Gaslighting
When Your Reality is Manipulated
Dear Kathy,
When I try to tell my parents that they are gaslighting me, they say, “No, we aren’t.” Then they try to tell me what really happened. My dad, in particular, will deny doing something he just did, not only in front of me but in front of other people, too. He gets mad, defensive, and tries to turn my reality around.
Please explain what gaslighting is, and why other people try to do it to you? And why it hurts so much?
Angry, confused and hurt
Dear Angry, Confused and Hurt,
It’s deeply upsetting to have someone deny your reality, especially when you confront them and they do it again. Your experience of being told “No, we aren’t” while it’s actively happening is the gaslighting dynamic in a painful nutshell. Understanding why people do this is complicated, but clarifying their behavior helps you regain control.
Gaslighting is a term often raised as a component of family estrangement. An adult child feels a parent is trying to force them to believe in a reality that they know to be untrue. This forcing feels hurtful and crazy-making as the adult child feels they are told not to trust their own experience.
Defining Gaslighting: A Tactic for Control
“Gaslighting” is a term taken from the 1944 psychological thriller, Gaslight.
The film centers on a young wife who is systematically subjected to psychological manipulation by her husband. He hides objects, accusing her of having misplaced them, and secretly searches for jewels in the attic, causing the gas-fueled lights to dim slightly. When his wife notices the dimming, he vehemently denies the change, leading her to believe she is going insane so he can steal her jewels.
While the original term described a sinister, systematic campaign intended to drive someone mad, today, gaslighting is widely used to describe a powerful tactic of manipulation—the intentional denial or twisting of facts to avoid accountability and exert control over another person’s reality.
Gaslighting Dismantles Self-Trust
Gaslighting hurts so much because it doesn’t just challenge your opinion; it launches an attack on your sense of self-trust—the fundamental tool you use to navigate the world. The pain is deeply emotional.
When gaslighting begins in early childhood, where your ability to trust your caregivers is paramount, the consequences are severe and often lifelong. If you grow up hearing: “You don’t think that.” “You don’t feel that,” you will doubt your reality and your right to your own feelings.
Psychological Consequences
Erosion of Self-Trust: The individual develops a pervasive habit of second-guessing their own memory, perception, and judgment, leading to chronic anxiety and difficulty making even minor decisions.
Internalized Shame: The victim internalizes the abuse, feeling intense shame and guilt for their perceived inadequacy or “craziness,” which can manifest as anxiety, depression, or C-PTSD.
Relational Dependency: They struggle to set healthy boundaries and may develop a lifelong dependency on external validation, seeking proof from others that their own feelings and reality are real.
As experts note, gaslighting is a campaign, not a simple lie. Dr. Robin Stern calls it an insidious form of emotional abuse, reminding us: “Gaslighting is a slow dismantling of your self-trust.”
As celebrities who have experienced this confusion note, the emotional cost is immense. Lady Gaga speaks of the self-doubt: “It’s that feeling of, ‘Am I the one who is actually losing it?’” Jada Pinkett Smith observed the relational damage: “The hardest part of a manipulative relationship is that you start to feel like you’re the problem.”
Why Families Gaslight: The Generational Wound
Your pain is compounded because the behavior is often generational. Your desire to stop the behavior is you saying, “I claim my truth, my reality.”
The Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma (TTT)
Gaslighting in families can be a painful symptom of the Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma (TTT). This dynamic begins when the parent suffered their own reality being denied in childhood, instilling a profound fear of shame and a need to control the narrative.
The parent then unconsciously repeats this pattern—not out of malice, but as an unconscious survival mechanism to avoid their own deep-seated pain. This makes the cycle difficult to break. They resist your challenge because it doesn’t feel safe to tell the truth.
Taking Charge: Strategies to Break the Cycle
It can feel impossible to take charge when your system of relating is based on accepting being gaslit. Your recovery involves shifting your focus away from convincing the gaslighter and toward protecting your own thoughts, perceptions, and feelings.
These steps are meant to lay out small enough increments to be doable. If smaller increments would be more useful to you, please take those!
Your Nine-Step Process to Reclaim Reality
Trust your perception.
Observe the manipulation. Identify the attempted denial or twisting of facts.
Take a step back to validate your own experience.
Note the confusion and hurt you may feel.
Tell yourself you do not need to accept the other person’s invalidation.
If you are comfortable and ready, tell your gaslighter that you perceive things differently, and you don’t want to be told how to perceive.
Your gaslighter may double down on their manipulation. Repeat steps 1-6 if you feel it would help you gain more clarity.
Leave the conversation if you are not being listened to respectfully.
If you have the bandwidth, remember your gaslighter has likely been gaslit themselves, and for now, isn’t able to do better. Eventually, you may be able to have compassion while still refusing to engage.
Understand that you are bravely trying to break a cycle that did not start with you and this one individual, but likely has repeated for generations.
Healing and Reclaiming Your Reality
Recovery requires dismantling the false narrative created through the gaslighting and rebuilding your self-trust:
Document and Distance: If it helps you to write, keep a log of incidents. You can do this through journaling, leaving yourself voice memos, or keeping a list in your phone. This external record is your powerful counterweight to your gaslighter. Make guidelines for your tolerance and responses to being gaslit. Be kind to yourself as you step into this new territory.
Practice Self-Validation: Actively affirm your own thoughts and feelings. Use journaling and talk with friends to reconnect with your intuition, paying attention to the thoughts and feelings the gaslighter pressured you to ignore.
Seek Support: Join a support group such as a co-dependency group, educate yourself about the phenomenon of Gaslighting. Engage in therapy for recovery of the parts of yourself you have lost through being asked to ignore or even invalidate them, especially your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions.
For the Accused: What if you are the one being told you are Gaslighting?
Typically, it is the parent who is told they are gaslighting their adult child. If possible, start by doing these two things:
Respond by being curious, saying you would like to understand more what your family member is trying to tell you.
Be curious, yourself, about your own history of being told things such as: “You don’t think that.” “You don’t feel that.” “That’s not what happened.”
If phrases like these ring a bell from your own childhood, or even in present-day relationships, it would be a good idea to begin to track your own responses to being challenged, or wanting to be challenging of others’ experience.
I am planning to write a future column for the Gaslighter, to unpack where these dynamics took root in their own communication and perception of their experience.
So, Dear Angry, Confused and Hurt:
Thank you for your brave letter asking for help untangling the pernicious knot of Gaslighting. This form of manipulation ravages self-perception, self-esteem, and self-confidence. Best wishes for your path toward clarity, reclaiming your truths and the powerful experience of contact with yourself that those truths contain.
Kathy
Please write to me with your questions: ksinsheimermft@gmail.com
This is column # 11
Please address the other way around. My parental experience has been gaslit by my adult child. Thank you.
This sounds like a good idea for an additional column about gaslighting! If you are comfortable, would you tell me more about your experience? You could email me @ ksinsheimermft@gmail.com