What is Gaslighting? Signs, Examples & How to Respond to Being Gaslit

What is gaslighting? A definition & origin story

Gaslighting, otherwise known as being gaslit/gaslighted, is a specific technique that refers to the intentional psychological manipulation of someone in order to make them doubt their own reality.

The intended outcome is that the subject of gaslighting begins to find their sense data and interpretations of the world to be unreliable and thus turns to the manipulator, creating a sense of dependence and establishing them as the victim’s primary source for what is ‘real’.

The term is actually rather narrow in scope, and takes its name from the 1938 British play ‘Gas Light’ (later made into the 1944 movie that combined the two words; ‘Gaslight’). Within the context of the play/film, a husband tricks his wife via lies, elaborate manipulation and isolation to convince her that she is mentally ill, with the goal of eventually ripping her off. Because this extreme and dramatic behaviour happens so rarely in practice, the term basically saw no usage until the mid 2010’s, when it became popular as a stand-in term for much broader types of psychological manipulation.

Within this article, we’re going to break down what is and what isn’t considered gaslighting, the common perceptions and broader uses, and give some examples of signs, symptoms and types of manipulation that might fall under the term ‘gaslighting’. We’ll also look at some strategies for dealing with this technique as well as other abusive circumstances in your relationships.

What are the signs and tactics used by gaslighters? How is it different to regular manipulation?

It’s important to note that gaslighting is not a particularly official term—the usage of it really only exists in pop culture and psychology. There aren’t many real clinical examples (the word exists in clinical literature but mostly as a colloquialism) or data points to draw from, because as mentioned above, trying to convince someone that they’re fundamentally insane is a very elaborate and unrealistic task to embark on, and most instances we consider to be ‘gaslighting’ are actually just forms of manipulation or abuse that have been given extra severity with this new label.

Where it gets murky are in the descriptions of what might be considered genuine gaslighting—many of these are also common in abusive relationships and likely to be exhibited by manipulators, even if their ultimate goal isn’t to make you doubt your own reality.

Signs include:

• An imbalanced power dynamic, including co-dependence, reliance or isolation of the victim
• Aggressively diminishing the agency or the reliability of the victim through language or actions (‘You’re overreacting’, ‘You’re insane’, ‘You’re wrong’, or the inverse framing; ‘You don’t understand’, ‘I’m the only one that gets this’, ‘Everyone else would think you’re crazy/stupid/evil’)
• Seemingly contradictory events (dimming the titular gas lights from the movies, for example) where the ‘reality’ of a person is unstable or happens in ways that are later challenged
• The manipulator denying or retelling events differently than the victim’s memory, either explicitly or through subtle manipulations
• Re-assigning of motivations or the insistence that the victim did X for Y reason, even though that was not the case (especially if Y is supposedly subconscious in nature, like an unconscious drive to allegedly tear down the manipulator)

As you can see from the above, a lot of these are not limited to gaslighting itself, and may be things you yourself have experienced. It only becomes ‘gaslighting’ in the very explicit sense when patterns of these signs emerge across time in a dynamic which causes you to fall doubtful of things you have experienced, like events that you recall differently than you’re being told or motivations you didn’t think you had until you spoke to the manipulator.

Is gaslighting bad? Do gaslighters do it on purpose?

Because of how specific it is, many commonly considered examples of gaslighting are actually just simple types of manipulation, especially when the manipulator did not sit around plotting and scheming. A massive misconception is the assigning of malice to many of these types of coercion, when a lot of malicious behaviour can actually be explained as learned behaviours that unconsciously come out in the manipulator to try and control their circumstances or adjust a power dynamic. It is rare that someone fully considers how to manipulate the psychology of their victim—many abusers operate off their instinct alone.

Don’t mistake this for a diminishing of responsibility—we all have to take ownership of our choices and ensure we’re not manipulating others (obviously!), but with the advent of the term gaslighting came a wave of pop psychology in which the predominant narrative was one of intent—that everyday occurrences in relationships were being affected en masse by people intentionally trying to make their partners doubt their own reality and minds.

