Gaslighting
One-liner: Manipulating someone into doubting their own perceptions, memory, or sanity. Also known as / related terms: Reality distortion, “crazymaking,” coercive control (adjacent), mind games. What it is: Gaslighting is a pattern in which one person repeatedly denies, contradicts, or reframes another person’s directly experienced reality until the target starts to distrust their own memory and judgment. The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines it as manipulating another person into doubting their perceptions, experiences, or understanding of events, noting the term historically described manipulation so extreme it could justify psychiatric commitment, though it’s now used more broadly. The name comes from the 1938 stage play Gas Light (and its 1940/1944 film adaptations), in which a husband dims the gaslights and then insists his wife is imagining it. Clinically, “gaslighting” is not a diagnosis itself, psychologists note it is a colloquial description of a manipulation pattern, sometimes associated with antisocial or narcissistic traits, rather than a disorder in its own right. Academic work on workplace gaslighting treats it as a distinct organizational construct: a pattern of behavior, embedded in a power-unequal relationship, that over time erodes a target’s confidence in their own perception of events. What it looks like (workplace): A manager tells a report in a one-on-one that a project deadline was never discussed, despite an email thread proving otherwise; when the employee raises it, the manager says: “You’re remembering it wrong, you always do this,” and the employee leaves the meeting quietly questioning their own memory rather than the manager’s account. Why they do it: It shifts the burden of proof onto the target and lets the person avoid accountability by making their version of events the only “sane” one, consolidating control over the narrative. How to protect yourself:
- Keep a contemporaneous written record (email recaps, dated notes), a paper trail counters the “you’re misremembering” move.
- Say the fact plainly and stop: “The email is dated March 3rd. I’m not going to debate what it says.” Don’t re-argue the underlying reality.
- Get a second read from a trusted, uninvolved witness before assuming your perception is off.
- Notice the internal signal, chronic self-doubt after interactions with one specific person is itself data.
- If it’s a pattern, name it privately in writing (to yourself or HR) using neutral, factual language, not accusatory labels. Cross-links: DARVO, Plausible Deniability, Moving the Goalposts. Sources:
- APA Dictionary of Psychology, Gaslight, official APA definition and clinical status note.
- Workplace gaslighting: a construct for organizational research (PMC), peer-reviewed treatment of gaslighting as an organizational-behavior construct.
- Gaslighting | Psychology Today, clinical-adjacent overview of mechanism and power dynamics.
- Britannica, Gaslighting, origin of the term and the 1938/1940/1944 play and films. Label note: Colloquial term describing a real manipulation pattern; not itself a clinical diagnosis, though referenced in clinical and organizational-research literature.