![]() ![]() I suspect very few of us are mature enough to be able to fight with people close to us without throwing some invalidation in along the way. One of the main reasons I think the term gaslighting is overused is that it seems to be used often in a very broad sense to mean invalidating people’s experiences of reality. So is it gaslighting, or is it another form of emotional abuse? Because there isn’t a clear definition of gaslighting, there isn’t a clear answer to that question. That’s absolutely emotional abuse however, it’s a different scenario than in Gas Light, where the abuser was deliberately trying to make the abused think she was psychiatrically unwell. And the internet is labelling a whole lotta stuff as gaslighting.Īs an example of the lack of clarity, let’s consider an emotionally abusive situation where the abuser doesn’t think that the abused person even has a reality other than the abuser’s. There’s a risk that everyone’s using their own definition, which can mean things are given the same label despite being entirely different phenomena. Because there isn’t a clear way of differentiating what is a certain phenomenon versus what isn’t, it becomes entirely subjective. ![]() The gaslighting page doesn’t meet either of those standards.Ī major downside of pop psychology terms is that they’re generally not clearly defined the way that terms that actually come from the field of psychology or other clinical/academic fields are. Wikipedia pages should use a neutral point of view and high-quality references. Pop psychologyĪs is often the case for pop psychology terms, the Wikipedia page for the term gaslighting is absolute garbage. These strategies serve the primary aim of destroying any possibility of resistance. ![]() ![]() The abuser “aims to destroy the possibility of disagreement by so radically undermining another person that she has nowhere left to stand from which to disagree, no standpoint from which her words might constitute genuine disagreement” (Abramson, 2014).Ībramson identified several strategies used by those who gaslight: love, empathy, self-doubt, authority, leveraging practical consequences of resisting, and sexism. Gaslighting typically serves multiple aims for the perpetrator. An academic perspective on gaslightingĪccording to a paper in the journal Philosophical Perspectives, Kate Abramson explained that gaslighting is directed at “the target’s basic rational competence- her ability to get facts right, to deliberate, her basic evaluative competencies and ability to react appropriately: her independent standing as deliberator and moral agent.” The author likened gaslighting to torture, as it aims to destroy the target’s sense of self.” He did so by denying things that were actually happening when she asked about them for example, he denied having dimmed the gas lights and having made various noises while doing his nefarious activities. The male lead wanted to get his wife committed to a mental institution for his own benefit, so he tried to convince her she was going insane. The term gaslighting came from the 1938 stage play Gas Light, which had two subsequent two film versions. This is clearly something the internet is talking about. Those search result numbers are far from exact, but they do give a decent ballpark. When I Google gaslighting, it tells me there are 9.76 million results. But if everyone and their dog seems to be gaslighting (or being gaslit by) everyone else and their cat (or if cat and dog are both accusing the other of gaslighting them), is it really a meaningful descriptor of emotional abuse? Or does it just get diluted to the point that it no longer even has a clear meaning? It seems like everyone’s talking about gaslighting these days. ![]()
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