Simply put, gaslighting is when another person fucks with your reality – I have chosen this very colourful language because it really captures best the way in which someone will deny that your experience of what you observe is not what you observe, that what you are feeling or believing according to your inner perception, is not valid in some way. Gaslighting, associated often with narcissism, is a tactic to disempower another person’s reality. This term captures an abusive relationship with someone who has a skillset where they are unable or unwilling to provide us with a truthful sense of reality, with the result of making us undermine our own sense of trusting ourselves and what is true in our inner and outer world.

For a deeper insight into a particularly malignant form of gaslighting, please watch the movie Gaslight , where you will be able to grasp the potential of this tactic to render people insane or even killed. My personal experience, as well as my professional one, is that gaslighting in its more malignant forms exists much more often than you might think at first glance. It is a characteristic of what we call malignant narcissism, where the victim is isolated and made to question his/her own perceptions and feelings, their own sense of logic and cognition, through complex webs of lies and manipulations until he/she has lost all sense of reality and of self.

From my observations, what makes the difference between a malignant form of this circumstance and its more benign, casual occurrence, is the consistency of the abuse, the duration and the means by which it is induced. If the abuser inflicts these tactics consistently, day by day on a child over a period of months and years, and if the means are on the higher scale of violent, aggressive, repressive tactics, then, yes, this becomes highly unhealthy, leading to, more often than not, the likelihood of full-fledged malignancy, where the child becomes more like their parent’s puppet.

In this post though, I want to propose a view where I explore the possibility that a person does not purposefully try to gaslight you, but that is simply the best they can do at their level of consciousness.

I’m going to look at this in the context of a parent-child relationship and start from the premises that the parent is not purposefully abusive, or does not fall under the label of gaslighting as it is today seen with regards to the Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Let’s take a father who avoids, who has an aversion to difficult feelings and to emotional honesty, so let’s focus first on the parent and his relationship with himself. As human beings, we do not want to feel our feelings because they’re painful, so what we do, is we shut down, we distract, we self-medicate, we busy ourselves because we don’t want to feel our despair, our loneliness, our embarrassments… Imagine this father having done something embarrassing – he would not want to be in the centre-stage with his family members witnessing him experience his embarrassment. Having an aversion to feeling his own feelings, he’ll just push them away, avoid them, sweep them under the rug. Instead, he might just smile, just change the subject, just busy himself or distancing himself… or, like so many parents, especially fathers, he might just default to anger. In our culture, again, especially for men but not exclusively, anger is the one emotion that has the most pull, and so if you’re sad, you don’t reveal that you’re sad, you just get angry. If you’re lonely, you don’t reveal that you’re lonely, you just lead from anger. If you’re feeling anxious and distressed, you create an argument with someone. Instead of having to deal with your distress and your anxiety, you start arguing… and we use anger as this catchall default emotion where everyone around us is the target of our anger, resentment, criticism, grumpiness, etc.

If you had a parent who does not value feeling his own feelings and has developed the psychological mechanisms to defend against, to have an aversion, to shut down their challenging emotions, the parent has an allegiance, a sort of a core rule, this (oftentimes subconscious) belief where the approach is: I’m not going there, I’m not going to feel those feelings!! So when the parent is with other family members, and very specifically with the child, if a feeling comes up for the child – say the child is sad – the parent is going to respond to the child with the same allegiance to their own core belief to avert and shutdown and deny and distract from being honest about the feeling that is there in the present moment. This might then come up as a knee-jerk reaction of the parent saying: you’re not sad!! What are you sad about? There’s nothing to be sad about here! You big woose! That is emotional covert gaslighting which means the parent is responding in a way to ignore and/or invalidate the child’s emotional reality. If you take a moment to actually imagine (or remember) being that child, you will see that the child is going to feel lonely, or embarrassed, or ashamed… Let’s say that the child has mild sadness, but the parent who has this very rigid rule says, we’re not going to acknowledge feeling sadness at all in this household and the parent will perpetuate this imposing of his reality onto the child’s developing mind and emotional self. Why? Because, if the parent lets in the emotional reality of the child, they would have to empathize and feel the child’s sadness, which is going to be a gateway to open up the parent to having to feel his own sadness or embarrassment or loneliness or despair or anxiety or fear, whatever it is… so the parent himself is constantly denying the reality of his feelings and essentially gaslighting himself. This self-incongruence, this disconnected inner speech becomes his style of parenting and the model he presents to his offspring as a legacy.

