I recently saw someone characterize Mike Pence lying about what Trump said as an attempt at a “mass public gaslighting,” which I think is the final lump of dirt thrown into the grave of the good and useful word ‘gaslighting’, which used to describe a specific form of abuse and is now apparently a synonym for “lying” or “disagreeing”.
First of all, gaslighting is about observable, physical facts. Here is an example of things that could be gaslighting: “no, I never hit you”; “we didn’t go to that restaurant yesterday”; “you think that painting is blue? no, it is definitely purple”; “don’t be ridiculous, you never went to Yale, you went to Harvard”; “that table has always been there”; “two plus two is five”. Here is an example of things that are not gaslighting: “white privilege doesn’t exist”; “as a man, you can’t experience sexism”; “the minimum wage increases unemployment”; “I think that argument was your fault”; “you are lazy and entitled.” You can’t take a video of laziness and entitlement or of white privilege; these are abstractions used to explain a particular situation. You can, however, take a video of someone hitting someone else; those are observable facts.
To pick another example: if someone says “you’re a man, therefore your experience of being forced into sex while you said ‘no’ isn’t rape”, they’re not gaslighting, they’re just being an awful rape apologist fuckwit. If someone who was not present says “you didn’t say ‘no'”, they may be mistaken (perhaps they believe the rapist). If someone says “I was there while you were being raped and you didn’t say ‘no'”, they are gaslighting.
Second, gaslighting is a pattern. If you think that the painting is blue and I think it is purple, there are lots of possible explanations. Maybe it’s a weird color that’s kind of blue and kind of purple depending on the light. Maybe one of us is colorblind. If I think that we went to the restaurant on Tuesday and you think that we went to the restaurant on Wednesday, probably one of us has a shitty memory. Now, if every time I think that something is blue you think it is purple and every time we go to a restaurant we disagree about when it is, we might have an issue.
Not only is gaslighting repeated, but it also doesn’t involve an alternate explanation. If I’m colorblind, you and I may disagree a lot about what color the painting is, but this also isn’t gaslighting, because I know perfectly well why we disagree. It’s because I’m colorblind. If we both have terrible memories, we will probably go “eh, who knows when we went to the restaurant.” It is only when the conversation repeatedly descends to “you are insane and incapable of determining when you went to the place” that it is gaslighting.
I don’t want to go hardcore “all gaslighting is intentional,” because that sounds like I’m saying “all gaslighting is a deliberate attempt to make someone think they’re crazy.” While that does happen, sometimes gaslighting is “I don’t want to take responsibility for my actions so I will deny them in face of all evidence” or “I am in total denial of my shit memory and therefore assume that it must all be your fault.” But it is nonetheless true that gaslighting is not really a thing reasonable people do.
Third, gaslighting is taking advantage of a position of trust. For instance, you might trust your parents, your friends, and your partners. If some random stranger comes up to you and whacks you in the face and then says “I didn’t hit you, you imagined that”, your thought process is probably going to be something like “crazy fucker, I should call the cops.” If your parent comes up to you and whacks you in the face and then two days later when you confront them about it they say “I didn’t hit you, you imagined that”, your thought process is probably going to be something like “wait, did I imagine that? Was that a dream or something? I couldn’t have been making it up… I remember it! Maybe it was a hallucination? What’s going on?” Repeated over a long enough period of time, it can cause you to doubt your perceptions of reality.
(This, incidentally, is why gaslighting is much more dangerous for crazy people than for sane people. Many crazy people rely on their friends, family, partners, and caregivers for reality checking on everything from “does everyone secretly hate me?” to “is there an enormous monster in the corner of the room?” If someone is in a position of that much trust, they can abuse their power, and since the crazy person’s perceptions are much more unreliable, it’s that much harder to catch.)
This is why Mike Pence is not gaslighting anyone. He is a politician. Most people above the age of six do not rely on politicians to be accurate reporters of empirical facts. Indeed, many people expect them to lie as much as they can get away with. If a politician telling a lie causes you to distrust your perceptions of reality, that is probably more about you than about the politician.
Neb said:
I disagree that gaslighting needs to be about observable physical facts. I think doing this kind of thing with people’s internal experience is something appropriately called gaslighting.
