I want to preface this by saying that gaslighting is a very particular thing, and it is not the only bad thing.
I think that what I'm going to answer for this question is not just how do you know if you're being gaslit, but how do you know if you're in a dynamic that the things that you feel and experience are not being respected or heard?
Because there are a lot of ways to be toxic or be crappy to someone that don't rise to the level of gaslighting, but that are still a problem.
So gaslighting, as a definition, gaslighting comes from the movie “Gaslight,” which is a movie about a man who fucks with the gaslights in their house to try to make his wife think that she's going crazy, I think because he's fucking someone else and wants to get her sent to the loony bin so he can get rid of her.
Almost always that's what these things are about.
But it is about a person who purposely changes her environment.
When she remarks on the things that are happening, tells her that he didn't notice it, that she's crazy.
So, it is someone denying objective reality, not just your experience of reality.
So gaslighting would be someone didn't show up for the date at all.
You go back, you text them, why didn't you show up for the date?
They're like, I was there.
I was waiting for you the whole time.
was looking for you.
Where were you?
And you're like, I was at the very front of the restaurant.
There's nowhere you could have come in.
I looked around the tables.
You weren't there.
I asked them if anyone had come in with your name or my name.
Nobody had. I stood in the front of the restaurant for half an hour. You didn't come, right?
They're like, no, I absolutely was there.
If they're denying objective reality, again, generally to make you feel crazy or to make you question your reality, that is gaslighting.
If someone did something that was really shitty and hurt your feelings, and you're like, this really sucked.
And they're like, it's not that big a deal. Is that gaslighting?
I mean, I think there's some interpretation there.
I think that sometimes people use the word “gaslighting” for disagreed with my interpretation of reality, which is an overstep.
Sometimes what we perceive as someone being thoughtless or rude or inappropriate is something that is kind of more messy in the middle.
And so, for that, I would not call that gaslighting necessarily, but it can still be something that is not cool, right?
And so, the thing that I would say is that in a healthy relationship dynamic – Jojo, doing the most, doing the most. I know.
Do you want to come up?
No?
Okay, then stay over there.
If you tell someone, hey, this thing you did really hurt my feelings.
And they say, “It's not a big deal. Why are you so upset about it?”
That's not a healthy relationship, right?
In a healthy relationship dynamic, even if the person didn't do anything wrong, what we want to do is acknowledge like, I am really sorry that you were hurt, right?
That was not what I was going for with those actions.
And it is never my intention to harm you or to hurt you.
Can you help me understand what about this was hurtful for you so that we can figure out what to do about it?
Now, sometimes it may be the case that what you did was nothing wrong and they still felt hurt.
And you don't need to apologize for doing a thing that was not wrong, but you can still express sympathy and caring that it made them upset.
Sometimes they are being unreasonable.
Sometimes they're not, right?
Sometimes a thing that is totally okay to do is also something that is very hurtful.
And our realities and our wants and our needs don't mesh well.
That is something that happens sometimes.
What matters is, does this person care about what you're telling them and how they impacted you?
Do they want to understand it?
Do they show you sympathy and understanding and caring?
Or are they dismissive and defensive and attempting to tell you that you are wrong or that you shouldn't feel the way you feel, right?
Now again, sometimes there is an element of this that needs to happen, right?
There are some people whose reaction to something is way out of proportion to the thing that happened, right?
Because of their own baggage, because there's something else that's going on.
And in that case, there may be an element of needing to tell them like, I can see that this is really upsetting you. I want to support you with that.
And this reaction doesn't seem like it's in proportion to what happened, and I don't understand what that's about.
Can you help me understand this?
Can you help me figure out what's going on here?
Because I don't want to be upsetting you and I don't know how to tell you that I won't do this thing again because it wasn't – the thing that I did doesn't seem to be what's causing this reaction here.
So, I think that the importance here is, are they respectful?
Do they care about how you feel?
Do they care about what you want?
That doesn't mean they always give it to you.
That doesn't mean you always get what you want.
But do they have that amount of curiosity and compassion that underlies how they respond to the things that you are telling them or is their response rooted in, “They didn't do anything wrong. This is on you. They don't want to hear it”?
What I would use the term gaslighting to refer to is something that is intentional.
That is an intentional muddling of reality for whatever goal.
So sometimes people because of their own trauma or their own stuff, they negate your reality.
Not because they're intentionally trying to challenge your reality or make you feel crazy, but because their perception of reality is just way warped based on their own stuff.
And that is kind of like gaslighting, but for me intent is an important portion of gaslighting and the way that I use it.
But it is still something that is like negating, right?
And I think anytime that someone responds to you sharing that you were hurt with something negating, that's a problem.
And there's, again, there's always nuance here, right?
