Today's Saturday • 7 mins read
— By Dr. Sandip Roy.
Gaslighting, by any interpretation, is a deliberate act of mental abuse. It feeds the victim lies, half-truths, word salad, and reality distortion to make them deeply confused and unsure of themselves.
Narcissistic and other manipulative gaslighters can make you question your memories and life events, making you wonder if they really happened or if you are just imagining them.
Its ultimate goal is to make you depend on the gaslighter to verify and validate your memories, opinions, thoughts, and reality.
Over time, as you get reliant on your gaslighter to verify the truth of an event, memory, or belief, you lose self-confidence and self-esteem.
A gaslighted person can ask, “I think my friend Sheila was here on Wednesday, right? I am so confused these days!”
The gaslighter also worsens the power imbalance in the relationship. So you won’t protest when they tell others that you’re having false illusions and delusions, getting more and more helpless on your own, and losing your mind.
When you show your gaslighter proof that they are wrong, they will often gaslight you even more by saying, “You’re imagining things and don’t even know it.”
They want you to ask yourself, “Am I going crazy?”
Gaslighting Phrases Used By Classic Gaslighters
A gaslighter mainly tries to psychologically manipulate you into distrusting yourself. These are some of their favorite phrases:
“I never said that.”
The denial statements are meant to plant doubts in the victim’s mind. They want to convince their target that they are imagining things that never happened.
“You’re too sensitive.”
When the gaslighter says, “You’re too sensitive,” the goal is blame-shifting. It’s a smart move to get you to focus on your own feelings and reactions, away from what they did wrong.
By saying that your feelings are an overreaction or that you are “too sensitive,” they take away your full mental energy to think clearly. This makes it easier to control you.
They also imply you shouldn’t be offended and should instead accept your fault like “normal” people do, since you are no longer completely sane.
“That never happened.”
It is a blatant denial, often expressed with an air of surprise or anger.
These statements are designed to make the victim doubt their own eyes, ears, and memory of events.
This rejects the victim’s reality outright and plants seeds of uncertainty and self-doubt in the victim’s mind. The victim gradually loses her self-confidence to express her experiences and recollections.
That is the key goal of the gaslighter: to make the victim less trusting of their own views and thoughts and more trusting of the narcissist’s validations.
“Stop being so insecure.”
In a classic case of being caught cheating, the gaslighter flatly denies their involvement and transfers the blame to the victim, saying it’s their insecurity that’s making them imagine the act as cheating.
“Stop being so paranoid.”
It strengthens the gaslighter’s argument that the victim is losing touch with reality.
This creates an increasing sense of overdependence on the narcissist. The victim starts to believe that their abuser knows how to keep them safe and in touch with the real world.
“Stop being so dramatic.”
Gaslighters use this phrase to help convince victims that their concerns and reactions are overblown, while the issue is trivial. This is a direct strike on the reasoning intellect of the target person.
“You’re imagining things.”
A victim may get to hear their partner repeat this (“You’re imagining things” or “You’re making this up”) if they have narcissistic personality traits. This is one of the most frequent expressions used by narcissists.
They may be prone to using their denial as a means of defense. As a result, they may coerce the victim to change their view of a situation.
“Just stop thinking about it!”
That phrase openly accuses the victim of overthinking and being unable to stop the train of thought in their mind.
Another variation of that phrase could be, “Why do you keep overthinking so much?”
“It sounds like you don’t trust me.”
It is one of the more direct gaslighting phrases used by abusers to shift blame away from themselves and onto the victim.
They will frequently claim that the situation was a misunderstanding because of a lack of trust by the victim in them, and this phrase is their way to get away with it. They may add that the victim needs to rebuild trust in the relationship.
“Stop trying to act like such a victim!”
It tells the victim that they are acting like a victim!
What this statement does is make the victim reluctant to share their doubts and ordeals with others, since they may start to think she/he is behaving like a victim while they are not.
“Calm down and just drop it already!”
This aims to underplay the surge of emotions the victim is experiencing. This negates the emotional climate in the victim’s mind and asks them to do the same.
It tells them that they are unnecessarily making mountains out of molehills by overreacting, such as getting angry or aggressive.
“Why are you always so angry at me?”
To be honest, that can be an accurate statement, because the victim spends much of their day confused about what is right and wrong, causing them to have a constant low level of anger.
That sentence makes the victim realize that being angry all the time is wrong. If they are not angry, they will hold themselves accountable for angry reactions even before they occur.
More Gaslighting Phrases
- “How many times do I have to tell you?”
- “What do you want me to do about it?”
- “Stop exaggerating. It wasn’t all that bad.”
- “You’re not allowed to have your own opinion!”
- “Your mind seems off. You desperately need help.”
- “What are you talking about? That never even happened!”
- “I was joking. Why can’t you take a joke like a normal person?”
- “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. It upsets you too much.”
- “After all, it’s entirely your doing. When are you going to get this?”
- “You know that’s not what you meant, so stop pretending like it is!”
- “You can’t do it on your own anymore. You must ask me before making any decision.”
- “You don’t even know how to feel an emotion properly. You should be feeling sorry, not angry.”
How Do Gaslighters Manipulate Their Victims?
The classic gaslighter works his/her way through the victimization process as:
- Insisting that the victim repeatedly makes the same mistakes (when they don’t).
- Labeling their victims’ emotions as inappropriate, irrational, and out of place.
- Branding their feelings as overreactions and dramatizations of the situations.
- Isolating them as the main part of the problem when they are confronted.
Any gaslighter’s ultimate goal is to take control of their victim’s mind, making them dependent on them for every decision. Though it takes time, once successful, the victim becomes fixated on the gaslighter for emotional support and intellectual approval.
Final Words
A classic example of gaslighting:
– A gaslighter gets caught in an immoral act, like cheating.
– First, they deny it. “You saw it wrong! It never happened!”
– Then, when you say others saw it too, they say, “They are feeding you lies; stay away from them.”
Gaslighting can also be carried out by a large group working together. I believe Edward Snowden and Aaron Swartz are modern-day victims of coordinated gaslighting by several governmental agencies.
Some movies with a “gaslighting” theme:
- The 1944 movie Gaslight, which popularized the term. The husband secretly dimmed all the gaslights in the house. When the wife complained, he said she was imagining it. This is to convince her and others that she is insane.
- The 2016 film “The Girl On The Train” had the wife being gaslighted by her husband for so long that she could not trust her own judgment on whether she had been the cause for someone to lose their life.
- Another similar-themed film was 2014’s “Gone Girl,” which had the wife hauntingly gaslighting the husband.
Gaslighting is common among sociopaths and narcissists. Both are masters at convincing their victims to believe their version of the events.
√ Also Read: 8 Signs of A Toxic Friendship & How To Handle Them
√ Please spread the word if you found this helpful.
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