You're not imagining it. The word "gaslighting" is everywhere.
During a recent episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the late-night host said President Trump was "gaslighting" Americans by trying to convince them that rising fuel prices benefit them.
"The United States is the largest oil producer in the world by far. So when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money," Trump said in a post on Truth Social earlier this month.
Kimmel quipped: "You hear the term gaslighting a lot, but rarely when it comes to actual gas."
"Gaslight," a term used to describe a destructive form of psychological manipulation, has gone from clinical lingo to Merriam Webster's 2022 Word of the Year.. It's become a buzzword lobbed at bad bosses and ex-boyfriends, and leaders across the political spectrum.
The trouble with buzzwords, though, is that their meanings can get watered down when they become ubiquitous. And some therapists say our comfort with deploying the term has gotten out of hand.
Robin Stern, a psychoanalyst and author of The Gaslight Effect, says people frequently misuse the term during arguments.
"Gaslighting is not a disagreement," says Stern, who's also a senior advisor at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. "It's a deliberate effort to undermine my reality, or if I'm doing the gaslighting, for me to undermine your reality."
Are we overusing it? For this edition of Word of the Week, let's get a reality-check on "gaslighting."
What gaslighting is and isn't
In short, gaslighting can be described as "crazy-making," says Paige Sweet, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who studies the phenomenon in the context of intimate relationships.
"Someone trying to make you seem or feel crazy — either to yourself and or to other people," she says. It's like "watching something happen and then being told that's not what's happening." But it's beyond the scope of lying.
"Liars may or may not be using their lies to gaslight," says Kate Abramson, author of the book On Gaslighting. "The ordinary liars are just trying to get you to believe something. That may be part of this bigger effort to undermine your ability to deliberate or might not."
With successful gaslighting, Sweet says, "You feel that the thing is your fault or you're bad for thinking that what's happening is happening — making you mistrust yourself as a kind of witness to the world."
The movie that taught us "gaslighting"
The verb was inspired by Patrick Hamilton's 1930s play Gas Light, but the better-known reference is George Cukor's popular 1944 film adaptation starring Ingrid Bergman.
In the film, the charming jewel thief Gregory is pursuing rare gems that belonged to a wealthy woman he murdered years earlier.
He marries the victim's niece, Paula, and continues his hunt for the gems, which he believes are hidden in her townhouse. Wary of Paula catching on to his scheme, he sets out to drive her mad. Among other tactics, he moves things around the home — and when she points it out, he says she's being forgetful. Eventually, Paula begins to doubt herself and her sense of reality.
It wasn't until over a decade later that the word "gaslight" was attached to the phenomenon. Anthropologist Anthony Wallace first penned it in the 1961 text, Culture & Personality, as a way to reference the manipulation tactic.
"It is also popularly believed to be possible to 'gaslight' a perfectly healthy person into psychosis by interpreting his own behavior to him as symptomatic of serious mental illness," Wallace wrote.
The term later moved into therapy settings, as a way to describe the tactics used by domestic abusers against their victims.
For all the darkness associated with the word, though, "gaslight" also bears a message of hope, if we refresh our memory of the source text. The titular gaslights in Paula's home are actually a way out for the victim.
Paula notices that every time her husband leaves the house, the lights in the home dim minutes later. That's because other gas-fueled light fixtures have been turned on elsewhere in the house — on the top floor, where her husband is digging around for the jewels. But because Paula's reality has been undermined, she needs confirmation from an outside party, a police inspector, to put the puzzle pieces together.
"It's the way she uses the information from what's happening with the gaslight that she can determine from what's happening with what I think is such a vivid, dramatic effect that then the term sort of got attached to this abuser's playbook," says crime fiction scholar Rosemary Johnson, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on Patrick Hamilton.
Fiction vs. reality
The depiction of gaslighting in the 1944 film — manipulation orchestrated by a Machiavellian murderer with a deliberate and diabolical plan to steal a family fortune — is overt.
In reality, Sweet says, the signs are not always so obvious.
"That's what it feeds on — is you not knowing really what's happening to you," she says.
But gaslighters don't necessarily act out of pure malice, Sweet says. More often, it's a defense mechanism the gaslighter uses to wield power in a situation.
Women are more likely to become victims of gaslighting. They're socialized to be agreeable and more likely to seek therapy, says psychoanalyst Stern.
"We were socialized to stand in someone else's shoes, perhaps to the detriment of forgetting to go back to their own shoes," Stern says. "But when you get stuck in someone else's shoes, you can see yourself very differently."
A powerful word
Being able to name the disorienting experience can help victims start to regain their sense of self. The verb, Sweet says, helps people identify "something that's really confusing and sort of unnamable by nature."
"A lot of my interviewees describe learning the term as a light bulb moment," she says.
That allows the healing process to begin, says Stern. "When you become aware of the behavior, you can talk about it, and you can start to reclaim your reality."
Unlike what happens to Paula, when victims realize they've been gaslit, the world doesn't come back to them so quickly and all at once.
"Successful gaslighting shatters the skills of trust — you don't know what to trust anymore, who to trust — and those have to be gradually built back up," she says.
But she says it does come back, eventually, once you label it.
Precision in our usage of the word is key, say therapists and experts who study gaslighting.
"If everything gets called gaslighting, nobody takes it seriously anymore," says author Abramson.
And it is a very serious thing, says psychoanalyst Stern.
"When you begin, over time, to accommodate to somebody else's reality and you're giving up pieces of yourself along the way, it can be what many people say is soul-destroying," Stern says. "To minimize it is not helpful for people who are experiencing it or want to talk about it."
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