Perhaps no other form of psychological agony is better known or mentioned in the popular media today than gaslighting. To experience it, your sense of reality is denied, but it is important to understand whether the other person is actually using the manipulative tool on purpose or whether they simply disagree. Before making the accusation, it’s important to understand what really qualifies as gaslighting – and what, in the heat of the moment, feels like gaslighting but isn’t.
What is gas lighting?
Gaslighting is emotional abuse that denies a sense of reality, especially when a person is acting on purpose. There are several ways this behavior can manifest itself, but the ultimate goal is to obscure reality. As the psychologist Ahona Guha wrote for Psychology today in 2018, it is generally “a pattern of behavior that is usually intentional to get someone to question their own reality, memories, or experience”.
The term owes its origins to the 1944 film Gaslight, which recorded the relationship of a man and his wife that he was slowly becoming convinced was going out of her mind, and summed up gaslighting in its purest form. It is a particularly manipulative form of communication in which one person is constantly trying to convince the other party that their interpretation of reality is wrong.
What expressions indicate gas lighting?
Anything that tends to undermine without looking for a deeper understanding can fall into the insidious camp. The gas lighter has a litany of rhetorical weapons, not limited to:
- “You are too sensitive.”
- “I have never said that.”
- “Your memory is so bad.”
- “You are crazy.”
- “You take things too personally.”
- “Calm down.”
- “I’m sorry that you feel like I hurt you.”
Of course, this is just a taste of what someone exposed to gaslighting could endure. There are other behaviors that a gaslighter might employ, as explained by the psychologist Stephanie A. Sarkis in a 2017 Psychology Today article. For one, people susceptible to this type of abuse can deny their own actions even when proven otherwise. Or they project some of their own negative behaviors onto you. The list is long And not everyone who experiences a gaslighting partner will be privy to all of the same tactics.
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This is how you can tell whether it is not gas lighting
You need some intention, or at least a persistent reluctance, to hear the other side of the conversation in order to meet gaslighting standards. As Guha wrote, in the definitive example of gaslighting there is a necessary level of malice combined with intent, though often it is carried out unknowingly. She wrote, “These motives are not necessarily understood or noticed by the gaslighter, and sometimes they really believe what they are saying.”
However, it is easy to cross the line between gaslighting and mere disagreement. If the wording of certain statements is subtly changed, this no longer corresponds to the standard of gaslighting. Guhu listed sentences that are assertive and contradicting, but not necessarily gaslighting.
- “You misunderstood me; I didn’t mean it that way.”
- “I don’t remember that.”
- “I did not want to.”
- “What I said wasn’t that bad.”
If an argument is just a temporary dead end – and every couple struggles – and not a constant level of manipulation or emotional incitement, then it’s probably best not to level the gas lighting charge. If it is clear that your partner is at least willing to hear your side of things – they may disagree, but they should still try to understand your side – then they are probably not pressuring you, and you can Conversation likely to continue looking for common ground.
