Defining gaslighting and its techniques
Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which one person deliberately distorts a partner's perception of reality, memory, and judgment until the victim begins to doubt their own sanity. The name comes from the 1944 film Gaslight, whose plot turns on a husband dimming and brightening the gas lamps in the house in order to convince his wife that she is losing her mind. The techniques that characterize gaslighting include the following. (1) Denial: flatly asserting that events which did happen never took place. (2) Minimization: dismissing the victim's feelings as an overreaction or as evidence of being too sensitive. (3) Blame-shifting: attributing the cause of every problem to the victim. (4) Manipulation of information: relaying facts in a distorted form. (5) Isolation: cutting the victim off from the people who might support them. (6) Intermittent reinforcement: showing occasional warmth and affection, which leaves the victim confused about what the relationship actually is.
The psychological consequences of gaslighting
Victims of gaslighting suffer serious psychological harm from manipulation sustained over a long period. Their confidence in their own judgment collapses, and they come to live in a state of constant self-doubt, wondering whether something is wrong with them. Self-esteem can be badly eroded, and the experience is widely noted to lead to intense anxiety, low mood, and trauma responses. What makes gaslighting especially dangerous is how hard it is for the victim to notice that it is happening. Because the perpetrator distorts reality skillfully, the victim stops being able to trust their own memories and perceptions and starts accepting the perpetrator's version of reality instead. Dependence on the perpetrator deepens as a result, and leaving the relationship becomes correspondingly harder. From the standpoint of attachment theory, gaslighting is thought to unsettle the victim's basic assumptions about themselves and other people, and to push them toward an anxious way of relating in which they are forever watching the other person for cues. The victim internalizes beliefs of the form "I cannot judge things correctly" and "I could not survive without this person."
Telling this apart from a compatibility problem
Gaslighting should never be filed away as a compatibility problem. A mismatch in personality or values is not a question of who is right, and there is room to work it out between you. Gaslighting is a different thing altogether: one person deliberately rewrites the other's perception of reality in order to control them, and that is not something mutual accommodation can resolve. Even so, it is easy to lose sight of the shape of the problem while you are still asking yourself whether the two of you are simply badly matched. A useful clue is what remains after a disagreement. With a compatibility problem, what remains is the feeling that you did not see eye to eye. With gaslighting, what erodes is your confidence in your own memories and perceptions. On the side of the person doing it, one sometimes sees a controlling streak bound up with a marked lack of consideration for others. On the receiving side, people who accommodate others too readily, who hold a low estimate of themselves, or who carry a strong fear of being abandoned are more likely to absorb this kind of manipulation. That is not to say the cause lies with the person on the receiving end. If any of this sounds familiar, stop trying to work it out alone: tell someone you trust, or a professional support service, what has actually been happening. Simply letting an outside pair of eyes in makes it much easier for a distorted reality to regain its outline.