Gaslighting Guide: What it is, how to respond, how it damages intuition and methods for intuition repair
Brianna D. Mann, Ph.D.
When children grow up in homes with a parent(s) with significant mental health concerns, they often experience abuse and neglect. This is because the parent has difficulty regulating their own emotional experiences and taking care of their own emotional and physical needs. This makes it very difficult for the parent to respond to conflict and emotional distress in healthy ways and to take care of the needs of others, including their children. As a result, there is often a lot of parental immaturity, negative emotion, chaos, substance use, yelling, name calling, too much or too little supervision, controlling behavior, little attention paid to the child’s feelings and needs, gaslighting, physical or sexual abuse, and role reversals, with the children taking care of the household, the parent and the parent’s needs.
Gaslighting defined
Today, we are going to highlight the phenomenon of gaslighting specifically because it is particularly deleterious and present in all forms of abuse (emotional, physical and sexual). The name comes from a 1938 British play (later made into a film) called, Gas Light, involving a husband using the characteristic tactics we will discuss against his wife (Wikipedia-Gas Light, 1938). Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse that occurs when a perpetrator causes their victim to doubt their sanity and experience of reality by implicitly or explicitly conveying that:
their experiences aren’t real;
their feelings are wrong;
their memory of events is incorrect;
they don’t know what they need or want, but the perpetrator does;
they aren’t who they think they are;
the perpetrator’s behavior is somehow the victim’s fault;
nothing is wrong, even though something seems wrong;
it is okay or normal for terrible things to happen like emotional, physical or sexual abuse;
the perpetrator’s objectionable behaviors or personality characteristics are actually the victim’s (called projection).