One note here is that this can be very subtle, it doesn’t have to be verbal, it doesn’t have to be direct and it doesn’t have to be conscious – although it might be. For example, let’s say the child comes into the room with a look of sadness on his face and the parent doesn’t even pick it up, the parent totally ignores it. The parent doesn’t register the child’s sadness on their radar, because the parent has trained himself (or he has been trained as a child by his family) to not have a sensitive radar system that’s going to register that a downturned mouth, looking down, heavy eyes – as something that is off and that that should prompt an intervention like – what’s going on? You look sad! Is everything okay? The parent will be so immersed and ingrained in their own emotional disconnect, that they will treat the child from the same place of emotional disconnect as they treat themselves. This produces in the child the same consequence, the same experience where the child is going to feel that his reality doesn’t make sense, that there’s no place in the world for his own feelings, and so now, the child has to talk himself out of having a feeling and a need for comfort for that feeling. Sometimes the child will shame himself for just having a feeling – I have shame that I have a need to be sad, and then I have shame that I feel lonely when my family does not talk to me about my sadness.

In my professional experience, I have encountered many people who had no recollection of such circumstances, but be aware that your parents could have done this by just a look in the eye, maybe they weren’t even trying to do it… Here’s an example: let’s say this 10-year-old boy has some genuine normal sadness and he walks into the room and wants to share with dad, wants some support, wants connection, wants emotional attunement and very quickly, in a split second, the child picks up that dad has a look of disgust on his face. What will happen is that the child will internalize not only the feeling of disgust, but that the child himself is disgusting and the child will believe, oh, there must be something wrong with me if I have this feeling and I very clearly am not going to get dad’s connection, warmth, support, love, so I have to shut this part of me down to try to stay in relationship with dad.

Let’s look, by comparison, at a healthy, positive, loving manifestation of this circumstance. In a healthy family, the parent will be mirroring back any behavioural or verbal cues that would affirm the reality of the child by saying something like, you look lonely, you look like you need a friend and I wonder if you want to talk about it with me… or, a parent would immediately walk over and hug the child and speak to the child’s reality. The parent is creating here a shared reality, a sort of container to hold the emotional experience where there is a completion, where they’re joining in the same reality as that of the child. What happens when a parent doesn’t do that? What happens when the family rule, the family culture, the family dysfunction is to perpetually ignore everyone’s emotional needs and ignore the reality that we’re emotional beings and instead, repeatedly deny and deflect and avert and create a bunch of smoke and mirrors and distraction around naming reality? This makes us implode and shut down to our own emotional truth and having no other means but to take on the same way that the parent is dealing with their own feelings and the same way that the parent works very hard to deny and avoid emotions. The child also will disown his emotions and we can say that, if the child is disowning his emotions, he is disowning a part of themselves and so now he becomes split, he becomes disconnected and this is the place where people shut down emotionally – sometimes for the rest of their lives. This is how narcissism is born.

It could be many many years into adulthood where one day this child, now an adult realizes – I don’t really know what I feel, I don’t feel my feelings, I can’t access them. That’s because he grew up in an environment where this covert denying of feelings messed up his ability to acknowledge reality – this is what happens in any kind of gaslighting situation – it really messes with and screws up our sense of reality and our ability and even willingness to connect emotionally.

Remember your family system – maybe you have multiple family members or a single-parent unit, it doesn’t matter – where you might have been prompted into reinforcing emotional disconnect and where you have been trained into being confused about what a shared emotional reality between two people really looks like. Now, fast-forward into your adult relationships and you wonder why you struggle with them… Many people default to the word “communication” – bad communication, we don’t communicate properly. Here, communication is a catchall phrase which means, we’re not able (or willing) to read each other’s emotional cues and validate each other’s reality and stay contained together and allow each other to mirror back what we’re feeling. Many of us can’t do that for a partner because we haven’t learned how to do it for ourselves. Having parents who have not mirrored our feelings back to us, creates an incredible amount of discord and distress and a chronic, ongoing feeling that something is wrong and that we cannot connect with any of the people in our life.

