Therapy speak is on the rise—or perhaps it’s already reached its pinnacle, given how often people confidently use clinical terms to describe themselves and others. Indeed, in our attempts to understand our experiences and relationships, fueled by the sudden increased access to psychological knowledge thanks to the Internet and social media, we’re relying too heavily on psychobabble to explain and define our lives.
The result is that many clinical words are being misunderstood and misused—even weaponized. And none more so than gaslighting. (Well, except perhaps for narcissism.) Suddenly, people are claiming gaslighting left and right. But are they being gaslit? Are you? Let’s look at what this word means and untangle the difference between invalidation and gaslighting.
Defining Gaslighting
Gaslighting is an abuse tactic used to make someone doubt their experience of reality. In it, an abuser questions the person’s perception of events, making them lose trust in their memory and experience. Over time, with repeated instances of gaslighting, the other person believes that they’re misunderstanding and misreading the world around them and relies on the abuser’s narrative as truth. It makes them feel stupid, inept, and like they’re going crazy.
Some Truths About Real Gaslighting
- It’s rare that someone only gaslights and engages in no other abusive behaviors. Gaslighting is often one of many tools in the arsenal of an abuser. It’s part of eroding a person’s self-trust and self-esteem, but it’s not the only method being used.
- Gaslighting can be intentional or unintentional. Some abusive people are fully aware that they’re spinning a lie and making the other person feel crazy, whereas others so profoundly believe that their truth is the only truth that they don’t have insight into their actions.
- True gaslighting does incredible damage. People healing from an abusive relationship that involved gaslighting have to re-learn self-trust. They need to learn to believe their experience was accurate and valid. They have to remember that they’re not crazy; they were just with someone who tried to make them feel that way.
- While there’s the chance someone gaslights you only once, this almost never happens. That’s because gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse that works when it’s repeated. Its goal is to help an abuser gain power and control by making the other person feel crazy, uncertain, and self-doubting. One instance of gaslighting won’t accomplish that, but gaslighting during every argument will get results.
Invalidation, Lying, and Disagreeing Aren’t Automatically Gaslighting
We often misunderstand the term and think it’s gaslighting if someone invalidates our experience, lies, or disagrees with us. These things, in and of themselves, are not gaslighting. Here’s why.
Invalidation is when someone ignores or dismisses your experience or feelings. They poke holes in what you’re saying. They tell you that you should feel differently. This can be a component of gaslighting, but it can also be a very normal human response when someone is thinking or feeling a way we don’t like or disagree with. Chances are you’re guilty of doing this: telling someone they’re angry for no reason, they’re being too sensitive, or that other people have it worse, so they shouldn’t be so upset. It’s not an effective way to respond to someone’s suffering, but it’s also not automatically gaslighting.
Lying is another common behavior that can be part of gaslighting. People lie because they don’t want the other person to be upset, they’re ashamed of what they’ve done, or they’re scared. It’s a defense mechanism to avoid taking responsibility or a (misguided) effort to remove someone’s unhappiness. Again, it’s not good or effective, but it’s not abusive.
And then there’s disagreeing, the biggest target for misapplied accusations of gaslighting. Disagreeing with someone’s memory of events or feelings is not the same as gaslighting. People usually have different perceptions of the same experience and sometimes resort to arguing about whose perception was accurate. People cling to the (incorrect) idea that there is an accurate perception instead of accepting that many different versions of reality can coexist peacefully if we let them. But disagreeing and arguing about who’s right isn’t gaslighting unless it’s accompanied by the insidious insistence that the other person is crazy for thinking what they do or that they’re intentionally claiming an untruth as a manipulation tactic (perpetrators often do this: reverse roles and claim the victim is the abusive person). It needs to include denying or distorting reality to make the other person feel like they can’t trust their perception.
For example, when your parent says, “You said you’d come home for the long weekend,” and you respond with, “What? I didn’t say that. You’re not remembering that right. I have to catch up on stuff that weekend,” you’re not gaslighting them. You’re disagreeing with each other. You’re not making your parent feel crazy. However, if instead you said, “I never said that. You hear what you want to, even if I don’t actually say it. You make stuff up then get mad at me about it,” that would be closer to gaslighting because you’re denying their reality, blaming them for what they think they heard, and telling them they’re imagining things.
The Problem With Misusing Gaslighting
Like all clinical terms related to abuse, gaslighting carries a lot of weight. It is a very destructive abuse tactic that causes long-term harm to its victims. Claiming gaslighting incorrectly means we view normal (although admittedly unhelpful) behaviors as abusive, leading to significant relationship ruptures.
The misapplication overlooks and even denies the reality that humans don’t always treat each other well, and this doesn’t immediately amount to abuse. Most people lie, dismiss, ignore, reject, minimize, or disagree. They intentionally or inadvertently invalidate other people’s experiences or feelings because they don’t want the person to feel that way or they think it’s wrong, but they’re not gaslighting them.
We need to give space for people to be frustratingly imperfect without jumping to terms of abuse because these words represent abhorrent behaviors and their true definitions need to remain intact.