Hey everyone!
Today, we’re gonna talk about gaslighting.
Chances are you’ve heard this phrase thrown around at some point -- probably either in
reference to an abusive relationship, or in reference to how Trump talks to the American public.
So what exactly is gaslighting?
Essentially, it’s a method of psychological manipulation where Person A tries to get Person
B to doubt their lived experiences, memories, and knowledge.
This allows A to control B, because B doesn’t know what to believe and can’t trust their
own perception of reality.
Because of this deep-seeded doubt, B feels like they have to believe whatever Person
A says -- even if it’s a complete lie.
Unfortunately, it’s a very effective manipulation technique because gaslighters tend to be relentless
in their position, meaning that the more you question them and point out their lies, the
further they commit to those lies.
It’s easy to think that you can trust your own perception of reality when you’re not
being gaslit, but when someone is so adamantly telling you things that clash with what you
know to be true, it’s really hard not to doubt yourself at least a little bit.
And that’s all gaslighters need is to sow enough doubt that you’re not 100% sure you
can trust what you know.
In abusive relationships, gaslighting can be a powerful weapon.
Even those who are aware of what gaslighting is can fall victim to it.
So I think it’s important not to blame gaslighting victims for what has happened to them.
Just because you, someone outside of the situation, can see how gaslighting is occurring, that
doesn’t necessarily mean that someone in that situation can see it as clearly.
But it is also important to be aware of what gaslighting can look like so that you can
do your best to identify it in your relationships and not tolerate it.
So what are some example of gaslighting?
Oftentimes, this technique can be used to cover up a mistake that was made by the gaslighter.
Let’s say that there are two people in a romantic relationship, Person A and Person
B. In this scenario, Person A stays at home during the day while Person B works from 9 to 5.
So in the morning, Person B wants to take the trash out on their way to work, but they forget.
So when they get home, instead of taking responsibility for forgetting, admitting that they messed
up, and taking out the trash -- they decide to blame Person A. They say to Person A, “I
asked you to take out the trash while I was gone like 3 times this morning, why didn’t you do it?”
Now, that definitely never happened.
B never asked A to take out the trash.
But because B is so forcefully insisting that they did, A starts to wonder whether that
did happen and they just forgot.
So A apologizes for messing up and takes out the trash.
After all, in A’s mind, it is *possible* that B said something that morning and A just forgot.
That’s a classic case of gaslighting -- making someone else doubt their reality by using
the uncertainty of their memory against them.
Though it can also be used even more maliciously.
Maybe B didn’t even forget to take out the trash, it was just their plan all along to
guilt A into doing it.
And as their relationship continues, B can continue to use this tactic to make A doubt
even larger aspects of their life.
Maybe after years of B physically abusing A, the two of them sit down together to talk
about their relationship, and B says, “I would never hurt you.
That’s not who I am.
You’ve really made it sound so much more dramatic than it was.
We’ve always been so happy!”
This kind of gaslighting can make people question if they ever really were abused, which is
terrible because then they can’t even deal with that abuse or get away from it or move
on from it, because they’re not even 100% it all happened the way they remember.
Another common gaslighting technique, though, is to spin it back at the victim and blame
them for the problem.
Gaslighters are always on the offense, because if you keep hurling baseless accusations,
the victim has to spend so much time defending themselves from those accusations that they
can’t even address the real abuse from the gaslighter.
Following the same example from earlier, where Person B was denying that they ever hurt Person
A, B could continue by saying, “I can’t believe you would accuse me of hitting you!
Why do you hate this relationship?
We do you want it to fail?
Why don’t you believe in us?”
And that type of language immediately puts A on the defensive.
So now they’re not only questioning what happened to them, but they’re questioning
if maybe they were the problem all along.
Gaslighting is such a sick, twisted manipulation tactic that is so hard recognize because we
all have trouble trusting our memory.
I mean, our memory is fragile and malleable and often unreliable -- every time you remember
something, you change little things about that memory -- but gaslighters take advantage
of that to the extreme.
Because even though our memories can have their issues, overall we do tend to remember
general things that happened and how we felt during them.
And while this kind of manipulation is common in abusive relationships, it can also show
up in friendships, among coworkers, and even among politicians.
Trump is notorious for gaslighting all of the US.
The easiest example is the size of the crowd at his inauguration.
We have photos proving it was smaller than he said it was, and yet to this day he continues
to insist it was larger, just flat out lying to everyone’s faces -- trying to get them
to question their reality by sticking to his lies no matter what.
And it works -- he has supporters who will defend the crowd size and make elaborate excuses for it.
When this all happened, there was a whole national conversation about the size of the
inauguration crowd, which shouldn’t even have been a thing because we know for a fact
how many people attended.
But the fact that it was even talked about for so long was what Trump wanted.
It wasn’t really about convincing everyone that the crowd was bigger than they thought
-- it was about sowing doubt.
He wants you to think, “Well, maybe those photos were edited,” or “Maybe everyone
who was there lied about the crowd size.”
He doesn’t have to convince every American that he’s right, he just needs to make everyone
a *little* bit unsure about what is true.
No amount of proof can dissuade Trump from his lies, and that’s what makes him such
a strong gaslighter.
The more he sticks to his nonsense lies, the more people in the media start to ask, “Well,
maybe there *is* something there,” even though there obviously isn’t.
Now, the crowd size issue is by no means the worst gaslighting he’s ever done, it’s
just a good example.
That’s how gaslighting works.
It’s not just about getting you to question the big stuff, it’s also about getting you
to question the smaller things that don’t really matter as much.
It makes you question your entire reality.
Like, to pick one of many examples, there’s the fact that Trump led the birtherism movement
for years, being racist as hell and calling for Obama’s birth certificate.
But then in 2016, he tried to blame Clinton for birtherism and acted like he’d been
innocent all along.
Trump’s been a pro at the gaslighting game for years, making Americans doubt everything
they’ve experienced, regardless of whether it’s a thing as simple as crowd sizes or
as serious as claiming Obama wasn’t born in the US.
So that’s what gaslighting is, but where does the term come from?
It comes from a play that was turned into a movie in the 1940s where a husband tries
to convince his wife that she’s crazy.
In the movie, he dims the gas lights in the house, and when she points out that they’re
dimmer than normal, he says that they’re the same brightness and that she’s imagining things.
The term gaslighting as been in usage since the 1960s, so it’s by no means a new word.
It’s just one that has cropped up in a lot of stories lately largely because of how right-wing
politicians continue to gaslight the American public.
And while it is important to recognize how gaslighting works in the political sphere
so that we can fight against it, it’s also important to be aware of how gaslighting works
so that you can identify it in your own relationships.
That’s certainly not easy, and it’s not your fault if you’re gaslit by someone else,
but hopefully by understanding this tactic and how it works, you can be confident in
what you know to be true, and you can call out gaslighters for exactly what they’re doing.
Anyway, that’s all I had for you today.
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Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you next time.