Rescuing the Term "Gaslighting" From Overuse

Explore different uses of the term "gaslighting" to better understand the behavior.

Reviewed by Margaret Foley

Key points

• Intimate gaslighting is the clearest case where any notion of the victim’s "collusion" is inappropriate.
• Consideration of collusion is appropriate in political gaslighting, a behavior that fosters social division.
• Institutional "gaslighting" bears some similarities to gaslighting but should be distinguished from it.

In my previous post, I set out two features of gaslighting that are essential to its meaning. The first is the exploitation of the victim’s acceptance of fallibility—the normal and healthy acknowledgment that it is possible to be mistaken—and transform it into global self-doubt—a state in which the victim does not trust their own experience and memory as sources of knowledge about themselves and the world. The second is a coercive narration whereby the gaslighter both takes on the role of expert interpreter of some important aspects of the victim’s world and threatens (or delivers) a variety of punishments if the victim resists their interpretation. [1]

Many gaslighters know they are inflicting a false story on their victim, but some genuinely believe their version. And sometimes, in some respects, the gaslighter’s interpretation is valid, but the rigidity and coerciveness—along with threats of punishment if their view is not accepted—constitute gaslighting.

Intimate Gaslighting

A parent who gaslights a child, a peer who gaslights a friend, a partner who gaslights a love, all present the victim with the dilemma: "Accept my version of you and the world or suffer my disapproval/derision/rejection." In some cases, this can lead to retaliation: "If you are going to be this way, then I won’t do anything for you." When the victim resists or leaves, the gaslighter tries to increase their control and undermine other supports by demeaning the victim to others, positioning them as incapable of knowledge.

Tactics for control include talking over (denying speech space), repetition (a broken record response that reminds the victim that there is no room for negotiating differences in perception), and criticism ("You don’t know how to listen" and "You always get into trouble when you think you’re right.")

When victims cannot trust their own knowledge, they may suffer cognitive dissonance: "I think something, but when this differs from what the gaslighter is telling me, I have to believe them." To maintain the relationship and avoid high conflict, the victim needs to trust the gaslighter and distrust their own thoughts. In this intimate context, the victim does—at a stretch, as some claim—"collude" with the perpetrator, but a term such as "collusion" in a context of significant differences in power is not voluntary.

Political Gaslighting

In intimate gaslighting, we see the most stark versions of gaslighting. While there is a case for limiting true gaslighting to close personal relationships, the concept is so useful that it can be extended well beyond the personal sphere without diluting its meaning, as long as the differences in contexts are acknowledged.

In the more public and less personal context, such as political rallies, the gaslighter does not wield power through intimacy, but via a magnetism created by their own certainty. Here truth is sidelined— sometimes by falsehoods but more often by "bullsh*t"—the disregard for truth or falsehood. [2] Speech becomes bias creation, drawing on fears and prejudices. This often leads to "truthiness"—defined by Stephen Colbert as a vague and baseless sense of truth, though often the "claims" are simply freewheeling hypotheticals or scenarios. Political gaslighters are polarizing because followers welcome the power of the gaslighter’s conviction, seeing it as strength (just as intimate gaslighters derive power from their certainty and rigidity). They are, moreover, relieved of the need to make sense of very complex predictions and principles that surround any political discussion. Freed from critical thinking, followers can themselves do the gaslighter’s work among friends, family, and colleagues, repeating the politician’s claims and mimicking the politician’s implicit threats of disdain and rejection for those who do not share their views.

Nonfollowers, however, are destabilized by bullsh*t and receive gratefully a more measured and verifiable story. But resistance to political gaslighting is not always healthy. Those who resent the politician’s attempts at gaslighting might reject the political gaslighter without considering any detail of policy or principle, or follow another gaslighting politician whose bullsh*t outlines a competing story. The notion of victim collusion is more appropriate in the context of political gaslighting because threats of punishment are less direct and more easily avoided. Therefore, in this context, it is more reasonable to speak of "targets" than "victims" and to consider how their own behaviour, desires, and fantasies may render them participants in gaslighting.

Institutional Gaslighting

In dealing with many institutions where the user/customer is told that something will be done/has occurred/could not have occurred, many talk about being gaslit. Let us look at two different cases:

1. A bank insists that a transaction could not have occurred without the customer revealing a PIN or code; the customer knows they did not but cannot persuade the bank otherwise.
2. A company charges a worker with embezzlement, claiming its central software is incapable of error, and disregards or buries evidence to the contrary.

In the first case, whoever tells the customer they must have done what they know they have not done probably believes what they say. There is no punishment inflicted other than denying accountability and redress, and the customer is unlikely to distrust their own beliefs. In the second case, however, the accused worker may be threatened—as occurred in the Horizon/Post Office scandal—with a longer sentence if they do not admit to fraud or false accounting. Here epistemic injustice—discounting a person's ability to know, reason, or question, enforced through power and threat—constitutes gaslighting.

Epistemic injustices occur in many contexts, under many guises. These include embedded bias, wherein the speech of one person is given status and the speech of another person is discounted, according to a category to which they belong—sexual, ethnic, racial, class, or caste. Do these constitute gaslighting? The discussion must continue.