(My brain isn’t coming up with good examples, but some examples anyway – ‘you’re not really angry at me, you’re just projecting your anger at your father’, ‘you’re a girl and you’ll realize that eventually’, ‘you only think you want that because you read too many books. Your real true and healthy desires are this other thing. Let us help you fix yourself again’).
(The alternative is to have a lexical gap for the above thing, and my opinion is that using gaslighting for it is the far better of the two because I think it’s a natural category and also lexical gaps for important things are a problem).
This very clearly shares the pattern (the other person setting themselves up as the one who knows true reality and who you should turn to for that) and the effect (“you are incapable of determining what your own experiences and mind are”).
(It also shares the trait that the pattern can be horizontal rather than lineal – if a room full of my friends saw my partner hit me and all insist it didn’t happen, this might affect me worse, even if it happens fewer times.)
Meanwhile, I really appreciate the ‘position of trust’ part, which I don’t think I’d seen explicitly brought up before! This also ties with other things – for instance, medical professionals are in positions of trust for many people. And while one stranger usually isn’t, ‘people in general thinking a thing’ can be – if my partner hits me on live TV and then most of the audience insists this didn’t happen, that would likely also make me doubt myself).
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Libris said:
Yeah, agreed – and I really like your point about medical professionals being in a position of trust, which I think furthers your argument here. If a doctor (or multiple doctors) tell(s) you over and over that you’re not in pain/there’s nothing wrong with you/this is all normal, this can quite easily *not* be an observable physical fact – you are the only one who can determine your pain levels and many other symptoms, after all – but still has the *effects* of gaslighting (and also the effects of making your condition deteriorate while they convince you you’re just hysterical, which is an extra bonus).
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ozymandias said:
Fair. I wasn’t thinking of it, but I think internal experience (often) is more similar to “what color is this painting?” than to “does white privilege exist?”, and in those cases it is very possible to gaslight someone about their internal experience. I will think about it a bit more and perhaps put a paragraph about this into the post.
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Aapje said:
I agree with Neb. Also, there is a level of trust that all non-paranoid people have in strangers.
If someone comes up to me and says that I stepped in poop, my first assumption is that they are being helpful and I will check, even if I watched where I was going and didn’t remember feeling that ‘sweet’ sensation of my shoe sliding a bit due to shit lubrication. Con artists tend to take advantage of this.
The higher the trust, the more evidence I need that they are lying. It also works the other way around, if a neighborhood kid is always playing pranks, I may be so unwilling to be duped that I might refuse to look even as the smell of poo is all around me (the ‘boy who cried wolf’ is about this mechanism).
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liskantope said:
I appreciate this post because I have also been annoyed lately at the concept of “gaslighting” being broadened almost beyond recognition so that it can be used against almost any claim that one disagrees with. See, for instance, this article on how anti-millenial rhetoric is supposedly “gaslighting” (I find the article obnoxious for other reasons as well).
However, while I haven’t read the linked article about the VP debate carefully, I have seen a conversation on Tumblr about it where I do think an argument can be made that Mike Pence was exhibiting gaslighting behavior. The key point is that they were often arguing about things that maybe can be objectively verified, namely whether Trump did or did not say X. Some videos came out afterwards kinda-sorta proving that Trump did indeed say all the things that Tim Kayne claimed he said which Pence flatly denied in a let’s-everyone-just-calm-down-here voice. I put in qualifiers like “kinda-sorta” because there may still be some room for interpretation depending on context, and I’m still not altogether convinced that “gaslighting” is the most valid way to describe Pence’s behavior.
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Kenny said:
I almost stopped reading that article because of their terrible first example of supposed gaslighting:
Maybe this could be (somewhat tortuously) described as ‘self-gaslighting’, but it’d probably be more useful to dissuade the term from being stretched so thin.
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Machine Interface said:
It seems that to be broaden beyond recognition to become almost appliable to any thing is the fate of almost any political, ideological or social concept.
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Lambert said:
Perhaps we need an ‘and we really mean it, in its true narrow sense’ conveyor belt, to go alongside the PC one.
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John said:
It doesn’t work. Any concept that means “literally” will eventually be dulled to a mere intensifier.
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pansnarrans said:
You say that, but you’re clearly a troll*.
*”Someone I disagree with on the internet”
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nancylebovitz said:
How would you categorize combining “everyone is racist” with “only white people can be racist” and saying that noticing the contradiction is wrong?