Whilst this does happen—and any gaslighting or manipulative circumstances are always cause for concern—we can’t stop behaviour that exists by impulse. A manipulative individual is not always doing it on purpose, or with intent of forethought, and so in their own mind is not actually doing anything wrong—this is the distinction between being manipulative, and simply exhibiting manipulative behaviour.

To change or escape unconscious manipulative behaviour requires education—‘when you did X, it made me feel Y, and that’s manipulative because of Z’.

Examples of gaslighting and manipulation

To show what I mean, we’ll use a few examples using the above formula from different contexts of gaslighting, as well as some that are on purpose versus impulsive behaviour.

Example One: intentional versus inadvertent gaslighting in relationships

Say a manipulator acts in a manner to make their victim feel uneasy or insecure. Regardless of whether they meant to or not, their statement might not change—in a relationship they might say something like:

“Do you feel like we’ve been drifting apart lately?”, or in a work context it might be:
“Do you feel as though you’ve been underperforming recently?”

These are subtle language patterns—they use presupposition and implication to suggest to the victim that something is wrong and put them at unease. If the person thought of this language in their head ahead of time in order to create this emotional outcome in their victim—that would be manipulation. If it happened through impulse or poor communication skills, it can still be manipulative behaviour, it just might not be manipulation. The distinction is important.

Following through with the romantic example above and applying it to our XYZ formula from earlier, we can express the whole emotional outcome as:

When you asked me if we’d been drifting apart, that put the idea of us losing touch into my head and made me feel anxious, and that was manipulative because I think you only asked me that question to make me uncomfortable.

See how we’re assigning the other person intention with this statement? When considering things like gaslighting, it’s common to jump straight to that conclusion—the other person meant to manipulate or mislead. The antidote to that is explicit declaration—I experienced this, it made me feel a certain way, and I am concerned that your intentions were poor or harmful. The response to such an assertion will tell you a lot about their intentions.

Example Two: brute-force ‘gaslighting’

Another example:

Say a couple comes back from a party, where the girlfriend witnesses her boyfriend put his arm around the waist of another girl. The boyfriend, when confronted, might say something like:

“You’re so jealous and paranoid. She grabbed my arm and put it around her—I pulled away after that.”

If the boyfriend is insistent enough and uses enough manipulation tactics (blaming the victim, guilt tripping, leveraging trust, exposing holes in her story and unreliable factors—’it was dark, you were drunk, etc’, lashing out in anger or other extreme performative emotion), the girlfriend might start to doubt what she saw in the way she saw it—who’s to say what actually happened if there’s no recording?

This would be a small example of what many would call gaslighting—a process of making someone question what they saw in reality. It would be somewhat accurate to describe this situation this way, but remember that our definition from earlier relied on a pattern over a long period of time in order to establish dependence and destabilise the victim. This example isn’t so much destabilising as it is damage control—the boyfriend just wants to get away with his actions rather than cause damage to his victim.

Example Three: genuine gaslighting to support an abusive relationship

An example that fits all of our above criteria: a relationship in which an abusive boyfriend intentionally segregates and misrepresents his girlfriend’s relationship with her family to create dependence on him.

We see that through repeated examples of the following phrases or scenarios:

“You always come back so sad from talking to them (about him). They’re making you sad. Stay here and be happy with me.”
“Toxic people are jealous of what you have. They see you happy in your relationship, and want to hold you back because they’re single and lonely and bitter.”
“If you leave the house to go out with your family tonight, we’re done. I don’t want to be with someone that would betray me like this—hanging out with people that hate me. It’s either me or them, and this isn’t an ultimatum, this is just me holding my boundaries.”
“They hate me because I’m taking you away from them. You just can’t see it because you’re too stupid/ignorant/naive”

Over time, this compounds, especially if the instances of this behaviour get more and more frequent and attached to other emotionally intense situations. The boyfriend knows that his girlfriend wants to trust him, and will eventually be worn down over time. If he continues to lay on this kind of manipulation and layer it with other tactics, it will cause his girlfriend to start doubting the positive impression of her family she once held and lose faith in her own judge of character. This is gaslighting.

