Gaslighting

Gaslighting is the ‘act of undermining someone’s reality, by denying facts, denying the environment around them, or denying their feelings.’

It is a key feature of narcissistic behaviour and it results in the recipient feeling unable to trust themselves. Basically, if someone is lying to you in a way that makes you question or stop trusting your own perceptions, memories or beliefs, then they are gaslighting you.

Gaslighting and ordinary lying are different, as illustrated here:

Let’s say you’d agreed to meet Jane for dinner at 7pm, but Jane arrived at 8pm because she couldn’t get her act together and left late. If she lied to you and told you that the traffic had been awful, she wouldn’t be making you question or doubt yourself - she’d just be telling you a lie.

But if Jane was gaslighting you she could tell you that you had got the time wrong, and that you had both agreed to meet at 8pm, perhaps embellishing further by telling you that she’d noticed that you seem to be forgetting small things, and losing your thread in conversations.

This might make you doubt yourself and wonder whether you are forgetting things. Gaslighting is a two-fold procedure - you are made to think that your thinking, memory or feelings are distorted or ‘wrong’ and that the gaslighter’s ideas are the true and right ones.

Narcissists actually do both straight lying and gaslighting, both utterly convincingly. Lying and gaslighting come very easily to narcissists because it’s essentially what they do all the time anyway - if you look at the very essence of narcissism, the narcissist hides their low self-esteem behind a convincing false persona, which they need other people to believe in so that they can believe in it themselves. This false persona itself is a lie - it’s not a true representation of who they really are. So you can see why it is so easy for them to effortlessly lie about other, smaller things too - they have had a lot of practice from a very early age.

One of the most common forms of gaslighting is when a narcissist denies a person’s memory of events by saying something along the lines of ‘That didn’t happen: this happened’. Narcissists are known for rewriting history, and completely denying events that did occur. They might say ‘I never said that - actually what I said was this.” or “I never did that - actually what I did was this,” Or “he or she never did or said that - actually what they did or said was this’.

As an example, consider the lady whose narcissistic ex would make himself a cup of tea in front of her, and then tell her with absolute conviction that it was actually coffee he was drinking, and that she had remembered it wrong. Over time she began to question herself, until she could no longer trust her own perceptions of reality.

Gaslighting is commonly applied to a person’s feelings too. If you were to express your emotions to a gaslighter they will trivialise or minimise them, or invalidate them.

So for example, if you were upset because your dog had died, a narcissist might say “It’s not such a big deal - people are starving all over the world” Or “You shouldn’t be that sad - it’s only a dog,” Or, “I’m the one who should be sad, because I can’t take time off work and just fall apart when the dog dies - I’ve got to keep going. It’s me you should feel upset for.”

Here the narcissist is making you question the validity of your reality (your being sad) and is trying to change it to another reality - classic gaslighting.

Narcissists gaslight for three reasons:

1. To gain control over their victims

Gaslighting enables the narcissist to get you to doubt yourself so much that you start to rely on them; they become your voice of reason. You might start wearing what they tell you looks good, rather than what you think looks good. You might not be able to make decisions, even little ones, without their input. You might believe that you are mentally ill, because they have told you that you are. You might become quiet in social situations because you have been gaslit into believing that people find you irritating or boring, or that you talk too much - the permutations are endless.

And because you stop trusting yourself, you start trusting the narcissist instead - giving them immense control. Narcissists don't want to abuse you so much that you just get up and leave - they usually need you to stay to give them narcissistic supply. So if they undermine you just enough, and destroy your confidence in yourself just enough, especially if they are dressing things up as ‘looking after you’ or ‘only telling you these things to help you’ you will stay with them, and they will have successfully kept you in play as a source of narcissistic supply.



2. To hide or minimise their bad behaviours, so that they don’t have to face up to the consequences of their actions.

Imagine the scenario where a narcissist has been caught in a compromising position, perhaps with a prostitute, perhaps on a work night out.

Quite justly, their partner will feel betrayed and upset - but a narcissist might tell them that all the men who work in his office regularly do this, and that it is normal. They might tell their partner that they are thinking about this incorrectly, and that they are not being unfaithful because they are paying for the service, and actually, they are helping someone in need (the prostitute) to pay their bills and make their way in life, and that this should be seen as a good thing. They may tell them that just because they have visited a prostitute that has no bearing at all on how they feel about their partner, and the two things are completely separate. They may even try to make their partner feel guilty by telling them that they are a bad person for not allowing to help the prostitute to do her job and earn money to keep her family in food. They may accuse their partner of intruding on their private life, or they may blame them for needing to visit prostitutes in the first place because they always seem too tired to ‘service their needs’ themselves. They may even demand an apology - and if the victim has been gaslit enough, for long enough, they may actually feel guilty and do just this - apologise, even though in their heart of hearts they know that they are not in the wrong. 

3. To try to change others into what they want them to be.

Remember that narcissists see others as merely two-dimensional objects to be exploited for their own ends, with the ultimate aim of gaining narcissistic supply in some way. So if a narcissist wants a partner who is a blonde, for example, they may gaslight you into believing that your brunette locks make you look pasty and unattractive, and that you would look much better with blonde hair. If you believe that they know best (which you might, if you’ve been gaslit for long enough) you might concede and go blonde/start wearing heels/start doing spin classes/start drinking alcohol/give up your vegetarianism/change jobs etc.