It’s 8:30 in the evening, you’re at a friend’s house and she’s trying to convince you that you’d rather have pizza than Chinese food. “Stop gaslighting me!” you yell and everyone in the room laughs. Anyone who has ever tried to be funny on the internet knows this joke. The exaggeration of the term gaslighting – a term in psychology defined by therapist Laurie Singer as the behavior by which one person tries to make another person doubt their perception of reality – has become a joke.
The jokes about this serious topic came about after many people misused the term online and mememed this type of behavior which is usually intentional and part of a cycle of abuse. Several medical terms have been misused online over time (for example, influencers have been too easily called narcissists), and this creates a lot of confusion.
So I wanted to shed some light on the subject, find out what gaslighting is and isn’t, and understand how best to react when it happens to us.
Ce e gaslighting-ul?
The term originates from a play called Gas Light , which premiered in 1938 and was screened twice. The most famous adaptation is the 1944 remake of Gaslight , starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. In each of the versions, the husband convinces his wife that she has gone mad. How does it do that? He tells her that he is imagining things, especially about the lights in the house.
As Singer said, gaslighting is a form of manipulation that tries to influence how another person sees the world. It is done through verbal communication – the gaslighter makes the victim doubt themselves and their memory.
Psychologist and relationship expert John Kenny explained to me over email that gaslighting is about gaining control. “Gaslighting is a form of emotional or mental abuse and occurs when someone tries to make you doubt your thoughts, actions, and emotions in order to gain control over you and the relationship . He wants you to doubt yourself and believe that the person is always right, so he can act however he wants around you,” he said.
Singer gave an example of gaslighting on a smaller scale: A parent thinks his child eats too much and wants to make him eat less. When the child says he is hungry, the parent replies, “You can’t be hungry, you just ate,” even though he ate three hours ago.
Maybe the parent does this unconsciously, but it’s still gaslighting. In this situation, it not only controls the food the child eats, but also the way he perceives hunger, thus influencing the child’s relationship with food.
What is not gaslighting
Although gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse, not all emotional abuse is gaslighting. Because gaslighting is a specific behavior used by one person against another, it is a bit simplistic to call any form of control gaslighting. And when we make jokes about it, we don’t help the victims of abuse at all, … more