Patterns of Abuse: Gaslighting
I would have liked to finish this post a lot sooner than I have. Unfortunately, I found myself injured during a hockey game and was not able to write for some time due to my arm being in a sling. The person who injured me may have been a narcissist, judging by their behavior during the game, but I don’t know them well enough to say for sure. The rest of the story may be an example used later. I at the very least am on the mend.
On to the topic at hand: Gaslighting. This has been an increasingly vexing term for me. Based on what I’ve seen out in the wider culture, the term “gaslighting” has been used to describe behavior well beyond its original scope. A non-insignificant number of people seem to be using it to merely describe all acts of lying or making strong insistent arguments. While it isn’t entirely inaccurate, it doesn’t quite capture the nuanced and insidious nature of what’s going on when someone is gaslighting someone else. It has much more to do with distorting another person’s perception of reality. Lying is just a brute force approach to the idea.
If you’re reading this, odds are you have been “gas-lit” at some point in your life. Much like projection, this behavior is a common go-to for narcissists. The ability to get you to submit to their version of reality is one of their ultimate goals. Once they can get you to believe a simple distortion of reality, getting you to believe everything they want you to submit to is… uncomplicated. One of the keys to this is the obfuscation of the truth. One narcissist I suffered under was a master of this. They often spoke large volumes of words without saying much at all. The volume of words was, as best as I could determine, a way to mask your perception of what was really going on around you. Gaslighting isn’t just someone just adjusting a few facts so you wind up thinking you’re crazy. It is the act of destroying your sense of all meaning in the world around you. Clouding those maps of meaning we build in our brains allows someone to redraw those maps at a moment’s notice.
The same person I mentioned above would also manufacture inaccurate data, just like how we normally think of gaslighting. This is the same person that would change details on my paperwork to exploit my anger, to try to elicit a negative response for some reactive abuse. See my post on that subject for more details on that story here. This person attempted on many occasions to distort my view of reality, and for a time they had me questioning myself, stuck in loops of anxious thought. I was second-guessing myself, my sanity, and my ability to think coherently. This lasted for several years, from about 2014 to the summer of 2017, when I began to see myself slipping into the beginning stages of suicidal ideation.
Had some better angels not intervened in my life in those days, I’m not sure how I would have ended up. Potentially bleeding out in a bathtub or painting a ceiling with a shotgun by Christmas of that year. But thankfully, I was given the tools to describe the confusion I was suffering under and how this person was behind it to others. I realized that the mental distress that I was suffering under was not coming from my own mind, but it was being inflicted on me by someone else on purpose. Whatever that ultimate intention was, I never found out. Things got a bit clearer afterwards anyway. It took about 18 months to evict that person from my life, and even longer still to regain a fraction of the confidence I had built coming out of my experiences in college. It’s not easy, but it is possible. The means of this are a subject for another time.
I’m not sure how our culture will continue to shape the meaning of gaslighting. I hope that narcissists in the culture don’t succeed in molding it to their own means, as I have seen some of them attempt. Since the word is a colloquialism, its meaning is far less secure in any case. But I do hope that people read this and not fall into a poorer understanding of the word.