The word gaslight originates from the 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton (Philips, 2021). The play is about a husband who convinces his wife that she is losing her mind to distract her from his criminal activities. Patrick Hamilton coined this term to describe a form of manipulation where a person is made to doubt their own perceptions and reality (Philips, 2021).

Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse that affects your memory, your perception, your sanity and your reality. To gaslight someone is to plant a seed of doubt in their mind and to make them question their own sense of truth and reality (Fabry, 2024). They can make you doubt your perceptions, feelings, sense of judgement or memory. It involves convincing someone that what they saw, heard or experienced didn’t happen, and if they felt something from that, then there is no reason for them to have felt that. The gaslighter can be so convincing that they can convince you that they know more than you do, they could even convince a person that they know the person better than they know themselves (Mukhtar, 2023). The most classic example of gaslighting is calling someone “crazy”, “irrational”, “needy”, “stupid” – it completely dismisses their perception of reality and destroys any semblance of autonomy and liberty.

Gaslighting is a tool to assert dominance and control in domestic violence. You start to trust them more because you start to distrust yourself. Gaslighting is insidious as the cycle of violence could transition into more severe and life-threatening experiences and the perpetrator could still convince a person that it hasn’t gotten worse. The Australian Domestic and Family Violence Death Review Network have reported that of the women that had been killed in Australia about 99% of them experienced only emotional and psychological abuse (Beckwith, et al. 2023).

No two experiences of gaslighting will be the same and the harmful behaviours of perpetrators can be experienced differently across population groups and communities. However, a message to any woman who thinks that they’re experiencing this, remember to trust yourself and trust your experiences. You are not alone in any of this.

Tina Nguyen

References

Fabry, E, R. (2024). Narrative Gaslighting. Philosophical Psychology, 1-18.

Mukhtar, S. (2023). Domestic/Intimate partner violence, abuse, and trauma during covid-19 lockdown: gaslighting, non-consensual condom removal, grooming, coercive control, power dynamic, and sexual entitlement in emotional and psychological abuse. Journal of Psychosexual health, 5(4), 198-207

Philips, D. (2021). Gaslighting: Domestic Noir, the narratives of coercive control. Women: a cultural review, 32(2), 140-160.

Beckwith, S., Lowe, L., Stevens, E., Carson, R., Kaspiew, R., MacDonald, J, B., McEwan, J., Willoughby, M., & Gahan, L. (2023). Coercive control literature review- final report. Melbourne: Australia Institute of Family Studies.