BEWARE OF BAD ACTORS: 3 steps to take if you suspect someone’s “gaslighting” you

The term gaslighting comes from the 1944 Hollywood movie Gaslight, about a Victorian woman (Ingrid Bergman) whose new husband (Charles Boyer) slowly convinces her she’s going insane—a ruse to distract her from his malevolent activities. Among his many tactics, he dims the gas-fuelled lights on their property so that she thinks her mind is playing tricks on her.

Gaslighting involves both lying and psychological manipulation to convince the victim to lose faith in their judgment and perceptions. Gaslighting is one of several forms of coercive communication—abusive relational tactics meant to keep you insecure, self-doubting and therefore easy to control.

Unless the coercive communication is extreme—in the movie, the villain convinces his wife that she’s an amnesiac and kleptomaniac—it can be challenging to identify. Is someone deliberately trying to mislead you and persuade you to abandon your judgment, or do the two of you just see things differently?

One insidious aspect of most coercive communication is that there’s a lot of room for what lawyers refer to as plausible deniability—the perpetrator can deny responsibility for the communication either because they didn’t know they were doing it or because it wasn’t happening. In my experience, coercive communication invokes a pronounced sense of unease and loss of confidence in the victim.

It’s impossible to push back effectively if you aren’t sure what’s going on. The relationships that are most difficult to assert yourself in are often polluted with manipulation tactics intended to keep you feeling off-kilter.

Coercive communication may be involved if you consistently feel uneasy or dread your interactions with someone, whether a partner, a co-worker or a parent, but can’t quite articulate why. If you want to stay in these relationships while keeping your self-worth intact, you’ll need to push back—hard.

Here are the types of coercive communication I see most often in my practice.

Gaslighting

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Gaslighting is common in abusive relationships, where the abuser, as I described above, seeks to undermine the other person’s sense of confidence in their perceptions. It’s essentially just lying with a side of “You’re being crazy.”

The late comedian Richard Pryor captured gaslighting perfectly in a stand-up routine when he quipped about his wife catching him in bed with another woman: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

After my client Erica accused her boyfriend of monitoring her whereabouts and reading her texts and emails, he initially laughed it off. Then, he told her he was worried about her mental health. He said that what she was accusing him of wasn’t even possible and, moreover, that he’d noticed her getting more anxious and paranoid in general.

Erica started thinking she was being paranoid … until one afternoon, his phone lit up on the sofa next to her, and Erica saw that the incoming text was from her best friend and meant for Erica. It turned out he was monitoring her location through a tracking app, had hacked her email and had managed to get her texts sent to his phone.

When confronted, he shifted the argument to yet another manipulation: “What are you so upset about if you have nothing to hide?”

Gaslighting might also occur in the workplace. June’s boss would consistently offer her a promotion, a raise or an opportunity to work on a coveted project and then, after several substantive discussions, would drop the subject as though she had never made the offer.

Repeatedly, June would feel excited and optimistic about what was to come, only to have the opportunity disappear. When she tried to push back by asking directly what was going on, her boss would deny having made the promise and suggest that June was acting entitled and making grandiose presumptions.

All coercive communication thrives in privacy and one-on-one interactions.

Initially June doubted herself, but after talking to a close co-worker, she started to trust her gut. One way June pushed back was to send an email after each interaction where her boss offered her a promotion; by outlining what they had talked about, she created an electronic paper trail. She would also bring additional team members into the discussion whenever possible. Getting the promises and plans out in the open eventually made it harder for her boss to deny the promises she had made.

June further pushed back by advising other junior members of the team how to deal with her boss, encouraging an open dialogue about what was happening. All coercive communication thrives in privacy and one-on-one interactions, so June’s efforts to shine a light on it worked—she was promoted out of the gaslighter’s department.

It took some work, but June found effective ways to push back against her gaslighter. Here are steps you can take if you believe you’re being gaslit.

3 ways to push back against gaslighting

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Trust your gut

If you think you’re being lied to and it’s happened before, you’re probably right. Not agreeing on how an interaction played out or having different memories of it is common. But if you consistently feel confused and uneasy, something more nefarious is going on. If something in your relationship “just doesn’t make sense,” as Erica put it, that’s really all the evidence you need that something is amiss.

Document what’s happening

June’s email recaps of meetings with her boss established a digital paper trail documenting what was said and when. For Erica, writing down instances when she felt she was being monitored allowed her to face the truth about how long the monitoring had been going on and eventually to leave the relationship.

Bring in other people

For both June and Erica, reassurance from those around them that they weren’t crazy helped ground them in the truth that something was off in their relationships. Bad behaviour flourishes in secrecy. Include co-workers in conversations, talk to your friends and don’t hesitate to ask a trusted person for a gut check.

image: Andrew Neel