Gaslighting: Definition, Examples, & Signs

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph. D. Candidate
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Gaslighting is an abusive set of behaviors designed to make someone doubt their own reality and sense of self. Read on for signs and examples of gaslighting, as well as suggestions for stopping it.
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We have all had people in our lives who seem to drive us crazy. Maybe there is a person in your own life who comes to mind quickly. Perhaps you leave each interaction with them more confused and uncertain of your own thoughts and beliefs than before. Or maybe after each conversation you have, you somehow end up feeling worse about yourself, but you can’t quite say why.
This person’s effect on you could be more obvious, or more subtle. Maybe you avoid them like the plague, because the very thought of being around this person gets your heart racing – and not in a good way. Or maybe, once you’ve read this article, you’ll realize that a particular person in your life is causing you to doubt yourself in all sorts of ways, and you hadn’t put the pieces together before. The effects of gaslighting on a person can look all of these ways. Let’s take a deep dive on gaslighting – what it is, some telltale signs and examples – so you can know how to deal with any gaslighting that’s happening in your life.​
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What Is Gaslighting? (A Definition)

I sometimes have a hard time making the definition of gaslighting easy to understand. Thankfully, the origins of the term give us a concrete example. The term comes from the 1944 movie about a newly married couple called Gaslight. In the film, the husband tries to drive his new wife crazy so that he can claim her wealth for himself. His primary tactic for doing this is to turn up and down the brightness of the gaslights in their apartment, denying all the while that anything is changing. This is just one of several actions he takes to make her start to doubt her own senses and perceptions; eventually, she will accept reality as he tells her it is, instead.
 
The word gaslighting as we use it today has much in common with this first example. Gaslighting is engaging in behaviors that make the world surreal for somebody else that make them question their own reality (Ferraro, 2006). This may be achieved by manipulating somebody’s perceptions, memory, reasoning, or emotions (Sodoma, 2022). And the ultimate outcome of gaslighting is typically a person who cannot disagree with the gaslighter, because they no longer believe in any of their own thoughts, feelings, or perceptions (Abramson, 2014). However, in the movie example, the husband is quite aware of what he is doing. In real life, not all gaslighters are conscious of their actions – not that this excuses their behavior.

What Is A Gaslighting Narcissist?

A narcissist is extremely attached to seeing the world in a particular way – through a lens that depicts them as uniformly good, desirable, and liked. For this reason, narcissists are likely to insist that other people see the world their way; this makes them likely to consciously or unconsciously gaslight other people (Stern, 2018).
 
Here’s an example: if a narcissist cannot handle a reality in which they make mistakes, they may turn their mistakes into other people’s mistakes: “You must not have reminded me of the time of the meeting. I don’t know why you expect me to remember things you only mention once and then never bring up again. It’s almost like you want me to mess up.”

Gaslighting Phrases

In addition to the example above, phrases that likely indicate someone is trying, intentionally or unintentionally, to gaslight you, include the following:
 
  • “You must not be remembering that right.”
  • “I’m not going to argue with you, but I know what I know.”
  • “There’s no reason to feel that way.”
  • “I sometimes think you’re making these things up just to have an excuse to be mad with me.”
  • “You’re always the victim here, aren’t you? It’s always my fault with you.”
  • “I can’t believe you feel that way – it just doesn’t make sense.”
  • “I didn’t do anything wrong. You’re just too sensitive.”

Examples of Gaslighting

Another way to identify examples of gaslighting is to think about how you might go about eroding somebody’s sense of reality. Efforts to hide important details, lie about one’s own actions, and control the narrative and the person in general, are all behaviors that can have a gaslighting effect (Petric, 2022).
 
Suppose your work colleague fails to meet a deadline in a way that impacts your work together. When you ask them about the situation, gaslighting responses might look like some of the following (Petric, 2022):
 
  • Lying: “I did send you that report. Maybe you should check your email more closely.” 
  • Misdirection: “I’m pretty sure somebody else on the team was supposed to do that. And shouldn’t you remember who you asked to do this?”
  • Denial: “There’s no way that was my responsibility. If it was, I would have it on my to-do list, and look, it’s not here.”
  • Nonverbal behaviors: If somebody glares, audibly sighs, or rolls their eyes, but vehemently denies they are doing these things, or denies that these behaviors have any meaning behind them, they may be part of a gaslighting pattern.
 
Gaslighting in society​
Up to this point, I’ve discussed gaslighting as a behavior that happens between two people, or perhaps a small group of people. However, we can also understand gaslighting as happening on a larger scale. For example, contemporary politics in the United States features a lot of people saying that somebody else’s experience or perception of the facts is totally unreal or false (Rietdijk, 2021). This “post-truth” political reality can feel like gaslighting to many people, although it is far less subtle than most gaslighting behavior.
 
Similarly, it can be helpful to understand gaslighting as a behavior that typically tries to exploit power imbalances between people. In this sense, gaslighting is likely to happen when one person in a relationship holds some kind of social or institutional privileges that the other person does not (Sweet, 2019). For example, gaslighting by men against women often leverages gender-based stereotypes, such as women being “overly emotional” or “changing their minds often.” Similarly, White people may gaslight non-White people about racial microaggressions, saying things like, “His comment had nothing to do with race. You are overreacting” (Johnson et al., 2021).

Gaslighting Signs

Stern (2018) has described a progression of behaviors that occur in a gaslighting situation. First, conflict might arise because the gaslighter is insecure about something in the relationship. Next, the “gaslightee” responds to the conflict in a way that tries to defuse it and appease the gaslighter. But the gaslighter may refuse to end the conflict until their version of events is fully accepted. Overwhelmed, the gaslightee finally gives in to the gaslighter’s story, and suddenly the gaslighter is “right” and the gaslightee’s version of events is discredited.