How do I deal with gaslighting? How do you shut down a gaslighter?

Manipulative people that want to/have a habit of gaslighting others pick easy targets—those that are easily influenced, gullible, naive or lack a sense of strong self-identity. Broadly speaking, putting more faith in yourself and your ability to recognise when someone is saying or doing something that will emotionally impact you or your view of the world is how you shut down a gaslighter, or any other type of manipulation.

The key is in that small bit in the middle—learning when you’ve been affected by someone else’s behaviour and being able to efficiently work out why.

For example, a guilt trip (by your family, partner, coworkers) can be a small segment of someone trying to gaslight you by making you doubt your own intentions and feel responsibility for something you ought not to. They might say “I can’t believe you’d hurt your own mother like this”—implying you meant to or were okay with causing them harm. This promotes an emotional response, an instinct to comfort/reassure them or deny the statement with the truth, and usually also affection—which is often what the person wanted in the first place.

Rather than react in that way, you can understand that their words are designed to seek an emotional response, and separate that from your own reaction. A strong communicative response to the above would be:

“It was absolutely not my intention to hurt you—my behaviour came from a place of reason X. I’m so sorry that I’ve caused you harm. I think we absolutely can look for ways to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

This follows a formula for a strong apology—taking responsibility, acknowledging what happened and how they feel, and presenting a path forward to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The important part is that it’s not an emotive response, it’s a rational one born from taking responsibility (if you actually did something wrong). You don’t have to coddle the person or take on a massive emotional burden of making them feel better—healthy conflict resolution is about hitting the above three points and not taking on more responsibility than what you’re owed.

Now, if you didn’t do anything wrong and you feel you’re being gaslighted, you can instead do the following:

“I don’t feel that I’ve done anything intentionally or otherwise to cause you harm, and whatever happened, it certainly wasn’t my intention to do so. I’d like to make sure this doesn’t happen again, so it’d be cool to have a conversation about that—but I don’t think it’s fair to me to suggest I wanted to hurt you or acted in a way that would make that happen.”

This is a way of hitting some of the same notes as before—responsibility, stating that you had no bad intentions, looking towards a solution—but you also get to hold your ground against the idea that you did anything wrong. Again, a healthy outcome here is that the person recognises that you didn’t want to hurt them, and rather than dwelling in trying to guilt trip you, they take you up on your offer to find a solution.

What if they’re not healthy?

The above options are examples of healthy communication and boundary setting. They work in the ideal scenario where both parties are reasonable and looking for a positive outcome. Oftentimes with manipulative people or anyone actively seeking to gaslight you, they will not be reasonable and they will not be interested in a healthy or positive outcome.

Your options are the following:

• Leave

That’s about it.

Once you have given them enough chances to recognise, notice and adjust their behaviour (or found that it is compromising you to remain in that situation), you have done everything you are obliged to. The only step forward is to distance yourself from that kind of behaviour.

Second chances are just that—second chances. The reason we don’t talk about fifth chances is because an appropriately well-adjusted person with good intentions won’t exhibit manipulative behaviour five times—they hear your feedback, notice the issue and deal with their own shit so that the problem stops there.

The techniques described in this article and the approaches to communication that make up gaslighting and manipulation are designed to create doubt in your mind and imply that you shouldn’t trust your own instincts—which is exactly how manipulative people force you to stay near them to continue abusive patterns. If simply removing yourself wasn’t the best solution, there wouldn’t exist so many patterns of behaviour to prevent that from happening.

Ideally you’ll develop a radar—what is healthy behaviour and what is not—and this can help you work out people’s intentions. Mistakes do happen, and manipulative behaviour occurs constantly, by accident. But if those bad patterns are addressed and don’t change, the person in question is either malicious or entirely negligent, and both of those are qualities that you don’t want to keep around.