Am I remembering this wrong, or is the story changing?

What is gaslighting in a relationship?

Gaslighting is a repeated pattern of emotional abuse that wears down your trust in your own memory, perception and judgement. Your account of an evening is corrected. Your feeling about it is explained back to you as an overreaction. After enough of that you run your version past your partner before you trust it yourself, and that habit is the part that lasts.

The word comes from a stage play by Patrick Hamilton, Gas Light, in which a husband alters the lighting in the house and tells his wife she is imagining the change. What makes the real thing so hard to describe is that each separate incident sounds trivial the moment you say it out loud. The account you give convinces nobody, and in time it stops convincing you.

It also needs something to lean on¹. It works where one person is able to draw on an existing assumption that the other is unreliable, emotional or unstable, which is why it is better understood as a social arrangement than as a personality. That has a practical shape in Copenhagen. If your partner holds the language, the paperwork, the flat and the people here while your own friends are elsewhere, there is less to check your version against, and an account of events nobody else saw gets thinner the longer you hold it alone.

How do I know it is gaslighting and not just a disagreement?

Look for repetition and direction: the correction lands in the same place every time, and you come away doubting yourself rather than doubting the subject. A great deal of what gets called gaslighting is 2 people remembering differently, and I say that plainly to the clients who ask me. Memory is not a recording. Misleading suggestions made after an event change what people believe they saw, and across the lost-in-the-mall experiments an average of about 30 per cent of participants produced a partial or complete false memory². Your partner is able to be wrong, and certain, and still be doing nothing to you.

• “That is not what I said.” A memory that has settled differently from yours, and in their favour, as yours has in yours.
• Disagreeing with your interpretation. Unpleasant, sometimes infuriating, and ordinary.
• Defending themselves badly. A poor defence is still a defence, and it is not aimed at your judgement.
• Holding to a version they believe. Refusing an account they think is wrong is a disagreement, even when they are the one who is wrong.

One argument about what happened is a disagreement. A year of them, after which you have stopped trusting yourself, is something else. These questions are aids to understanding and not a verdict, and where the picture stays unclear it needs looking at with somebody outside the relationship. Read more about whether the relationship is doing harm.

What does gaslighting actually look like between 2 people?

No single lie and no bad argument defines it. What I listen for is repetition with a direction, and the accounts I hear in my room have a recognisable order to them.

• An intense start. A great deal of attention, affection and grand plans, very early.
• Doubt delivered as concern. Remarks that question your grip on reality, arriving as worry about you.
• Words that stop sounding like insults. “Crazy” and “stupid”, used regularly enough to become information about you.
• Blame first, detail afterwards. You are blamed for something you did not do, and you find yourself negotiating the facts instead of noticing the move.
• Warmth and anger with no rule. The terms of the relationship never settle, so you keep checking where you stand.

Both halves of it live in the same hour. You know what was said, and you would still rather somebody else confirmed it before you say so out loud. Read more about living around somebody else’s moods.

Does somebody gaslight without meaning to?

Some of it is deliberate, some of it is not, and the effect on you is real either way. Intent does not show in the behaviour, so I hold it as an open question rather than a reading of your partner. Some of what I meet is habit: somebody who cannot tolerate being in the wrong rearranges the account of an evening without ever deciding to. Some of it is chosen, warmth and correction kept moving so that another person stays unsure of themselves, and that is a different problem with a different answer.

What intent changes is the repair available to you, not the cost already paid. So you do not have to settle it before asking for help, and few people settle it from inside the relationship. Watch instead what happens to you in the hour after one of those conversations. Your record of the evening is rarely the thing that has been damaged. What has gone is your permission to rely on it.

How do I stop gaslighting from eroding my trust in myself?

Get an account of events from outside the relationship, then describe the behaviour and leave the label out of it. The pattern works by reducing you to one source, so the first repair is a second one.

• Get an outside view. A friend, a sibling, a therapist, a written record, in that order of availability.
• Keep a plain record for a month. The date, what was said, what you felt afterwards, kept where your partner has no access. The month is my suggestion and not a clinical threshold.
• Read it back. A run of ordinary rows is worth knowing about too, and a pattern shows itself as a pattern.
• Describe the behaviour. “When I bring this up, you tell me I am imagining it” is harder to dismiss than the word gaslighting, which is a serious charge to make if you have it wrong.
• End a conversation that denies your experience. Say that you are not continuing while your experience is being denied or turned back on you, and step away.
• Choose the help that fits. If the 2 of you still hear each other, couples therapy is the direct route. If your own footing has gone, individual sessions come first and the relationship question waits.

These steps assume a conversation the 2 of you are still able to have, and this article is the wrong instrument once that is gone: when every attempt to describe the behaviour is turned back on you, when your money, your phone, your friendships or your movements are being managed for you, or when what you feel in the room is fear and not frustration. Reading about the pattern does nothing for any of that. The work there is individual, it begins with your own footing rather than with the relationship, and what you then do about the relationship is yours to decide in your own time. Read more about silence used as control.

The question of intent is the one that stays open longest here, and it becomes clear last rather than first. Starting the work without an answer to it is the normal way in.

Questions people ask

Will a therapist decide who is telling the truth?

No, and I say so early, because the hope that I will settle it is part of what brings people in. What I work on instead is how you came to need an outside ruling before you could trust your own account.

Is couples therapy the right place to take this?

It works where both of you still hear each other and neither of you is frightened. Where the pattern has gone past that, individual sessions are the right first step, and I say so rather than running the couple work anyway.

I am worried a therapist will think I am imagining it. What then?

Bring that worry into the first session, because the fear of not being believed is part of what this pattern produces. I work with what the behaviour has done to you, which does not require me to certify your memory.

What does individual work on this actually involve?

Rebuilding ordinary confidence in small judgements first, then looking at how another account of events came to feel more reliable than your own. The question of what to do about the relationship becomes answerable once that footing is back.

Should I wait until I am sure before booking?

Waiting for certainty extends the problem, because the doubt is the part the work is for. One session or the free 30-minute call is enough to decide whether this is the right place to do it.

If you have started to doubt your own memory, therapy after narcissistic abuse is a place where I help you trust what you saw again.

Sources

1. Paige L. Sweet, The sociology of gaslighting, American Sociological Review, 2019
2. Elizabeth F. Loftus, Planting misinformation in the human mind: a 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory, Learning and Memory, 2005

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.