Understanding Gaslighting: When Reality Becomes Negotiable

The term "gaslighting" has become ubiquitous in recent years, appearing in conversations about everything from romantic relationships to workplace dynamics to political discourse. But as the term has gained popularity, its meaning has become diluted and distorted. People now use "gaslighting" to describe any disagreement, misunderstanding, or instance of someone being wrong—watering down a term that describes a specific and psychologically damaging pattern of behaviour.

True gaslighting is more than just lying, disagreeing, or having a different perspective. It's a pattern of behaviour that systematically undermines someone's trust in their own perception, memory, and sanity. Understanding what gaslighting actually is—and recognizing the various forms it takes, including how we gaslight ourselves—is crucial for maintaining healthy relationships and a stable sense of reality.

What Gaslighting Actually Is

The term "gaslighting" comes from the 1938 play "Gas Light" (and subsequent 1944 film "Gaslight"), in which a husband manipulates his wife into believing she's losing her mind by dimming the gas lights in their home while insisting the lighting hasn't changed. When she questions her perception, he tells her she's imagining things, slowly eroding her confidence in her own sanity.

True gaslighting involves:

Persistent denial of someone's reality: Not just disagreeing, but systematically denying what someone knows to be true in a way that makes them question their own perception and memory.

Manipulation of evidence or information: Hiding, moving, or altering things and then denying it happened, or insisting events occurred differently than they did.

Undermining confidence in perception and memory: Consistently suggesting that someone is "too sensitive," "remembering wrong," "imagining things," or "crazy."

Creating dependence on the gaslighter's version of reality: Over time, the target begins to rely on the gaslighter to tell them what's real because they've lost confidence in their own judgment.

Intent or pattern, not isolated incidents: Gaslighting is typically either intentional manipulation or a deeply ingrained pattern of behaviour, not a one-time misunderstanding or disagreement.

What Gaslighting Is NOT

The term has become so overused that it's important to distinguish genuine gaslighting from other behaviours:

Simple disagreement: "I remember it differently" or "That's not how I saw it" is not gaslighting—it's normal human variance in perception and memory.

Being wrong: Someone confidently stating something incorrect isn't gaslighting—it's being mistaken.

Lying: While gaslighting involves lying, not all lying is gaslighting. Someone lying about where they were isn't necessarily gaslighting unless they're also trying to make you doubt your perception of reality.

Defensiveness: Someone getting defensive or denying wrongdoing isn't automatically gaslighting—people often have difficulty acknowledging mistakes.

Different perspectives: Two people can genuinely experience the same event differently based on their perspectives, attention, and emotional states.

Minimizing feelings: While invalidating someone's feelings ("You shouldn't feel that way") is problematic, it's not gaslighting unless it's part of a broader pattern of making someone doubt their reality.

The key difference is that gaslighting specifically targets someone's trust in their own perception and sanity, creating systematic doubt about what they know to be true.

Gaslighting Others: Why People Do It

Understanding why people gaslight others doesn't excuse the behavior, but it helps us recognize patterns and protect ourselves.

Intentional Manipulation and Control

Some people gaslight deliberately as a tool for maintaining power and control in relationships. This often appears in:

Abusive relationships: Where one partner systematically undermines the other's reality to maintain dominance and prevent them from leaving or seeking help.

Narcissistic patterns: Where someone needs to maintain their idealized self-image and will distort reality rather than acknowledge flaws or mistakes.

Workplace manipulation: Where someone undermines colleagues' credibility to advance their own position or cover their mistakes.

These gaslighters often have a clear goal: keeping someone confused, dependent, and unable to trust their own judgment makes them easier to control.

Protecting Self-Image

Many people gaslight not from calculated malice but from a desperate need to protect their self-concept:

Shame avoidance: When someone can't tolerate the feeling of being wrong or having made a mistake, they may unconsciously distort reality rather than face those feelings.

Fragile ego: People with fragile self-esteem may genuinely need to believe their version of events to maintain psychological stability, leading them to aggressively deny alternative perspectives.

Cognitive dissonance: When someone's behavior conflicts with their self-image (like a "nice person" who said something cruel), they may reshape reality to eliminate the conflict rather than acknowledge the inconsistency.

Learned Behavior

Some people gaslight because it's how they learned to navigate relationships:

Family patterns: Growing up in a family where reality was constantly negotiable teaches that this is how relationships work.

Survival strategy: Some people learned to distort reality as children to cope with abuse, chaos, or parent's mental illness—a survival tool that becomes destructive in adult relationships.

Never learning accountability: Without models of healthy accountability, some people never develop the capacity to say "I was wrong" or "I hurt you," resorting instead to reality manipulation.

Psychological Conditions

Certain psychological conditions can make gaslighting more likely:

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Where maintaining a grandiose self-image takes precedence over truth.

