THE GASLIGHT EFFECT: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life

Gaslighting is a type of emotional manipulation in which a gaslighter tries to convince you that you’re misremembering, misunderstanding, or misinterpreting your own behavior or motivations, thus creating doubt in your mind that leaves you vulnerable and confused.

Gaslighting is always the creation of two people- a gaslighter, who sows confusion and doubt, and a gaslightee, who is willing to doubt his or her own perceptions in order to keep the relationship going. 

Gaslighting works only when you believe what the gaslighter says and need him to think well of you. 

Stages of Gaslighting:

1-DISBELIEF: The relatively mild gaslighting of stage 1 can leave you feeling confused, frustrated, and anxious. The tricky thing about this stage is that it seems so minor. Just a little misunderstanding, just a moment of discomfort, just a tiny loss of temper or petty disagreement. Yet gaslighting that takes place as this stage often proves to be a crucial turning point in a relationship. Some telltale signs of this stage are: Arguing about who is right and wrong, You find yourself thinking less about what you like and more about whether he is right, You can’t understand why he so frequently seems to be judging you, You often have the sense that he’s distorting reality- remembering or describing things very differently from how they actually happened, The way he sees things often makes no sense to you, Your image of the realtionship is that it’s going really well- “except for” these isolated incidents that keep sticking out in your mind. 

2- DEFENSE: This stage is marked by the need to defend yourself. You search for evidence to prove your gaslighter wrong and argue with him obsessively, often in your head, desperately trying to win his approval. In this stage you are far more invested in winning your gaslighter’s approval for being a good, capable, and lovable person. If you don’t agree with him, he might step up his version of the Emotional Apocalypse: yelling more loudly, finding more pointed insults, giving you bigger doses of the silent treatment. You feel that you’ll do anything to avoid this treatment, so you try even harder to please him. 

3-DEPRESSION: Stage 3 gaslighting is the most difficult of all: depression. 

Being gaslighted by someone whom you’ve trusted for years can be even more debilitating than entering into a gaslighting relationship from the start. The gaslight effect is truly soul-destroying. Perhaps the worst moment is when you realize how far you’ve gotten from what you used to consider your best self- your true self. You’ve lost your self-confidence, your self-esteem, your perspective, your courage. Worst of all, you’ve lost your joy. All that matters to you is getting your gaslighter to approve of you. And by Stage 3, you’re beginning to understand that you never will. 

The basic formula for gaslighting is the same: Someone else insists that you go along with a point of view you know isn’t true, but you try to convince yourself it is in order to win that person’s approval and preserve a relationship that makes you feel good, special, loving, capable. 

Be careful of the GOOD GUY GASLIGHTER . If you are involved with a guy like this, you may often feel confused. You may sense on some level that you’re being dismissed or disrespected- that your wishes and concerns never really get through- but you can never quite put your finger on what’s wrong. 

Signs of being involved with a ‘GOOD GUY GASLIGHTER’:

• Is he constantly working at pleasing you and other people?
• Does he offer help, support, or compromises that somehow leave you feeling frustrated or vaguely dissatisfied?
• Is he willing to negotiate household, social, or work arrangements with you, but you still never quite feel as if you were heard, even though you’ve presumably gotten what you asked for?
• Do you feel as though you never quite get what you want, but you can’t quite put your finger on what you have to complain about?
• Would you describe yourself as perfectly happy in your relationship but somehow feeling numb, disinterested, or discouraged about life in general?
• Does he ask you about your day, listen attentively, and respond sympathetically, yet somehow, you end most such conversations feeling worse than before?

The Good Guy Gaslighter also presents a confusing picture. It looks like he’s being cooperative, pleasant, and helpful, but you still end up feeling confused and frustrated. The Good Guy Gaslighter finds a way to make it look like he’s doing everything you want- without ever really giving you what you want. He engages in “disrespectful compliance”, going through the motions of agreeing while finding all sorts of little ways to show how unhappy and resentful he feels. This guy’s Emotional Apocalypse is the pout, looking unhappy or angry without admitting that there’s a problem. You will feel confused and say to yourself, “He’s such a good guy- so cooperative, always does what I ask- what’s wrong with me that I don’t appreciate him more?” You’ll worry that you’re crazy for thinking something is wrong. He engages in gaslighting to try to make himself look like a good guy instead of being clear about what he wants. The best thing to do is to stop worrying about his approval, refuse to idealize him, and hold on to your own reality. 