If you were in an abusive situation where someone was really purposefully trying to screw with you reality and deny that you felt something, deny that something happened, or if you grew up in a situation where your family never acknowledged your own emotional reality, then, chances are, as an adult, you are going to be very challenged to mirror that in your partner, because you can’t mirror it for yourself and what you’re going to feel is like something is wrong, something’s off, there’s this chronic sense that you just have not been able to totally shut down your rational logical mind and your intuitive self knows that something is not right, but you just can’t quite figure it out. This is what will prompt the person into blaming “the other” – this person is to blame that I can’t connect with them… Another way I have seen this manifest is a continuous, compulsive search for the next person who would be able to connect with us, or, if oriented towards the past, the lingering grief of having lost the one person we were ever capable to connect with.

If you’re fortunate enough to fall into a situation where you’re in a relationship with someone who does know how to do this – could be a partner, a therapist, a friend – and all of the sudden that person is acknowledging your emotions – that can feel wildly exposing, simply because you have so much habituated history around being shut down emotionally. When this actually wakes up and there’s this reciprocity and openness to shared containment of emotional attunement, you won’t trust it. It’s very possible that what’s going to happen, is a flood of shame coming in, because what kept this going was you having been shamed and then shaming yourself for having an emotion all your life. You will feel ashamed to open up to that person, so, most times, you won’t. This is where stagnation keeps its grip on people. Shame, funny enough, will be, in this context, a sign of healing, of letting go, of letting all that putrefaction out.

By failing to let shame out, we create a circumstance where we internalize shame and this becomes this very vicious cycle of emotional incongruence, of emotional shutting down, of emotionally denying our own feelings and then denying the feelings of others that we bring with us into our adult relationships and we repeat it, we’re doing the same thing.. and we can then say that we’re the one doing the gaslighting. We can now see clearly how we might not be purposefully trying to be manipulative, to make the other person lose his or her mind, but we’re so ingrained to disowning our own feelings, that we are very attached to a lot of rules and knee-jerk reactions around not letting our partner’s feelings influence us, because if we’d feel and had empathy for their feelings, we would have to wake up and feel our feelings too.

See how this is so reciprocal and how, in a way, many times we’re the victim and the perpetrator at the same time? We are thus simultaneously participating and perpetuating this emotional covert denying, shutting down our partner’s feelings because we’re just repeating what has always been done to us. This is a very common core reason that people struggle in relationships because we struggle to be honest with ourselves and reveal that to another person, we struggle to be emotionally honest with ourselves and reveal it to a partner who might not know how to receive it. Oftentimes, we pick a partner who already came from a family where they too were shutting down emotional openness, emotional warmth, emotional attunement and so now you have two people who pretty much came from similar environments where they’re attempting to build a foundation of intimacy and emotional openness, but where, if we’re going to open up, this promises to bring with it our loneliness and our shame and our sadness and our fear and our anxiety. For this to go towards any type of meaningful healing, we need mature, sophisticated practice to contain and hold and mirror those feelings for a partner, which means that, at a fundamental level, we know how to do it for ourselves. Failing to do that, our relationships will continue to suffer and struggle and many of us will feel like something is always off emotionally with our partner. If we’ve been engaging repeatedly in this type of dynamic, if this happened a lot in our family, we call this an emotional trauma and we could say, if it keeps playing out in our current adult relationships, we’re looping in trauma reenactment where we’re constantly emotionally imploding and feeling great disconnect.

So try to think about what I have proposed here in a way where this isn’t, necessarily, (although it might be) so much a form of a purposefully abusive, manipulative construct, but more a response to the avoiding of emotions and that when a parent does this within themselves, they’re going to also coerce the child into avoiding his/her own emotions through creating their own disconnect and deny their own reality, the same way that their parent has denied theirs.