What Is Gaslighting?

What Is Gaslighting?

Gaslighting is psychological manipulation that makes a person doubt their own memory and perception. The word comes from the 1944 film Gaslight, in which a husband dims the gas lamps in the house and tells his wife she is imagining it.

People disagree about what happened all the time. Gaslighting is different because it goes after a person's ability to trust what they saw and heard.

Researchers describe gaslighting as abuse carried out through denial, lying, contradiction and misdirection (March et al., 2023). Common forms include:

• denying a conversation or event took place
• saying you are too sensitive or that you remember it wrong
• turning the conversation to your reaction whenever you raise a concern
• switching between warmth and cruelty, so you can't predict which version of the person you will get
• telling other people you are unstable before you describe what is happening

Any one of these can be brushed off on its own. Gaslighting works through repetition, and each time a person gives way to the other's account, it gets harder to hold on to their own.

In intimate relationships, gaslighting is one of the tools of coercive control. Someone who can't trust their own perceptions is less likely to name abuse or ask for help. March and colleagues point out that the standard power and control wheel used in domestic violence work leaves out this attack on a person's sense of reality. The gender-neutral power and control wheel used here includes it.

Gaslighting often shows up alongside DARVO, a pattern in which the person causing harm reverses roles and presents themselves as the victim.

In the same study of 315 adults, people higher in psychopathy and sadism rated gaslighting tactics as more acceptable, and men rated them as more acceptable than women did. Gaslighting is used by people of every gender, which is why the wheel is written in gender-neutral language.

Medical gaslighting happens when a patient's account of their own symptoms is repeatedly dismissed, for example when physical symptoms are put down to stress or anxiety without being investigated. A 2024 review suggests the term "medical invalidation" for dismissal without intent to harm, and notes that both cause damage (Fuss et al., 2024).

Patients who are not believed tend to withdraw from care and avoid appointments, and dismissive labels follow them from one provider to the next through their records (Shapiro & Hayburn, 2024). Women, people of color, disabled people and people with contested diagnoses are dismissed more often.

Many adults identified as autistic or ADHD later in life describe years of being told their experience was anxiety or a personality problem. After enough of that, people stop trusting how they read their own bodies and minds, and rebuilding that trust is part of recovering from it.

At work, gaslighting usually means having concerns trivialized or earlier agreements denied. Researchers who built a workplace gaslighting scale found it linked to lower job satisfaction and more role conflict (Kukreja & Pandey, 2023).

• Keep a record. Write down what happened soon after it happens, so you have something to check your memory against later.
• Talk with someone outside the relationship. A person who isn't involved can tell you whether your account of events holds together.
• Look across many conversations. Gaslighting is hard to see in a single exchange and easier to see over weeks or months.
• Plan for safety if you need to. If gaslighting comes with fear or control, use the Safety Plan Builder or contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.
• Work with a therapist. Therapy can help you sort out what you experienced and trust your own perceptions again.

• March, E., Kay, C. S., Dinić, B. M., et al. (2023). "It's all in your head": Personality traits and gaslighting tactics in intimate relationships. Journal of Family Violence.
• Fuss, A., Jagielski, C. H., & Taft, T. (2024). We didn't start the fire...or did we? A narrative review of medical gaslighting and introduction to medical invalidation. Translational Gastroenterology and Hepatology, 9, 73.
• Shapiro, D., & Hayburn, A. (2024). Medical gaslighting as a mechanism for medical trauma: Case studies and analysis. Current Psychology, 43, 34747-34760.
• Kukreja, P., & Pandey, J. (2023). Workplace gaslighting: Conceptualization, development, and validation of a scale. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1099485.