Origin of Gaslighting

Generally, people who are more likely to gaslight others have poor conflict resolution skills and are not good at managing their close relationships (Brodie et al., 2018). People who are psychologically abusive (and gaslighting is definitely a psychologically abusive behavior) often also are impulsive (Miano et al., 2021) and have trouble regulating their emotions and expressing what they are feeling (Teten et al., 2008). They also tend to get stuck on negative thoughts and to see the world through a hostile lens (Wilkowski & Robinson, 2008).
 
They tend to have trouble understanding what they and other people are thinking. In other words, they have a hard time thinking about thinking (Bateman & Fonagy, 2008), which means they are probably not fully aware of what they are doing. This example is not meant to be belittling, but you could perhaps draw a comparison to when a child vigorously denies doing something they clearly have done.
 
If you ask many psychologists why people persist in doing behaviors that seem harmful to themselves or others, many would say, “because it works in some way.” This is a helpful perspective on gaslighting because it tells us that people who gaslight probably saw other people gaslighting and getting their needs met in this way. For example, they may have witnessed either or both of their parents gaslighting the other when they grew up, and in this context, they learned that gaslighting is an effective (and perhaps even appropriate) way to treat other people.

Gaslighting in a Relationship

In relationships, we are perpetually trying to get our own needs met (and hopefully meeting other people’s needs, too). When a person is gaslighting, their own needs take absolute priority over everything else. Two very common desires we have in relationships are to be seen as good and to feel safe and loved. In relationships, we may gaslight each other if it helps us feel these ways.
 
Here’s an example from Calef and Weinshel (1981). Perhaps I worry that I cannot be loved if I have made a mistake. When I think I have done something wrong, I may project that anxiety I have about being wrong onto you, making you wrong instead of me. A common example of this in abusive relationships is when an unfaithful partner gaslights the other partner by accusing them of being unfaithful.
 
When somebody repeatedly gaslights somebody else in an intimate relationship, it can look like a constant stream of manipulation, with continual efforts to control another person’s routine behaviors, with the impact being an increasing control of how that person sees themselves and reality (Murphy & Hoover 1999).
 
Often, the gaslighter relies on being in (or creating) a position of power over the other person. For example, the gaslighter may withhold affection, sex, or money, or isolate the gaslightee from their family and friends so that they become dependent on the gaslighter (Worley, 2016).
 
For a truly comprehensive list of gaslighting behaviors and how they are experienced by the recipient of the behaviors, you can check out the video below:

Video: How Gaslighting Manipulates Your Mind

Is Gaslighting Abuse?

As I hope is clear by now, gaslighting is an abusive behavior (Myhill, 2015). We know this because most people who have been in relationships with abusive partners say they were repeatedly gaslighted by those partners (Warsaw et al., 2014). In fact, over half of the participants in the study by Warsaw and colleagues said that their abusive partners had threatened to call the police on them because they were acting “crazy.”
 
Gaslighting behaviors appear to be done more often by men to women than the other way around (Hester et al., 2017). In fact, some scholars argue that gaslighting based on gender is taking place not just between partners but on a broader cultural and social level, as the experiences of women are routinely discredited and doubted (for example, when women who have experienced sexual assault are disbelieved) (Stark, 2019).
 
Regardless of the genders of the people involved, though, the effects of gaslighting are severe, perhaps even more so than the effects of physical abuse (Hester et al. 2017; Murphy & Hoover 1999). Gaslightees experience high rates of anxiety, depression, addiction, and thoughts of suicide, as well as many physical symptoms of stress (Christensen & Evans-Murray, 2021).
 
Perhaps you can imagine how a gaslighter would take advantage of these mental health challenges to make the gaslightee see themselves as even less reliable and sane, and further erode their sense of self in the process.

How To Deal With Gaslighting

In a popular book on how to deal with gaslighting, Robin Stern (2018) stressed the importance of the gaslightee taking an active role in breaking the cycle of gaslighting. (After all, what incentive does the gaslighter have to stop their behavior?)
 
Stern suggests that if you are being gaslighted, ask yourself why you want the approval of the gaslighting person. Once you have identified the reason, you can ask yourself whether that is a healthy expectation. If it is not, you may want to write down what healthy boundaries in the relationship would look like. Then, practice a more effective response pattern – one that does not engage the gaslighter’s version of events and that validates and protects your own needs. It may be helpful to roleplay this kind of situation with a good friend or even a therapist.
 
From efforts to address race-based gaslighting (Roberts & Andrews, 2013), we can draw the following helpful suggestions: (1) try to reduce the benefits the gaslighter gets from doing what they do; (2) make it clear the ways the gaslightee – not the gaslighter – is the victim in the situation; and (3) empower those who are getting gaslighted to get away from or become less reliant on their gaslighters.

Articles Related to Gaslighting

Want to learn more? Here are some related articles that might be helpful.

Books Related to Gaslighting

To keep learning, here are some books to explore:​​

Final Thoughts on Gaslighting

Gaslighting has gotten a lot of attention in the press and social media recently, and for good reason; it’s an unfortunately common and harmful way that people treat each other. I hope you now feel better able to recognize gaslighting when it happens and respond effectively to it, including if you yourself have gaslighted someone before. People who gaslight can learn to get their relationship needs met in healthier ways, and people who are gaslighted can draw boundaries to keep themselves from being abused in relationships. We all deserve healthy and happy relationships with healthy and happy boundaries. 

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