Gaslighting

On This Page:

• What Is Gaslighting?
• Where the Word Comes From
• Why Gaslighting Works
• What Gaslighting Looked Like in My Marriage
• It Can Happen to Anyone
• Questions People Ask About Gaslighting
• Where to Get Help

What Is Gaslighting?

Gaslighting is a pattern of words and actions that makes you doubt your own memory, judgment, and sanity. The person doing it denies what you saw and heard, tells you what you really meant, and treats your reactions as the problem, until their version of events feels more reliable than yours.

One dishonest remark is not gaslighting. Repetition is what makes it work. The National Domestic Violence Hotline describes it as emotional abuse that makes a person second-guess their own feelings, instincts, and sanity. Merriam-Webster defines it as psychological manipulation, usually over an extended time, that leaves a person questioning their own thoughts, perceptions, and memories.

It tends to sound like this:

• “That never happened.”
• “I never said that. You’re making things up.”
• “You always remember things wrong.”
• “You’re too sensitive.”
• “Who put that idea in your head?”
• “I’m not discussing this again.”

Any one of these can come up in an ordinary argument. Gaslighting is what it looks like when they come up again and again, and you end up the one who apologizes. The same patterns have their own pages on this site: denial, countering, forgetting, trivializing, blocking and diverting, and withholding. Gaslighting is the name for them working together on your sense of what is real.

Gaslighting names a behavior. It does not diagnose the person doing it, and you can recognize the behavior without knowing why they do it.

Where the Word Comes From

The word comes from a 1938 stage play called Gas Light. In the story, a husband dims the gas lamps in the couple’s home, then insists nothing has changed when his wife points it out. She starts to doubt her own senses, and then her own mind. Films followed, and by the middle of the 20th century people were using the title as a word for this kind of manipulation. Merriam-Webster’s earliest recorded use of the noun is from 1961.

The word has spread well beyond relationships. Merriam-Webster chose it as its 2022 Word of the Year, and people now use it for politics and public life too. This page is about the original meaning: one person wearing down another person’s trust in their own mind.

Why Gaslighting Works

Most people start out trusting their own memory, and that is healthy. Gaslighting goes around that trust. The person contradicting you is someone you love, depend on, or have to get along with, and they sound certain.

It usually builds slowly. The first incidents are small enough to explain away: a promise that gets forgotten, a “you’re too sensitive,” a conversation that ends with you apologizing and not remembering what for. The Hotline notes that early behavior can look harmless and that the pattern strengthens over time.

Once you can’t rely on your own account, you start relying on someone else’s, and the person gaslighting you is the one offering it. You check with them to find out what is real. The Hotline points out that this dependence makes the relationship harder to leave.

None of this depends on how smart or educated you are. My page on brainwashing and intelligence explains why.

What Gaslighting Looked Like in My Marriage

One phone call shows how it went. I had turned off Skype on my computer so my husband couldn’t interrupt me while I worked. He could still call my cell phone and the boys’, and he could still Skype the boys on their computers. To me it was a small boundary.

He called my cell phone to be angry about it. He talked as if I had cut off every way to reach us, and he said so while we were on the phone with each other. Then the call stopped being about Skype. It turned into whether I wanted our marriage to work, whether it was my way or the highway, and what my blog would do to me in front of a judge. He also told me he would never reply to my emails, which left phone calls as the only way for us to talk. Without anything in writing, there was nothing to check a call against.

The subject kept moving, tossed back and forth like a dinghy in a storm. A boundary about a computer program turned into a verdict on my marriage. I felt out of control and didn’t know whether I was coming or going. I hung up on him to get my footing back, not to punish him.

I kept believing that the right wording, a calmer tone, or enough logic would make him see what he was doing. It never did, because the conversation was never about the facts.

I wrote about that day as it happened in Gaslighting Abuse Means War. More examples of this kind of behavior, including rules he changed without telling me, are on my Crazymaking page.

It Can Happen to Anyone

Gaslighting does not depend on the kind of relationship. It happens between partners, between parents and children, among siblings and friends, and at work. People of every gender, age, income, and education level are on both ends of it, and I don’t assume the person doing it is a man. See Are Abusers Typically Men?

Being smart, careful, or confident does not protect you. Gaslighting depends on how much you trust the other person, and trusting people close to you is normal.

Questions People Ask About Gaslighting

Is gaslighting abuse?

When it is a pattern, yes. The Hotline classes it as emotional abuse, and because most of it is carried out through speech, it is also verbal abuse. A single misstatement is not gaslighting. Repeated denial, rewriting, and blame that leave you doubting your own mind is.

You don’t have to settle on a name for your relationship to take this seriously. You can look at what happens, how often, and what it does to you.

How is gaslighting different from misremembering, disagreeing, or lying?

Everyone misremembers. Couples disagree about who said what. People lie for reasons that have nothing to do with controlling anyone. What separates those from gaslighting is what happens next:

• When there is proof. Show someone who misremembered a text message or a receipt and they say, “Huh, you’re right.” A person gaslighting changes the subject, gets angry, or says the proof doesn’t count.
• Room for two versions. An honest disagreement leaves space for both people’s memories. Gaslighting leaves space for one.
• Scope. A lie covers a fact. Gaslighting goes after your ability to judge facts, so you end up apologizing and doubting your own mind.
• Repetition. A bad conversation happens once. Gaslighting follows you from one conversation to the next.

