Words like ‘narcissist,’ ‘traumatized,’ and ‘misogyny’ get thrown around social media pretty lightly nowadays. The film Bodies Bodies Bodies made quite a poignant observation about this: “‘Gaslight’ is like one of the most overused words ever, to like the point of annihilation,” one of the characters says. “It doesn’t mean anything, other than the fact that you read the Internet or congrats, you have a Twitter account.”
Merriam-Webster even named ‘gaslighting’ the most overused word of 2022. Today, people like to use it when someone simply disagrees with them. Some people might wrongly accuse their partners, family members, or coworkers of gaslighting when, in actuality, they’re just having a simple disagreement.
While many people do misuse the word ‘gaslight,’ its actual meaning is very serious. The National Domestic Violence Hotline describes gaslighting as an emotional abuse tactic that makes a victim question their reality.
Partners who gaslight do so because they want to have power and control over the other person. The gaslighter manipulates the gaslightee emotionally until they start to question their feelings, instincts, and sanity. When the victim no longer trusts their own perception, they’re more likely to stay in the abusive relationship.
Denial and forgetting are some gaslighting techniques. “The abusive partner pretends to have forgotten what actually occurred or denies things like promises made to the victim,” The Hotline writes.
The term ‘gaslight’ comes from a 1938 play Angel Street by Patrick Hamilton. It was later made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock titled Gas Light. In the film, a husband drives his wife crazy by making subtle changes to her environment.
He gradually, bit by bit, dims the flame in a gas lamp, eventually making her question what is real and what isn’t. Because this representation of controlling behavior used by manipulators was so accurate, mental health experts began to refer to the phenomena as ‘gaslighting.’
Many people shared similar stories about their emotionally abusive exes
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