What is gaslighting? Where the term comes from, and signs

Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which one person, over time, makes another doubt their own memory, perception or judgment, until they trust the manipulator's version of reality over their own. The word comes from a 1938 play and its 1944 film, Gaslight, in which a husband tries to convince his wife she is going mad. It isn't a clinical diagnosis, but it names a real pattern of emotional abuse.

In short

• The core of gaslighting is a campaign against someone's confidence in their own mind, not a single lie or argument.
• It works through repeated denial, twisting events, isolation and attacks on the person's credibility, and it feeds on differences in power.
• Ordinary disagreements, honest misremembering and a single lie are not gaslighting; the pattern and the effect on the other person's self-trust are what mark it.

Where does the word gaslighting come from?

The English writer Patrick Hamilton's play Gas Light was first staged in 1938. It is set in a Victorian house, where a husband secretly searches the rooms upstairs at night for hidden jewels. Each time he turns on the gas lamps up there, the lights in the rest of the house dim. When his wife notices the dimming, and the footsteps overhead, he tells her she is imagining things, part of a plan to make her believe she is losing her mind.

A British film followed in 1940, and in 1944 the Hollywood studio MGM made the best-known version, directed by George Cukor, with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. Bergman won the Academy Award for best actress for the role, one of the film's two Oscars.

The verb took longer. The word "gaslighting" appears in neither the play nor the films; its earliest recorded use dates from 1961. In 1969 a report in the medical journal The Lancet, "The gas-light phenomenon," described cases of people trying to have relatives committed to psychiatric hospital by convincing others they were insane. The word spread far beyond psychiatry in the 2010s, and in 2022 Merriam-Webster named it the word of the year, after lookups on its site rose 1,740% over the year before. Its dictionary defines it as manipulation that causes the victim "to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories."

How does gaslighting work?

Gaslighting is a process, not an incident: its target is the other person's trust in their own mind. The sociologist Paige Sweet, who has interviewed people who experienced it, wrote in Scientific American in 2022 that gaslighting typically unfolds through four tactics: denial or distortion of what happened, isolation from others who might confirm the person's view, shame, and attacks on their credibility so that even other people doubt them.

Each tactic does a different job. Denial plants the first doubt: "That never happened." Distortion rewrites the event: "I only said that because you were screaming." Isolation removes the witnesses, the friends and family who might say "No, I saw it too." Credibility attacks recast the person as unstable, "You know how you get," so that their complaints sound like symptoms. Over months, someone who keeps hearing these messages can start apologizing for things they didn't do and checking their own memories against the other person's.

Sweet's research also stresses power. Gaslighting works best where one side already has more of it: more money, more social standing, or a stereotype on its side, such as the old one that women are irrational. It is most often described in abusive intimate relationships, but it also happens in families and in workplaces and institutions, where a manager or an organization can deny what an employee saw. It isn't always fully deliberate. Some people deny reality to protect their own self-image, a move related to the way cognitive dissonance pushes people to explain away facts that clash with what they believe about themselves.

What does gaslighting sound like?

Some phrases come up again and again in accounts of it. None proves gaslighting on its own; the pattern does.

• Denying clear events: "I never said that," about something said that morning.
• Recasting feelings as the problem: "You're too sensitive," "You're overreacting," "You're crazy."
• Rewriting the past: "That's not what happened, you always remember things wrong."
• Turning the complaint around: "The real problem is how you're attacking me."
• Recruiting others: "Everyone thinks you've been acting strange lately."
• Trivializing: "It was a joke. Why do you make everything a big deal?"

The effects on the person on the receiving end are often the clearest sign. People describe second-guessing themselves constantly, apologizing all the time, feeling confused or "foggy" after conversations, making excuses to friends for the other person's behavior, and feeling that something is wrong without being able to say what. That kind of corrosive self-doubt can resemble impostor syndrome, though impostor feelings usually arise without anyone working to create them.

How is gaslighting different from an ordinary disagreement?

The word is now used loosely, sometimes for any argument or any lie, and experts worry that stretches it until it means little. A side-by-side comparison helps:

	Ordinary disagreement or mistake	Gaslighting
What's disputed	One event or opinion	Your ability to know what's real
How often	Occasional	Repeated, a pattern over time
Evidence	Both people can look at it and update	Evidence is dismissed, or you are blamed for raising it
Your feelings	Can be heard, even if the other person disagrees	Treated as proof that something is wrong with you
Outsiders	Not a threat to the conversation	You are pulled away from them, or they are told you're unstable
Afterward	You may still disagree, but trust your own mind	You doubt your memory and judgment more each time

Two people can honestly remember the same event differently. Memory is rebuilt each time it is recalled rather than replayed like a recording, one reason the brain gets details wrong, so a single mismatch is normal. A single lie, too, is a lie and not gaslighting. What sets gaslighting apart is a sustained effort, deliberate or not, to make one person's version of reality override the other's.

Still argued

How widely the word should be used is argued. Some psychologists and writers say its spread has helped people recognize abuse they couldn't name before. Others say its use for every disagreement, and in politics for any claim one dislikes, waters down a term for serious harm and can itself be used to shut down legitimate disagreement ("you're gaslighting me" as a way to end an argument). Because it is not a formal diagnosis, there is no agreed test for it, and research on how common it is remains limited.

What helps if you think it's happening?

Common advice from people who study abuse points in a few directions. Writing down events soon after they happen, with dates, gives an independent record to check memory against; in Sweet's interviews, one woman kept a journal for exactly that reason. Talking with people outside the relationship, such as friends, family or a counselor, restores the outside view that gaslighting works to remove. Sweet also argues that material security matters: people with a living wage, child care and safe housing are less dependent on abusive partners and bad jobs, which makes the manipulation harder to sustain.

Gaslighting is often part of wider emotional abuse. The UK's National Health Service lists, among the signs of emotional abuse, a partner who denies abuse is happening or downplays it, isolates someone from family and friends, or tells them "what to think." Anyone who feels unsafe, or worried about a relationship, can talk to a doctor, a licensed therapist or a domestic abuse service in their own country; many offer free, confidential support, and in an emergency, local emergency services are the first call. Understanding the pattern, as psychology tries to, can help name it, but nobody has to be sure it is gaslighting to ask for help.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: why does the dimming gas lamp make a good image for this kind of manipulation?
• What separates gaslighting from two people simply remembering an event differently?
• Why does isolation from friends and family make gaslighting work better?

Sources

• Gaslighting — Wikipedia
• The 17th Academy Awards, 1945 — Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
• 'Gaslighting' is Merriam-Webster's word of 2022 — Associated Press, via NBC News, 2022
• How gaslighting manipulates reality — Paige L. Sweet, Scientific American, 2022
• Domestic violence and abuse: getting help — National Health Service (UK)