I have a category of “cognitive abuse”, but it might be worthwhile to split out the specific types.
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Aapje said:
Nancy,
The actual argument is generally a bit different. The claim is that everyone has prejudice, but that our society only enables white people to act on this ‘systematically’. As such, everyone can experience prejudice, but only PoC can experience ‘systematic’ discrimination.
Now, I have severe problems with this line of reasoning, including how ‘systematic’ generally seems to be defined by who is hurt (making it a circular argument: only PoC face systematic racism because only discrimination that hurts PoC is systemic) but I don’t see any gaslighting in it.
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Nita said:
“Systemic”, not “systematic”. As in, various “systems” in society work to your disadvantage (as opposed to individual people being prejudiced against you for their own personal reasons).
I mean, you don’t have to accept their model, but at least get the terms right 😛
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Aapje said:
Yes, of course. Not a native English writer here, so it’s harder for me to get the terms always correct.
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caryatis said:
“Systematic” is also correct. The two terms are synonyms which mean “of, relating to, or common to a system” (Merriam-Webster).
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nancylebovitz said:
My impression of SJW was formed during RaceFail, and there have been some changes in it since.
In particular, the distinction between racism and prejudice is relatively recent and not applied consistently.
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Elzh said:
Oh, drek.
Reading Ozy’s description of gaslighting, I realized that one of my friends actually did gaslight me. I think it might have been just a shit memory on their part, but it was something that was hard to forget.
We were in an argument and I was talking about why I was upset at them- incidents where they had been a jerk to me, incidents where they had acted in ways I found upsetting, and how I wanted them to behave differently. They’d tried to gossip about my friends behind their backs with me, and it particularly upset me since they’d said cruel things about one of my friends who is really shy and socially awkward.
When I talked about that incident, they just denied it. They said that it was my problem that I was mad at them and that it was my problem that I was upset by that, and that they’d never meant it.
This caused me to feel extremely worried that my memory was faulty and that I was just overreacting. I wrote all of my thoughts down in a journal, looked up text messages from when we had talked before, and rehearsed over and over again the memory itself.
My friend was a complete dick. I don’t trust them anymore.
Also, the day before the argument I had asked them to stop being overly nice to me. They apparently were really upset by that. So after school their mother pulled a shitty rhetorical trick. (They came and talked to me along with their mother. Who worked at the school that we both went to. As a teacher. :/) She first talked at me about how disrespectful I was being. When I said something like, “I feel very upset when [redacted] is nice to me”, she said, with this huge smile on her face, like she’d caught me in a lie, “Then that’s your problem, isn’t it? You behavior is the only thing you can control.” Then I said, “Yes, but I would appreciate if [redacted] would modify her behavior as well.” Then her mother the teacher at our school said, “Believe me, we’re working on that.” At some point [redacted] said something like, “If you don’t want to be around me that that’s literally like saying you want me to be dead.”
So the part where she shifted blame to me for my feelings when I made an “I” statement has some similarities to gaslighting, but I don’t think it actually counts. It’s just shitty emotional blackmail and an unfair rhetorical trick.
Anyway, I’m hesitantly coming to the conclusion that [redacted] was emotionally abusive in some way. They wouldn’t let me get away from them even after I specifically said that I didn’t. They wouldn’t let me enforce boundaries like “please stop being nice to me”. They unfairly used their mother’s power over me. They denied true facts that had happened. They attacked me for my emotions and claimed that I believed terrible things. They induced immense guilt and emotional turmoil in me using manipulation.
What do other commentators think about this situation?
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Elzh said:
Clarification: They’d tried to engage me in gossip about my shy and socially awkward friend, which was worse than just talking about him badly.
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Elzh said:
Also, they wanted me to wave hi to them in the halls.
I didn’t like them before this, so I would wave to other people and not them and generally avoid eye contact. (This was probably a bad decision.) Her and their mother guilt tripped me into agreeing to wave at them and smile when I saw them.
But for fuck’s sake, it wasn’t right of them to do that.
To be fair, in our later conversation they said they didn’t want to force me to do that.
So basically: some conscience, but not very much.
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Elzh said:
Holy crap, sorry; I’ve responded three times to myself! But this is a pretty upsetting story.