The Gaslight Tango-

Although from the outside gaslighting can look like the work of a single, abusive gaslighter, a gaslighting relationship always involves the active participation of two people. That is, in fact, the good news. If you’re caught in a gaslighting relationship, you may not be able to change the gaslighter’s behavior, but you can certainly change your own.

The Gaslight Tango is a dance that usually begins when a gaslighter insists that something is true, despite your ‘deep knowing’ that it is false. 

Gaslighting can occur only when a gaslightee tries-consciously or not- to accomodate the gaslighter, or to get him to see things her way, because she so desperately wants his approval so she can feel whole. 

End the gaslighting as soon as you stop trying to win the argument or convince your gaslighter to be reasonable. Instead, you can simply opt out. 

 

Feeling and acts of love are not the same things as understanding. 

A refusal of the ‘Urge to Merge’ is a terrific protection against gaslighting. 

The Explanation Trap- The effort to explain away behavior that disturbs us. Instead of letting these early signs set off the warning bells they are meant to, we find seemingly rational explanations to prove to ourselves why these danger signals aren’t really dangerous. 

We try to short-circuit our loved ones’ shortcomings by becoming better people ourselves. 

 Even if the gaslighter is capable of genuinely relating to you some of the time- becomes overwhelmed by his own need to restore his sense of self and his sense of power by proving to you that he’s right and insisting that you agree. No matter how much he talks about you and your feelings, he’s really concerned with only one thing: getting you to agree he’s right. 

If we focus on how we’re being treated, we cut through a lot of the confusion. 

Things you can say to avoid the right-wrong debate: 

• I don’t think I can be constructive right now. Let’s talk about this at another time. 
• I hear you, and I’m going to think about that. But I don’t want to keep talking about it right now. 
• I don’t like the way I’m feeling right now, and I’m not willing to continue this conversation. 
• It may not be your intention to put me down, but I feel put down, and I’m not going to continue the conversation.
• This is not a good time for me to talk about this. Let’s agree on another time that works for both of us. 
• Whether you’re right or not, I don’t want to be criticized right now. 

What is really going on when we cling so hard to relationships that leave us exhausted, miserable, and confused? And why do we give up so much to remain in them? Those of us who stay in gaslighting relationships have decided- usually unconsciously- that we need to be able to tolerate anything, and that we have the power to fix anything. We’ve made up a vision of ourselves as able to transform any situation if only we do things right. Instead of giving up on our gaslighter and moving on, we try desperately to prove that we can change him. Failing that, we try to convince ourselves that his bad behavior doesn’t really matter because we are so strong. 

The good news is that if we have the courage to leave these gaslighting relationships and look honestly at what they’ve cost us, we can begin to see an end to the terrible fear that’s been haunting us our entire lives- the fear of being unloved and alone. We can see that now we are old enough to “become our own parents”, to take care of ourselves in a way we couldn’t when we were little. 

You can go on as an adult, knowing that sometimes you may be lonely, and often you may feel loved- and either way, you won’t ever again subject yourself to another person’s bad treatment. 

There was a story about a woman and her husband and her final thought was- “he does many nice things for me, but they don’t seem to relate to the person I actually am”. 

When you are continuing to be in a relationship with a gaslighter- you’re involved in a relationship that is undermining your spirit and sapping joy from your life. 

Often we disconnect from our feelings so that we can remain in our gaslighting relationships. 

What’s the difference between a power struggle and a genuine conversation? In a genuine conversation, both people are really listening and addressing each other’s concerns, even if they get emotional sometimes. 

 

To order this book, you can go here:

 

Yum