Borderline Personality Disorder: Where intense emotions can lead to genuinely different perceptions of events, though not always with manipulative intent.

Antisocial traits: Where lack of empathy combines with manipulative tendencies.

Paranoid thinking: Where someone's distorted perception becomes the "truth" they insist others accept.

Recognizing When You're Being Gaslit

Gaslighting can be difficult to identify because, by its nature, it makes you doubt your own perception. Here are signs you might be experiencing gaslighting:

Internal Signs

Constant self-doubt: You frequently question your memory, perception, or judgment, especially around this person.

Apologizing constantly: You find yourself apologizing for things you're not sure you did or for having reactions that seem reasonable.

Second-guessing yourself: Before conversations, you mentally prepare and rehearse, worried about "getting it right."

Feeling confused: Interactions leave you feeling confused, foggy, or unable to understand what just happened.

Walking on eggshells: You're constantly monitoring your words and actions to avoid the other person's denial or anger.

Feeling "crazy": You wonder if you're being too sensitive, too emotional, or losing your grip on reality.

Difficulty making decisions: You've lost confidence in your judgment and increasingly rely on others to tell you what's true or real.

Isolation: You've pulled away from friends and family, partly because you're confused about what's real and don't trust your own perspective enough to share it.

Behavioural Patterns from Others

Blatant lying: They confidently deny things you know happened or insist things happened that didn't.

"You're remembering wrong": When you bring up past events, they consistently insist your memory is faulty.

Trivializing your feelings: "You're too sensitive," "You're overreacting," "You're making a big deal out of nothing."

Countering: They reject your memory of events and replace it with their own: "That's not what happened. What actually happened was..."

Withholding: They refuse to listen or pretend not to understand: "I don't know what you're talking about" when you know they do.

Diverting: They change the subject or question your credibility: "You're always so negative" instead of addressing the issue.

Denial then: Denying promises, agreements, or conversations: "I never said that" about things you clearly remember them saying.

Projecting: Accusing you of behaviours they're doing: "You're the one who's manipulative" when you've raised concerns about their manipulation.

Aligning others against you: "Everyone thinks you're too sensitive," bringing in third parties (real or imagined) to support their version.

Evidence manipulation: Moving, hiding, or altering things and then denying they did it or insisting you did it yourself.

The Pattern Over Time

Individual instances might be explainable, but gaslighting creates a recognizable pattern:

• Your confidence in your own perception steadily decreases

• You increasingly rely on the gaslighter to tell you what's real

• You start defending them to others even when their behaviour seems wrong

• You feel like you can't trust your own mind

• The relationship dynamic revolves around whose version of reality is "correct"

Self-Gaslighting: When We Do It to Ourselves

Perhaps the most insidious form of gaslighting is what we do to ourselves. Self-gaslighting involves dismissing, minimizing, or distorting our own experiences, feelings, and perceptions—essentially doing to ourselves what a gaslighter would do.

What Self-Gaslighting Looks Like

Dismissing your feelings: "I shouldn't feel this way," "I'm being ridiculous," "It's not that bad."

Minimizing your experiences: "Other people have it worse," "It wasn't really abuse," "I'm making too big a deal of this."

Doubting your perceptions: "Maybe I'm remembering it wrong," "Maybe it wasn't as bad as I thought," "I'm probably being too sensitive."

Invalidating your needs: "I don't really need that," "I should be able to handle this alone," "Asking for help is weak."

Excusing others' harmful behaviour: "They didn't mean it," "They were stressed," "I probably provoked them."

Overriding your instincts: Ignoring gut feelings, inner warnings, or intuitive knowing because they're "not logical."

Rewriting your history: Convincing yourself past harm wasn't really harmful or that you were at fault for others' actions.

Why We Gaslight Ourselves

Understanding why we engage in self-gaslighting can help us recognize and interrupt the pattern.

Survival in Gaslighting Relationships

When we're being gaslit by others, we often internalize their voice and begin to gaslight ourselves. This can continue long after the relationship ends. It's a way of:

• Trying to maintain the relationship by accepting the other person's reality

• Avoiding the pain of acknowledging betrayal or manipulation

• Reducing cognitive dissonance between what we know and what we're told

Childhood Conditioning

Many people learn self-gaslighting in childhood:

Invalidating environments: If your feelings were consistently dismissed ("You're fine," "Stop crying"), you learned to dismiss them yourself.

Abuse or neglect: Children in harmful situations often blame themselves ("I must deserve this") because accepting that caregivers are unsafe is too threatening to their survival.

Emotional unavailability: When caregivers couldn't attune to your emotions, you learned your perceptions and feelings weren't trustworthy or important.

"Good child" pressure: Being rewarded for suppressing needs and feelings teaches that your authentic experience is wrong or bad.