I feel like I should warn for discussion of many things- so cw: discussion of rapeplay.
Anyone who has read Ozy’s post and any posts up to here likely isn’t going to be upset by discussion of (potential?) emotional abuse.
Shortly before these incidents, they had joked about killing all the straight people during worktime in a class we had with a lackluster substitute teacher. My straight friend got really uncomfortable and walked away from them towards me. She said, to me, that she was really uncomfortable. I said, to her, that this wasn’t a thing that I appreciated either. And then that fuckwit bitch looked over at us and yelled that they didn’t like it when people talked shit about them behind their back. Then we had an argument. It was a horrible argument and it was not okay.
***
So this year they’re trying to sit with my lunch group. And they bring up the topic of rapeplay. She says, “I don’t like it when non-rape victims do rapeplay or have rape fantasies or whatever. Yeah, it’s consensual,… but…”
There was someone who I know had been sexually harassed + maybe more by her boyfriend in that group, and she said, “Yeah, rapeplay is one of the only things I’d be okay with kinkshaming.” I don’t know whether [redacted] knew; I don’t think she did though.
And fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I’m only out as a rape fetishist to one of my friends, and I’m not a rape victim at all! I couldn’t argue because I didn’t want to disrespect the person I knew who’d been sexually harassed, and also I was immensely upset and emotionally vulnerable. So I decided to write something to my friend in my journal, so I took out my journal and wrote “I’m really upset and I can’t say anything”-
And then [redacted] looked me in the eye and said, “[deadname], are you writing shit about me?” in this really awful accusatory voice. And fuck I denied it flatly.
Relevant to the post: it was not gaslighting because it was just a lie whose truth they did not know (Ozy- that’s probably another aspect of the definition that either you missed or that I missed, that it does not include lying about things that the other person does not know about).
And then I said, “Can we please talk about something else” in this really upset voice because I was really upset. Everyone else pretty much assented calmly and politely.
And [redacted] just got up and left, as if affronted. I think it was to make me feel guilty for enforcing a boundary.
They attacked fictional sexual abuse while still being an emotional abuser for me.
I fucking hate [redacted] but I still have to have them in my life. I am trying to avoid them. They’re a large source of my hatred for the worst parts of sj, so I guess that this situation has multiple tie-ins to recent blog posts?
I don’t necessarily think [redacted] is an abuser, but I think my experience of them has been abusive. Reader, what do you think?
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pansnarrans said:
Firstly, props for talking out something that obviously upset you a lot, as that can be hard, especially on the internet.
I have a feeling that dividing things into strict groups of “gaslighting” and “not gaslighting” is a category error. I agree with Ozy’s article: some people are now throwing the term around in a way that is blatantly false, in an attempt to pathologise the words of people they disagree with. But what you’re talking about sounds borderline to me.
Reading the article I also thought “shit, some of this feels familiar”. The person I was reminded of was nowhere near as bad as you describe – it wasn’t really part of their personality – but they were considerably closer to me. That’s all I’ll say because I get paranoid that people will somehow find out that I’ve been talking about them online. I don’t think it makes a huge difference whether we call this stuff “gaslighting” or “something that resembles gaslighting but isn’t”.
For what it’s worth, [redacted] sounds like a nasty piece of work, and the one ray of light I can give here is that when I’ve met aggressive social manipulators like that in the past and come off the worst, I’ve spent time worrying everyone hated me as a result, then later found that people were sympathetic to me but didn’t want to call attention to themselves or escalate the situation by saying so.
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Elzh said:
Thank you for your advice, and I appreciate this post in general.
I agree: I expect it’s a bit like literature class, where there is no right answer but multiple wrong ones. There is no perfect dividing line/criterion for gaslighting, but there are certainly incidents of lying or disagreement that are not.
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Machine Interface said:
I get the impression that gaslighting often relies on a paradox: most people actually *overestimate* how good human memory is — it turns out human memory is optimized to remember piece of *knowledge*, not at all to remember *events* accurately. So it’s actually very easy to remember details wrong, to make them up without realising, or even outright to invent false memories (which cannot in any way be distinguished from real memories once they’re there).
So what a gaslighter does (from my perspective) is actually making a person that their memories are unreliable, but frame it as if it was only this person who was defective, whereas that’s actually normal and the gaslighter’s memory is no better.
