Quotes About Gaslighting

Like Ingrid Bergman in the film Gaslight, whose husband has convinced her that she's delusional when all along he's set her up, the victims often lose faith in their ability to determine what's real and what isn't. ("Gaslight" has since become a psychological term, meaning to deliberately manipulate someone.) Being duped contaminates your entire sense of self.

Women have been driven mad, "gaslighted", for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other's sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

Some men told me they wished someone would sexually harass them, because they seemed to be unable to imagine it as anything but pleasant invitations from attractive people. No one was offering the help of recognizing what I was experiencing or agreeing that I had the right to be safe and free. It was a kind of collective gaslighting.

we now talk about normalization, extractivism, unburnable carbon; about walking while Black, gaslighting, the prison-industrial complex and the new Jim Crow, affirmative consent, cisgender, concern trolling, whataboutism, the manosphere, and so much more.

It was a kind of collective gaslighting. To live in a war that no one around me would acknowledge as a war.

Generations of women have been told they are delusional, confused, manipulative, malicious, conspiratorial, congenitally dishonest, often all at once.

She smiled darkly and shook her head. 'I'm not crazy. I'm not. Of course what else would a crazy person claim? That's the Kafkaesque genius of it all. If you're not crazy but people have told the world you are, then all your protests to the contrary just underscore their point. Do you see what I'm saying?

Feelings, not facts, are essential to a good gaslighting.

If I, as a child, claim that something awful has happened—that someone has done something terrible to me—and everyone around me acts as if nothing is the matter, then either I must be crazy, or all of them are. And when you're a kid and your life depends on all these people, there is no choice: of course, I must be crazy.

In psychology, trying to force others to accept the reality of a fake world is called gaslighting. It got its name from the 1944 film 'Gaslight,' in which a husband convinces his wife and their neighbors that she is insane.

Guys like to gaslight us, and it's not cool. And it happens so much; it's happened to me in relationships. It's happened to me where I have been cheated on, and I felt so sad and angry, like it wasn't my fault, but that was because the person was gaslighting me into thinking it was my fault.

My father was a textbook narcissist. If he didn't like the narrative he'd start gaslighting you. He threatened the democracy of our family.

Women misjudged his pathology because of his prolific brain-games. He used gaslighting techniques to convince her she had a break with reality. Some survivors called it 'The Ultimate Mind Screw'--sending prominent female executives, attorneys, and doctors into mental institutions to recover from him. Coercion, psychological warfare techniques and Stockholm Syndrome symptoms have left survivors sawed off at the emotional knees by a smooth-talking and ear-to-ear grinning psychological terrorist.

He had the ability to twist almost anything I said or did so that I seemed stupid. During

He had the ability to twist almost anything I said or did so that I seemed stupid.

Romeo Blevins lawyered up and gaslighted the jury like he'd gaslighted Mariah and every other soul ever to know him. Making himself out the good Samaritan, Mariah the crazy jealous bitch.

The gaslighting parent usually has a "golden child" and a "scapegoat child." The former can do no wrong, whereas the latter can do no right. This pits siblings against each other, and these feelings of competition commonly extend into adulthood.

I think if you're going to abuse someone, you really have to convince them of two things. First, you have to normalise what you're doing, convince them that it's not that bad. And the second thing is to convince them that they deserve it in some way.

Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it's racial, and being told, Oh that's all in your head.

There's a special place in hell for men who convince women their intuition is insecurity to protect their duplicity.

The only way to stop gaslighting is to shine the light of reality onto a situation. That makes it imperative for the perpetrator to keep victims in the dark.

It's like you don't realize what you have done. You always turn it around and make it look like you're the victim.

The central attitudes driving the Water Torturer are: You are crazy. You fly off the handle over nothing. I can easily convince other people that you're the one who is messed up. As long as I'm calm, you can't call anything I do abusive, no matter how cruel. I know exactly how to get under your skin.

An abusive man who is adept in the language of feelings can make his partner feel crazy by turning each argument into a therapy session in which he puts her reactions under a microscope and assigns himself the role of "helping" her. He may, for example, "explain" to her the emotional issues she needs to work through, or analyze her reasons for "mistakenly" believing that he is mistreating her.