Cultural and Social Conditioning

Broader cultural messages encourage self-gaslighting:

Marginalized identities: People from marginalized groups often face systemic gaslighting ("You're being too sensitive about racism/sexism/etc.") and internalize these messages.

Gender socialization: Women are often taught to doubt their anger, minimize their needs, and prioritize others' comfort. Men are taught to dismiss vulnerability and "softer" emotions.

Productivity culture: Messages that we should always be grateful, positive, and productive lead us to dismiss legitimate stress, burnout, or dissatisfaction.

Toxic positivity: Cultural pressure to "look on the bright side" can become self-gaslighting when we invalidate legitimate negative emotions.

Cognitive Dissonance

We gaslight ourselves to resolve uncomfortable contradictions:

• "This person says they love me but treats me badly" → "I must be misinterpreting their behaviour"

• "I chose this situation, so it should be good" → "I'm ungrateful for not being happy"

• "I should be strong enough to handle this" → "My struggle means I'm weak or broken"

Self-Protection

Paradoxically, self-gaslighting can feel protective:

Avoiding difficult truths: It's sometimes easier to convince ourselves something isn't true than to face painful realities.

Maintaining hope: In difficult relationships, self-gaslighting can keep hope alive that things will improve.

Reducing fear: If we minimize danger or red flags, we feel less afraid (though this leaves us more vulnerable).

Escaping responsibility for change: If we convince ourselves something isn't really a problem, we don't have to take the difficult steps to address it.

Recognizing Self-Gaslighting

Notice when you:

• Use "should" about your feelings ("I shouldn't feel this way")

• Immediately follow an emotion with dismissal ("I'm sad, but I'm being ridiculous")

• Compare your pain to others' to minimize it

• Catch yourself making excuses for someone who hurt you

• Override a gut feeling because it's "not logical"

• Struggle to know what you actually think or feel because you've dismissed it so many times

• Feel guilty for having needs or boundaries

• Automatically assume you're wrong in conflicts

The Costs of Self-Gaslighting

Self-gaslighting prevents us from:

• Trusting our own judgment and perception

• Setting appropriate boundaries

• Leaving harmful relationships

• Acknowledging and processing difficult emotions

• Making decisions aligned with our authentic needs and values

• Healing from past trauma

• Developing self-compassion

• Accessing the wisdom of our emotional and intuitive responses

Healthier Communication with Ourselves

Breaking patterns of self-gaslighting requires developing new ways of relating to our own experience.

Practice Self-Validation

Acknowledge your feelings without judgment: "I feel anxious right now" rather than "I shouldn't feel anxious."

Trust your perceptions: "I experienced that as hurtful" rather than "Maybe I'm being too sensitive."

Honour your needs: "I need support right now" rather than "I should be able to handle this alone."

Validate before problem-solving: Feel and acknowledge emotions before trying to fix or change them.

Develop a Compassionate Inner Voice

Notice your self-talk: Pay attention to how you speak to yourself internally.

Ask "Would I say this to a friend?": If you wouldn't tell a friend they're being ridiculous or too sensitive, don't say it to yourself.

Practice self-compassion phrases:

• "This is really hard right now"

• "Of course I feel this way given what happened"

• "My feelings make sense"

• "I'm doing the best I can"

Trust Your Body

Listen to physical sensations: Your body often knows truth before your mind does—tension, nausea, or agitation can signal that something's wrong.

Honour your gut: When something feels off, take that feeling seriously even if you can't immediately explain it.

Notice when you feel relief: Pay attention to what brings a sense of ease or rightness.

Keep Evidence

Journal: Writing down events as they happen creates a record you can reference later.

Note patterns: When you notice recurring feelings or concerns, take them seriously rather than dismissing each instance.

Save messages: In relationships where gaslighting is happening, having written records can help you maintain grip on reality.

Seek Outside Perspectives

Talk to trusted others: Sharing experiences with people who aren't involved can help you reality-check.

Therapy: A therapist can help you distinguish between self-gaslighting and legitimate self-reflection.

Support groups: Connecting with others who've experienced similar situations can help normalize your experience.

Practice "Both/And" Thinking

Instead of either/or thinking, allow complexity:

• "I love this person AND their behaviour is harmful"

• "I made mistakes AND I didn't deserve to be treated that way"

• "Other people have struggles AND mine are still valid"

• "I can be grateful for what I have AND still want things to change"

Separate Feelings from Worth

Your feelings are data, not character flaws: Anxiety doesn't make you weak. Anger doesn't make you bad. Sadness doesn't make you broken.

Having needs is human: Needing support, connection, rest, or boundaries doesn't make you needy or high-maintenance.

Your perceptions are valid: Even if someone else remembers differently, your experience of an event is real and legitimate.

Healthier Communication with Others

When dealing with potential gaslighting from others, these communication strategies can help:

Set Clear Boundaries Around Reality

State your experience clearly: "I experienced this as hurtful" rather than asking for validation ("Don't you think that was mean?").

