Gaslighting is a popular psychology term today. It’s fun to use pop psychology terms to belong to some social group, but check this…
Remember how narcissistic is thrown around inappropriately? Ya, same situation here.
When someone is gaslighting another, they are abusing another. Full stop. Gaslighting is abuse.
This is why throwing around the term is so asinine. You are basically running around calling others abusers. That’s not okay. That is as serious claim.
Most people think someone is gaslighting them simply because they disagree.
Nope.
People can be confused, obtuse, or straight assholes, and none of that is gaslighting. Misuse of the term just devalues it and hurts true victims of abuse.
Rather, gaslighting is a slow and insidious process where someone makes another question their own sanity. It almost always takes constant interactions over a sustained period of time, and almost always involves intimate relationships.
There are six primary ways you can identify true gaslighting behavior:
Countering your claims by suggesting you aren’t remembering events correctly.
Withholding engagement by refusing to discuss serious issues.
Trivializing the events or your feelings as not important
Denying that events ever happened.
Diverting the focus of the discussion to your credibility to be making claims altogether.
Stereotyping you to try and dismiss the events and make you not want to speak up.
The victim must trust the abuser to spoon feed the narrative and needs to doubt their own memory of events. They must lose their sense of self.
This is not what is occurring with the casual malicious misuse thrown around in online debates.
The casual misuse of gaslighting fails to address the actions that are bothering you and mislabeling them with inappropriate terminology isn’t helpful for you, or them.
In turn you are doing more harm than helping. Often THOSE THROWING this term around are becoming the verbal abuser attacking the character of others when they want to deflect.
But you aren’t ready for that conversation…
We need to be more cautious when we throw around these terms. If you don’t fully grasp the implications of what this entails it’s best to just describe what you’re experiencing, rather than attempting to label it. This is how we encourage good faith discourse rather than devaluing the experience of true victims of abuse
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