the sight of both bones of my forearm heaving up from their normally straight line to form two rounded bumps just beneath my skin.

Gaslighting is a Spectrum

You might assume from this brief exchange that my parents were bad people. Negligent. Indifferent. To the contrary, they are caring, often selfless, rock-solid stable, and loving. Much of my childhood could easily blend into a Norman Rockwell montage.

Gaslighting — which is what happened in the above exchange — is a social problem. It’s hard to see this, because it’s most often individuals who gaslight us specifically.

It’s valuable to know the signs of a classic gaslighter. But. As long as we continue to focus exclusively on the ways gaslighting is most intense, deliberate, and abusive, we are stuck seeing all gaslighters as easy-to-spot Bond villains. This ultimately makes it far harder to:

• see and admit how people we love gaslight us
• recognize the ways we internalize gaslighting (I’m not that sick, I’m just being a whiner)
• call out its widespread use on social media and in politics
• own up to the casual and accidental ways we ourselves gaslight others

Gaslighting As Abuse

There are, of course, some individuals who do it deliberately, knowingly, manipulatively. See Jessica Wildfire’s “How to Scortch a Gaslighter” if you want to see how it plays out on that level. She starts by recommending we learn to spot a gasligher. They —

Hide an evil intention behind a friendly gesture

Subtly undermine your confidence and self-esteem

Make you second-guess yourself

Devalue you as an individual

Trivialize your opinions and ideas (and experiences)

Force you to justify yourself to everyone else

Infest you with guilt for no good reason

Here’s a simple but classic example of guilt-tripping from my emotionally abusive ex-husband’s playbook:

Day 1: “Why don’t you take out the dog before I get home from work? You know that I’m tired!”

Day 2: “Why did you take the dog out? You know how taking her for a walk helps me unwind!”

Off-balance, uncertain, confused, I never knew what the rules would be from day-to-day. I second- and third- and fourth-guessed everything I did for fear of reprisal.

There is no way to win the gaslighting game with an abuser. If you respond with, “But yesterday . . .” They can come back with 100 different ways that you should know better. That you misheard them. And don’t you know they have a headache?

Why are you arguing? Why are you being so sensitive? No matter what, it is somehow your fault. Your experience of reality is so damn inconvenient.

The reason gaslighting is so effective at disabling us, though, is that most of us are already primed to second-guess ourselves. We learned as children that our parents knew better. That we should listen to “authorities” regardless of their real qualifications or their intentions.

Gaslighting Reinforces Inequality

So if we pull back the camera for a minute, it’s clear that this toxic strategy is a socially normalized, if-not-down-right-endorsed behaviour. Stamped for approval by the people we are supposed to be able to trust: from parents to teachers to judges. It’s a short-cut for silencing things they don’t want to be true.

Inconvenient things, like a kid breaking her arm on the Sunday night of a long weekend. Annoying things, like someone’s sickness or sadness or grief when business needs to carry on as usual. Uncomfortable things, like the racist or sexist joke unthinkingly made.

From the birds-eye view, it becomes clear that gaslighting is a tool to fortify the existing and unequal power dynamics:

• Parents are right, children are wrong
• Men’s feelings are valid, women are hysterical or sensitive
• Bosses have the final say, employees need to comply
• White people are fragile so Black people shouldn’t speak up for themselves
• Healthy people spew positivisms to “help” those suffering from mental or chronic illness
• The rich earned their money and poor people are lazy

Ever the gaslight guru, Jessica Wildfire gestures towards this in her newest piece on how the rich are gaslighting the rest of us.

Instead of simply responding with openness, curiosity, or *gasp* acceptance, gaslighting is a rearguard action of avoidance. I don’t want to look at that. If I don’t look, if I don’t see, if I don’t acknowledge then it doesn’t exist, right?

In fact, gaslighters often do not see their victims: when they look they see their own failures, their own disappointments, their own insecurities. They see their own fear of losing control.

They don’t have to accept an alternative version of reality they don’t like because they’re almost always the ones with power.

Good People Gaslight Too

But — most of us also appear somewhere on the left side of that power spectrum. We are the adults. We might be the bosses. I’m white and healthy, and so I might have (almost certainly) played that out to my advantage, intentionally or not.

Once we acknowledge just how pervasive and ingrained gaslighting actually is, we can work to break the cycle.

I can choose, as a parent, to stop inadvertently gaslighting my toddler by not being dismissive when she is upset that I turned on the house lights in the wrong order.

I, as a white person, can listen to what black people have to say about the injustices I perpetuate against them, instead of reacting with disbelief, shock, or exceptionalism.

The first example seems trivial while the second is inarguably vital if we are ever going to break out of the vicious cycle of racism — and yet they are both examples of habitual ways of thinking and living and controlling others for our own benefit.

If I have a bad habit of casually gaslighting my daughter, what will stop me from wielding the torch in more complicated and emotional situations? We need to break the cycle where we are. Opportunities are everywhere.

Some places to start from the inside:

• Notice when you’ve internalized gaslighting and are doing it to yourself. You do actually have a right to feel sad, sick, offended, etc.
• Pay attention to what your inner gaslighter says and the language they use: there’s a fair chance you’re regurgitating that from someone, and there’s also a fair chance you’ll unconsciously repeat it to someone else.
• Recognize that what feels absolutely true is often a subjective perspective. I feel absolutely justified in telling my daughter it’s ridiculous to want to turn the lights on in the right order, and yet I have my equally arbitrary but intense feelings about how other “unimportant” things should be done, such as how butter ought to be spread to the outer edges of toast. Her feelings are important, even if I don’t understand her reasons.
• Realize you can acknowledge someone else’s perspective and experience without having to hand over the rights to the Absolute Truth.
• Notice when you’re not listening. A lot of unintentional gaslighting comes from simply not being present with what someone else is telling us.

Some places to start on the outside:

• Once you recognize the signs of gaslighting, it becomes easier to spot in the interaction around us. If you see it happening, particularly in one of the unequal power dynamics I mentioned above, step forward. It doesn’t cost a lot to say: “I think she has a point. Maybe we should hear her out?”
• If you’re not comfortable outing the gaslighter in public, it might still mean the world to the victim if you say to them in private: “I don’t think it was appropriate for them to cut you off / shut you down like that. Your feelings and thoughts are valid. I’m here to listen if you want to talk.”
• If it’s an ongoing problem you seen in an intimate relationship, it might be tricky. There are lots of reasons people can’t just leave, and sometimes can’t even see they are being abused. But you might open up the conversation with something like, “When your partner said that, it didn’t seem very respectful / considerate to me. Are you ok?” They may not be ready to talk, but it may help them to know it’s not all in their head.
• Raise awareness about power dynamics — those listed above and others I missed. The more we acknowledge these imbalances, the less potent they become.

There is much bigger work to be done, but we can only start where we are, by pulling up the weeds in our own gardens.

I was abused for years by a partner so skilled at gaslighting he practically owned his own electric company. I was so tangled up, for a long time I didn’t even know I was being abused, which you can read about here. So I do get how hard it could be, reflecting on these painful experiences, to acknowledge that we all play a part in the big-picture problem.

But if you survived, if you escaped, no one will be better than you at seeing the signs of infection. No one will be better at cutting the heart out of this terrible social disease.

Thank you to the invaluable work done by race scholars such as Mikki Kendall, Robin Diangelo, and Ibram X. Kendi, and to those who made their work possible in turn. Without generously sharing your knowledge and insight, my own awareness around these topics would not be possible.