“It’s a really discombobulating thing to think, ‘I know you’re wrong, but you are now more confident in your lie than I am in the truth,'” comedian John Oliver told The Hollywood Reporter last year.
He was talking about a high-profile Twitter spat with Donald Trump, which began when Trump claimed that he had refused to appear on Oliver’s “very boring and low-rated show”. Oliver denied inviting Trump, who then upped the ante, claiming he had been asked several times and had repeatedly turned the show down. Trump was so adamant that Oliver wondered if he had forgotten something.
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The argument has all the hallmarks of gaslighting, a form of psychological manipulation in which one person undermines another person’s reality. When carried out over a long period of time, the target can begin to doubt their own thoughts and memories.
We might like to think that this couldn’t happen to us, but the bad news is that it definitely could. This is because of a handful of psychological quirks that come as part of the package of the human mind. Although usually beneficial, these aspects of the way we perceive the world can be exploited by a gaslighter to control our reality. The good news is that by understanding them, it is possible to resist attacks and restore your faith in your own thinking – and reality.
“It could happen to any of us. Aspects of the way we perceive the world can be exploited to control our reality”
Gaslighting became headline news in the UK in 2016 when a prominent storyline in BBC radio drama The Archers involved a character called Helen Archer being subjected to psychological abuse, including gaslighting, by her husband. A year earlier, England and Wales became the first places to introduce . “Gaslighting could be considered a form of coercive control,” says Evan Stark, professor emeritus at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who helped shape the new laws.
The term has become so common in recent years that it is now bandied about in political discourse, as in the headline of a recent opinion piece in the Boston Herald newspaper, which asked: “ this one? ” there has also been a growing awareness of the serious psychological toll of living with someone who carries out this manipulative and undermining behaviour.
Your own world
One problem with any bid to hold on to your own reality in the face of a gaslighter is that, whether we like it or not, none of us sees the world as it is. Our brains only process a fraction of the incoming sensory information we detect. The gaps are filled in by the brain, which constantly makes predictions based on previous experience and then updates them in light of new information. “The perceptual world is a dialogue between what we’re receiving from our senses combined with our experiences of weaving together a narrative reality that makes sense to us,” says Mazviita Chirimuuta, a philosopher of neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.
Given that our experiences and memories are unique, that adds up to a bespoke personal reality that differs from everyone else’s. It is no wonder that we sometimes disagree on how to interpret events. On top of this, memory can be notoriously unreliable. For example, studies of eyewitness testimony have shown that two people can form different memories of the same incident, including what was said and who did what. Our memories are far from a faithful recording of events.
So disagreeing with someone else’s view of reality doesn’t necessarily equal gaslighting. What distinguishes it is when coercion is used to make another person doubt the reality of their own experiences. In some instances, this is deliberate – driven by a desire to dominate or be in control. But it can also be the result of learned behaviour from someone’s upbringing, or a reflection of certain underlying mental health conditions; they may not be aware of what they are doing.
Gaslighting can be subtle and insidious. Robin Stern, co-founder of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale University and author of The Gaslight Effect, gives an example from a previous relationship. Stern’s ex would often arrive up to an hour late to dinner, which she found disrespectful. Yet when she confronted him, he insisted that it was her problem – that she was weirdly uptight about time. This, she says, turned a disagreement into gaslighting.
“It’s a difference of opinion if I say, ‘It’s really important to me that you’re on time’, and you say, ‘I can’t understand why that’s so important to you, but we don’t have to agree on everything’. It becomes gaslighting if it’s: ‘There’s something wrong with you for thinking the way you think.’ In this case, you are questioning my take on reality,” she says. “As a result, I question myself, asking: ‘Is there something wrong with me?’ ”
Part of the problem is that this is a question we can’t answer alone. “It’s really hard to verify the reliability of yourself from the inside,” says Andrew Spear, a philosopher at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. “You can’t check whether you saw correctly by using your vision. You can’t check whether your own memory is accurate. So, if I say, ‘Are you sure you’re not crazy? Prove to me that you’re not crazy’, it becomes circular quite quickly. There is this real fragility, right at the heart of ourselves.”
Sticking to it
This fragility enables the manipulation. It allows a gaslighter to play on the fact that, in some situations, we should definitely trust a loved one who is telling us that we are forgetting things or acting strangely. If you are the one being gaslighted, it is almost impossible to tell the difference between manipulation and genuine concern, says Spear (see “How to spot a gaslighter“).
On top of that, as a social species, we use our shared culture and language to compare our version of events to others and adjust our behaviour as necessary. “One reason why gaslighting is possible is because our sense of reality is already influenced by people even when it’s working fine and no one is trying to manipulate us,” says Chirimuuta. We are constantly keeping an eye on whether other people are on the same page as us.