Like if the way that you share that you were hurt is really aggressive and accusatory and unkind, you are much more likely to get a defensive response from someone that if you come to them with like, “Hey, this thing you did really hurt me. Can we talk about it? Like, I'm happy to figure out which part of this is mine, but can we please talk about this? Cause this, this didn't feel good,” versus “You don't even care about me. You're such a freaking jerk. You don't even care what I'm doing,” right?
The more accusatory and negating either person is, the worse that dynamic is.
So, it's important to share when someone hurts us as much as we can from a space of vulnerability and openness and a desire to heal rather than a space of needing them to be wrong and be punished.
And so, you have to find that balance for yourself of how can I let you know that I was feeling hurt in a way that isn't about me having to negate my own hurt, but that also isn't centering that hurt in a way that makes it really hard for us to have a discussion about it that is healthy and helpful.
Sander Jones' book “Cultivating Connection” is really, really helpful for this, I think, because it talks a lot about how to have these discussions in a way that helps people feel heard so that you can move towards a space of resolution.
Strongly recommend that book.
But how can you tell if you're being gaslit?
If you feel like you go into a conversation knowing one thing and you come out of it feeling really confused or something else is totally true, that could be a sign.
If you feel like you might be being gaslit, start taking notes.
Take notes before you go into a conversation about what you're thinking and why and what you think is going on and then take notes after about your perception after it.
And then take a look at it maybe with a friend or a coach or a therapist to figure out why did this perspective change and is that perspective change something that is coming from inside of me from understanding things differently or is this me being talked out of my reality in a way that is not healthy.
If you feel like you're crazy all the time, something toxic is probably happening.
If you're having a lot of fights and you're confused about them, something weird is happening.
If you feel like you go into a conversation to tell someone that they hurt you and end up reassuring and comforting them, something weird is happening there.
It's a real common switcheroo that some folks pull that you're like, hey, this thing you did was really, really hurtful and they're like, “Oh my god I’m so terrible, I know. I'm so bad. I’m so terrible at these things,” and you're like, “Oh baby, it's okay, it's okay.”
If you end up comforting them about them having hurt you, bad news, or my other favorite is it's really hard for you when you keep telling me that I’ve been hurting you.
It just is really hard for me to hear that I’m hurting you so much.
Then be different.
Either we're a bad fit or you need to change.
Those are like if you keep hurting – I will admit right now I’m a bit biased in saying this little bit because of a relationship I came out of fairly recently where the person I was dating apparently has gone through several cycles of every person that they're seeing being really pissed at them and they can't figure out why this keeps happening.
I’m like look in the mirror, buddy.
It seems like you're doing something and they've been told multiple times with multiple people what it is that they're doing that's a problem and they just don't change.
So, if that's happening and then they pulled the whole with me like, “Oh, I just can't seem to stop triggering you and it's really hard for me,” and I’m like, “Uh-huh. It would be nice if you treated me well so we didn't have to have these conflict conversations,” but you know, I can see that it's hard for you to keep being informed that you're still fucking up.
Maybe fuck up less.
Just a thought.
So, yeah, anyway, how do you know if you're being gaslit?
Do you feel like you're kind of crazy?
Do you feel like you don't know what reality is?
Do you feel like your partner doesn't respect what you tell them about how you're thinking and feeling or about how the things they do impact you?
Do you feel like you're having fights that you don't understand or conflicts you don't understand?
Do you feel like you go into a conflict with one understanding and come out totally different?
You know, take some notes.
Get some data.
Talk to friends about it.
Talk to a therapist or a coach about it, if you feel like you need to just pay attention to what is shifting your reality because sometimes we go into a conflict very certain of something.
And then we get new information through the course of working through that conflict and it does change our understanding of what happened.
But if that's happening all the time, then probably something weird is happening and so pay attention to that.
Take a look at that.
Okay. Alex says, “Sometimes there is a common denominator in patterns.”
Yeah.
If all your partners keep getting mad at you, what's the one thing that has remained constant there?
What do you think?
I don't know.
So hard to tell. Allie also said, “Mike and I talk about needing to separate intent from impact.”
Yes.
Hi Jojo.
You want to come up?
Come on.
Yeah.
So, you know, I think that I am not someone who believes that intent does not matter.
I think intent does matter.
There is a reason that we consider premeditated murder and manslaughter very different things.
But intent is not magic.
Just because you didn't intend to hurt someone doesn't mean that you didn't still hurt them.
Intent matters.
It colors how we understand and perceive what somebody did, but it is not magic.
Just because you didn't intend to hurt people doesn't mean that you didn't do it and sometimes that lack of intent is because you were just being generally careless.
You were just being generally thoughtless and so the lack of intent is not actually exculpatory.
It's something that is a portion of that problematic pattern.
So just I think looking at like what was the intent, what was the impact, how do they impact each other and what's the important focus there.
What's the piece we want to be worried about in that?
Yeah.
So just looking at like intent and impact because sometimes intent is really important, sometimes intent is less important and understanding that your impact can be very different than your intent, but both do need a space and we need space to understand and accommodate both of those.