Don't JADE: Don't Justify, Argue, Defend, or Explain. State your boundary or experience without needing the other person to agree.

Example: "I'm not available for conversations where my memory is consistently questioned" rather than trying to prove your memory is correct.

Use "I" Statements

Focus on your experience: "I felt dismissed when you said that" rather than "You're gaslighting me."

Own your perceptions: "I perceived this as..." or "My experience was..." makes your reality harder to argue with.

State impact: "When you deny things I know happened, I feel confused and doubt myself."

Document and Trust Your Records

Keep written records: Save emails, texts, or write down verbal conversations afterward.

Refer to documentation: "I have the email where you agreed to this" is harder to gaslight away than memory alone.

Trust your notes: If you wrote something down when it happened, trust that version over later denials.

Limit Engagement

Don't try to convince: With someone who's gaslighting, trying to get them to see your perspective is often futile and exhausting.

State and exit: State your experience or boundary once, then disengage rather than getting pulled into circular arguments.

Reduce contact: If possible, limit time with people who consistently gaslight you.

Seek Witnesses

Include third parties: When possible, have conversations with witnesses present or follow up verbal conversations with written summaries sent to the person and others.

Build community: Maintain relationships with people who validate your reality, counteracting the isolation gaslighting creates.

Know When to Leave

Some relationships can't be fixed: If gaslighting is persistent and the person refuses to acknowledge it or work on it, leaving may be the healthiest option.

Your sanity matters more than the relationship: If you're constantly questioning reality, feeling crazy, or losing yourself, the relationship is not healthy regardless of other factors.

Safety first: In abusive relationships where gaslighting is present, prioritize your safety and seek support from domestic violence resources.

When You Recognize You've Gaslit Others

If you recognize gaslighting patterns in your own behaviour, this awareness is the first step toward change.

Take Responsibility

Acknowledge the harm: "I've been denying your reality and that's not okay" without excuses or justifications.

Don't minimize: Resist the urge to explain it away or insist it wasn't that bad.

Validate their experience: "Your feelings and perceptions are valid" even if you remember things differently.

Understand Your Motivation

Explore why: Work with a therapist to understand what drives the need to control others' reality—shame, fear, learned patterns, or something else.

Identify triggers: When are you most likely to gaslight? When feeling criticized? When afraid of abandonment? When your self-image is threatened?

Address underlying issues: If gaslighting comes from shame intolerance or fragile self-esteem, work on building genuine self-acceptance.

Develop New Patterns

Practice saying "I was wrong": Build tolerance for being mistaken or having made mistakes.

Separate actions from identity: You can acknowledge harmful behaviour without it meaning you're a terrible person.

Validate before defending: When someone expresses hurt, validate their feelings before explaining your perspective.

Allow different realities: Two people can experience the same event differently—both can be true.

Make Amends

Apologize genuinely: Take responsibility without making it about you or seeking reassurance.

Change behaviour: Apologies mean nothing without changed behaviour.

Be patient: Rebuilding trust takes time, and the person you've gaslit may need space or may choose not to continue the relationship.

Get Help

Therapy: Working with a therapist can help you understand and change these patterns.

Accountability: Have trusted others who can call you out when you slip into gaslighting patterns.

Commit to growth: Changing deeply ingrained patterns is difficult but possible with commitment and support.

Moving Forward: Reclaiming Reality

Whether you've been gaslit by others, gaslit yourself, or recognized gaslighting patterns in your own behaviour, healing involves reclaiming your right to trust your own perception and experience.

You are the expert on your experience. No one else can tell you what you felt, what you experienced, or what you know to be true. Your perceptions, feelings, and memories are valid even when they differ from others' versions.

Reality doesn't require consensus. You don't need someone else to agree with or validate your experience for it to be real and legitimate.

Trust yourself. Rebuilding trust in your own judgment, perception, and sanity is possible, though it takes time and often requires support.

You deserve to be believed. In healthy relationships, people take each other's experiences seriously rather than constantly questioning or undermining them.

Your feelings make sense. Even when you can't fully articulate why, your emotional responses carry wisdom and information about your needs, boundaries, and values.

Healing is possible. Whether you've been gaslit or have gaslit others, with awareness, support, and commitment, you can develop healthier ways of relating to yourself and others.

The opposite of gaslighting isn't demanding that everyone see things exactly as you do—it's mutual respect for the validity of each person's experience, the humility to acknowledge when you're wrong, and the courage to trust your own knowing even when it's challenged. It's creating relationships where reality doesn't have to be negotiable because everyone's perceptions and feelings are honoured as legitimate, even when they differ.

Your reality matters. Your perceptions are valid. Your feelings make sense. And you have the right to trust your own mind.