Gaslighters, however, don’t take the view of the person they are manipulating into account, says Stern. They tend to be certain that they know what is right and wrong, and make a point of sticking to their guns.
For the rest of us, though, even the most entrenched views can change when group norms shift. The Black Lives Matter movement is a good example. Groups that say they experience racial discrimination commonly have that reality denied by those who are inflicting the abuse, says Chirimuuta. The May 2020 killing of George Floyd when a Minnesota police officer knelt on his neck was a catalyst for society as a whole to re-examine the reality of what black people continue to experience.
The influence of groups can easily be turned against us, however, particularly when we don’t have all the facts to hand. And the more credibility we give to outside sources, whether they are individuals, news sources or social groups, the easier it is to believe that they know best and the more vulnerable we are to being controlled. And when groups wildly disagree on an interpretation of events, each side can accuse the other of gaslighting. After the recent US election, both sides accused the other of lying to citizens for political gain. In situations like these, it can be difficult to know who to believe.
That is the challenge, says Spear. “Who should you assign credibility to?” This dilemma is behind arguments over fake news, the loss of trust in journalism and situations in which “alternative facts” start to take hold, such as the current misinformation around climate change or the outcome of the US presidential election. It also explains how people can have their entire world view reshaped by religious cults, which convince members that everything they think they know is a lie. There may be other incentives for believing other people’s perceptions over your own: when someone is torn between their own reality and that of a person they rely on to help pay the bills, for instance, it makes it more likely that they will opt for financial security over an inconvenient truth.
With so many loopholes in our psychology, how can we avoid the gaslighter’s traps? The most important thing is to trust your feelings, says Stern. “When you feel like there’s something wrong in the conversation, it’s usually because there is.”
A surprisingly powerful way to tune into our emotions is to pay attention to what is happening from the neck down. We have known since Charles Darwin noted it back in 1872 that physiological changes are an integral part of what it means to have emotion, but recent research has shown that having a better sense of interoception – the awareness of internal bodily signals such as heart rate – may help people to better recognise and manage their emotions.
Nick Medford, a neuropsychiatrist at South London and Maudsley National 91ɫƬ Service Foundation Trust, says that in his work with cult survivors, this bodily awareness is a key part of recovery. “When people describe a process of realising that a toxic or abusive relationship isn’t right, they talk about it in very physical terms,” he says. “[They say:] ‘I just started to feel that something wasn’t quite right.’ There is some kind of physical message coming through which is very primal, and it’s often very, very hard to put into words.”
Malicious intent
Once you identify that something is wrong and begin to trust that feeling, it is time to take away the gaslighter’s monopoly on being right. “The only way to get yourself out of the trap of gaslighting is to stop worrying about which one of you is right,” says Stern. It might be tempting to try to prove the gaslighter wrong, but changing their opinion doesn’t actually matter, says Stern. “What matters is that you feel uncomfortable and manipulated, and that is not OK.”
All of this is further complicated by just how difficult it can be to identify gaslighting to begin with. Sometimes, what looks like manipulation may simply be someone revealing an uncomfortable truth about another person’s behaviour or challenging their point of view or memory of events.
“My view isn’t that you should always be stubborn. It’s not just dig in no matter what, because that in itself would be irrational,” says Spear. There are plenty of circumstances where we should listen to another person’s perspective, but it becomes manipulation when there is an intention – often malicious – to mislead. Spear says that when someone is so unwilling to consider your point of view that they double down harder when challenged, that is a red flag.
Gaslighting is often a slow and stealthy process. Shining a light on it is a major step towards reclaiming reality.
Affected by domestic violence? UK ; US National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233; in Australia,
How to spot a gaslighter
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The term gaslighting comes from the 1938 play Gas Light by Patrick Hamilton. In it, a man convinces his wife that she is losing her sanity by dimming the lights in their home and telling her she is imagining it, as well as moving things around and then persuading her that she did it but forgot. It can be hard to spot this kind of manipulation, but here are some clues from psychologist Robin Stern at Yale University.
• Gaslighters seldom admit they are wrong. They are more likely to tell you that you are “deranged” than change their mind.
• They often tell you that they don’t like your friends and family, and find reasons to run them down and keep you away from them.
• A gaslighter may often question your mental well-being and your view of a situation, plus criticise your character.
Fighting back
Here are some tips for countering gaslighters:
• Guard your self-trust. Don’t give up your faith in your perceptions without strong evidence to the contrary, says Andrew Spear at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.
• If in doubt, check things with more than one other trusted person. “The strategy of the gaslighter is to discredit those other people,” says Spear. “But if you can get external, independent validation, you’re in a better place.”
• Check for power imbalance. Do you believe someone rather than yourself because you rely on them for emotional or practical support, says Spear.