Countering is a clear example: the person contradicts you even when you are holding the proof.

Does the person gaslighting me know they are doing it?

It depends, and nobody outside their head can say. Some people deny and rewrite because they know it works. Others do it from habit, panic, or an unwillingness to be wrong. The effect on you is the same either way: you lose trust in your own account, and they stay in charge of the story.

Working out why can take over your life, and the answer doesn’t change what you need to do next. Gaslighting is not a diagnosis, and I don’t assign labels to the people who do it. Are Abusers Mentally Ill? covers that question.

How do I know if it is happening to me?

Dr. Robin Stern, who wrote The Gaslight Effect, lists signs that many people recognize, and the Hotline summarizes them. In my words, you might:

• ask yourself several times a day whether you’re too sensitive
• apologize constantly, often without knowing what for
• feel confused, even crazy, in the relationship
• make excuses for the person to friends and family, or leave things out so you don’t have to explain
• have trouble making simple decisions
• feel that you used to be more confident and more relaxed

Several of these can have other causes, including depression, trauma, and stress, so treat the list as a reason to look closer, not a verdict. Compare it with what happens in specific conversations. The Am I Abused? quiz can help you look at the whole relationship.

What does gaslighting do to a person?

Confusion, anxiety, isolation, and depression are common results. Many people also lose confidence in their own decisions and feel unsure of their own stability. Some develop symptoms of trauma; see PTSD from Domestic Abuse.

These are reactions to what was done to you. They say nothing about whether the other person’s version of you is true. How Crazymaking and Coercive Control Affect Your Brain and Thinking covers how this kind of control changes thinking.

Will explaining myself better, or showing proof, make it stop?

I believed it would. I rephrased, repeated myself, talked over him, and brought logic, and none of it ended anything. The conversation was never a search for the right answer, so a better explanation had nothing to land on. That is not a sign you explained badly.

Stepping out of the argument about what is real helps more than trying to win it. That can mean:

• declining the debate. You don’t owe anyone a trial about what happened. Personal boundaries can help.
• keeping your own record somewhere the other person can’t reach, and not telling them you keep one.
• checking your memory with someone outside the relationship.

Changing how you respond can anger a person who relies on control. If they have threatened you or hurt you, or you are afraid of how they will react, make a safety plan before you change anything.

How do I trust myself again?

Start with small things you can check. Write down what was said and done soon after it happens, with the date, so you have an account that doesn’t change when someone tells you it should. Keep it where the other person cannot find it. A shared device, a shared printer, or a cloud account they can open can all give it away. Notes in a locked place you control are safer than any of those, though no storage method is completely secure.

After a few weeks, read your notes back. Patterns you couldn’t see inside a single conversation tend to show up.

Then talk with someone outside the relationship: an advocate, a counselor, or a friend who has no stake in the other person’s version. The Hotline invites anyone who recognizes the signs above to call or chat.

The Verbal Abuse Incident and Pattern Log is a structured place to do the writing. It has quick-capture pages for the days you only have a minute, detailed pages for later, and review pages that help you see what repeats. It is not a legal document and it can’t prove anything to anyone else. It gives you your own record to check your memory against. A plain notebook works too. Need it to look like something else? Get the discreet version.

Getting your own judgment back is part of recovery from domestic abuse, and it takes time.

Someone told me I’m the one gaslighting. Am I?

A person who is gaslighting may accuse you of it, and the accusation lands hard when you already doubt yourself. A few questions can help sort it out:

• Who ends up doubting their own memory?
• Who apologizes to end the conversation?
• Whose account is treated as the only reliable one?
• What happens when one of you says, “I see it differently”?

Everyone says “that’s not what I said” sometimes. The question is whether each person can hear “I see it differently” without punishing the other for saying it. If you are honestly worried that you have hurt someone, the Hotline has a page for people asking whether they are hurting their partner.

When is gaslighting a safety emergency?

Gaslighting can come with other forms of abuse, including physical violence, and it can make dangerous situations harder to see clearly. Treat these as urgent: strangulation or choking, weapons, threats to kill, stalking, forced sex, and violence that is getting worse. Read When Is Your Life in Danger? In the US, call 911 if you are in immediate danger.

Where to Get Help

If anything on this page matches what is happening to you, you can talk with an advocate for free, at any hour. In the United States, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is open 24 hours a day: call 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE), text START to 88788, or chat on thehotline.org. Message and data rates may apply to texts. If you are outside the US, contact a domestic abuse service in your area.

If someone else can see your phone, computer, or accounts, they may see that you visited a page like this or contacted a hotline. If you worry about being monitored, use a device the person cannot get to, such as a library computer or a friend’s phone, and clear your browser history afterward. Nothing online can be erased completely.

More on this site: Safety Planning for Domestic Violence and Abuse and Practical Resources.