I don’t know if this leads to any useful insignt, though it could suggest that at least some gaslighting is not intentional or at least not conceived as such by the gaslighter, who would actually be trying to divert attention from what they perceive as their own flawed memories by denial and preventive attacks on other people’s memory capacity, as a form of rationalization (“it seems I don’t remember that right, but I don’t like the implication that I have shitty memory, so it must be others who are crazy”).
Though this just theoretical musing and I would be content to have some confirmation or infirmation on this by someone with more concrete experience on the subject.
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pansnarrans said:
I do not have more concrete experience on the subject. However, I think you’re probably right about both the memory thing and the non-intentional thing. I suspect most abusers don’t see themselves as abusers, actually. Not only in the sense that they wouldn’t apply the label “abuser” to themselves, but that they rationalise (or, in some cases, are brought up to believe) that they’re doing nothing wrong.
I have no direct experience of physical abuse, so I’m going to be really irresponsible here and generalise from fictional evidence, but the more convincing examples of domestic violence I’ve encountered in fiction tend to end with the abuser saying things like “I wish you didn’t have to make me do this”. This sounds psychologically realistic to me.
(If anyone has direct experience and replies to this saying I’m an ignorant idiot, then they’re right and I’m wrong.)
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liskantope said:
Pansnarrans, what you’re describing is what I’ve long believed goes on in the minds of most humans with regard to many of their choices: (1) they see themselves as doing the right thing, even sometimes when it’s really obviously bad; or (2) they see their own actions as determined while at the same time seeing their adversaries’ actions as free. Everyone has at least some tendency to bend over backwards to make rationalizations of this kind. I expect that abusers do this to justify their actions like everyone else, the difference being that abusers have taken this kind of rationalization to enough of an extreme that they can justify behavior that the rest of us know is completely unacceptable.
I have seen the “you make me do this” line in fiction a lot as well. For my part, in my experience of bullying into adulthood, a little of which has bordered on physical abuse, the bullies have justified their behavior by claiming either that they cared about me and it was for my own good, or by claiming that it was irresistible because I “make it so easy”. If that helps.
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caryatis said:
Jeez, all this drama. Stop hanging out with this person. Don’t talk about them behind their back, don’t tell them or others that you think they were abusive or “gaslighting” because that is just fueling the drama. You don’t need to slap an “abuser” label on this person to end the friendship.
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pansnarrans said:
It doesn’t always work like that. Maybe such a person works or goes to school with you, maybe they’re integral to your friendship group, maybe they live down the road and you live in a tight-knit local community.
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ozymandias said:
That is not a very empathetic response to a person discussing a situation which causes them emotional pain. I won’t delete it because someone has already responded, but please be more civil in the future.
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Elzh said:
@caryatis I appreciate your advice that I disengage with this person, and I already have to a large extent. I also appreciate your insight that a relationship does not need to be abusive in order to be unhealthy.
However, your accusation of drama may fall prey to the noncentral fallacy, and I would in turn advise that *you* avoid assuming things about what I have or what I am doing.
Ozy and pansnarras, I also appreciate your clarifications and your empathy.
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caryatis said:
>If your parent comes up to you and whacks you in the face and then two days later when you confront them about it they say “I didn’t hit you, you imagined that”, your thought process is probably going to be something like “wait, did I imagine that? Was that a dream or something? I couldn’t have been making it up… I remember it! Maybe it was a hallucination? What’s going on?”
Actually, no. I assume Ozy is writing from a mentally ill perspective. But even a trusted person could not convince me to doubt myself about something like that. Maybe you could trick me into believing I was wrong about whether we had dinner on Tuesday or Wednesday, or where I put my keys, but something as salient (and hopefully rare) as being deliberately hit in the face, I know I’m going to remember that.
Now, maybe in the course of an abusive relationship where this sort of thing happens all the time, I would lose my grip on reality. But that’s mental illness too.
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ozymandias said:
Have you been in a gaslighting-type situation in which you responded in this way, or are you simply assuming that you respond differently than the average person to abuse because of how amazing you are?
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Nita said:
It sounds like you simply don’t trust anyone 😛
Also, as Ozy said, imagining a situation is one thing, experiencing it is something quite different. But you might actually be a person with a very low Agreeableness score, of course 🙂
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