gaslighting and other things my ex insists did not happen

it is currently 2:47pm on a thursday. i am writing this from my desk, on company time, in a building i would prefer not to name. you can decide whether i’m wasting my employer’s resources or doing the most important work of my career. i can argue both, but only one pays the rent.

writing this from my desk. carla is in the partner briefing on the third floor. i have, technically, the rest of the morning. let’s go.

so a few years ago, possibly four, possibly seven — depending on which version of my own life i’m using on a given thursday — i was in a relationship. it ended. these things happen. what is interesting, in the academic sense, is what happened in the middle. specifically, the part where i kept asking my partner if a thing had occurred and they kept telling me, calmly, kindly, with the patient voice of a person who has never lost an argument, that the thing had not occurred.

the thing had occurred. i was there.

gaslighting: a form of psychological manipulation where one person makes another doubt their own memory, perception, or judgment. it usually shows up gradually, in close relationships. the person doing it rarely admits it. that, in fact, is part of how it works. (the merriam-webster entry for gaslight uses fewer words and less feeling. fair, it’s a dictionary.)

GASLIGHTING. IS. NOT. AN. OPINION.

i need that on the record before we go further. some people will tell you it’s a spectrum, that it’s complicated, that both sides need to look at themselves. those people, i suspect, have never been told for the eleventh time in a thursday that they remembered something incorrectly when they very much did not. i’m not saying they’re wrong. i am, however, saying it.

what gaslighting actually is, and what your ex insists it is not

gaslighting is, in the clinical sense, a pattern. one event is not gaslighting. one event is just two people disagreeing, which is, frankly, what tuesdays are for. a pattern of being told that your memory, your perception, or your basic ability to be a functioning person is wrong — that’s the thing. that’s what the word means.

my ex would call this an “interpretation”. my ex now lives, i believe, with someone who owns a volvo. not just any volvo — a specific one, with the kind of seats that adjust in fourteen ways. i mention this only because it’s true and it haunts me, in equal proportion. the volvo and the seats. i have a chair from a thrift store that adjusts in zero ways. i sit on a wedge of mail i haven’t opened. we’ll get to the mail.

what gaslighting is not: someone correcting you about a fact. that’s correction. fine. healthy. someone forgetting a thing happened — also fine, brains are tired, the rent is high. gaslighting is when the correction is the strategy. when the forgetting is aimed. it’s the difference between a missed step on the stairs and someone, calmly, removing one stair every night while telling you the stairs have always been like that.

the seven signs i can list without checking my notes (i checked them)

i checked them. of course i checked them. i wrote a list. it’s on a post-it on the standing desk at which i now sit. the post-it has come unstuck twice. the desk is, technically, a sitting desk that i bought standing and gave up on after eight days. anyway. the signs:. the 1944 movie called Gaslight coined the term, for what it is worth there is a longer entry on malignant narcissism in this same series, written from the same desk..

1. you start sentences with “but didn’t you say”. this is the canary.
2. you keep a small mental archive of evidence. screenshots. dates. the time the receipt came in. normal people do not do this.
3. you preface your own opinions with “this might sound crazy, but”. it does not sound crazy. it sounds like an opinion. that’s all an opinion is.
4. you feel calmer when the other person leaves the room.
5. you feel calmer when the other person leaves the country.
6. you find yourself rehearsing arguments in the shower for fights you have not yet had.
7. you find yourself winning those arguments, in the shower, alone, and feeling, for ten clean seconds, correct — and then you walk into the kitchen and the feeling evaporates like steam off a microwave you should not have used.

if you score four or more, congratulations. you are not crazy. you are tired and you are right.

narcissistic gaslighting, the cousin nobody talks about

this is where it gets technical, by which i mean i looked it up. narcissistic traits and gaslighting are, in the wikipedia entry on gaslighting and elsewhere, frequently roommates. not the same person, but the same building. a narcissist will gaslight because the alternative is admitting they were wrong, and admitting they were wrong is, for them, a wound. the wound is fresh. the wound is daily. you can’t argue with a wound. you can only stop calling it on the phone.

(the man who calls. let’s not.)

the trick is that not every gaslighter is a narcissist and not every narcissist gaslights. some narcissists, frankly, do you the favor of being obvious about it. they post about themselves on linkedin in the third person. you can spot them from the street. the dangerous ones are the calm ones. the calm ones say “i think you’re tired” while removing your stair.

narcissistic gaslighting, specifically, has one extra ingredient: the manipulator believes their own version. it is not a lie to them. they have rewritten the file. when you bring up the contradiction, you are the one with the wrong file. you are the bug. they are the user.

examples i collected from a relationship that ended in 2019, possibly later

i have a folder. it is on my phone. it is named, with the optimism of a man who thought he was joking at the time, “evidence”. i will not share the folder. i will share three items, in summary, with names changed and details softened so the volvo guy doesn’t sue me.

example one. i said: “you told me you would be home by seven.” they said: “i never said seven. i said around seven.” i said: “you texted me ‘see you at seven’.” they said: “i meant approximately.” it was 9:42pm.

example two. i said: “you said you didn’t like the green chair.” they said: “i love the green chair.” (the green chair was in the trash. i had taken it down myself. there was a photograph.)

example three. i said: “you said my friend was annoying.” they said: “i never said that.” the friend called me ten minutes later, having heard, somehow, from a third party, the exact phrasing. friends know. it is their power. it cannot be defeated.

what these three examples have in common, as a man at the bar named mike once observed (he had a beard, he seemed sure), is the absence of conflict in the gaslighter’s tone. they didn’t shout. they didn’t deny aggressively. they were patient with my confusion. mike said “that’s the part that messes you up”. mike has not filed his taxes since 2019. but on this, mike was right.

why people gaslight, according to a man at the bar with a beard

i have, in fact, asked this question of several people, in several rooms. the answers vary by who is answering and how many beverages have entered the room.

the official answer, from books — i read parts of three of them, plus one i listened to on the train, which counts (some people will tell you books on tape are cheating; those people are wrong, and they say it on a podcast, which is a book on tape with worse pacing) — is that gaslighting comes from a need to control the narrative, often rooted in childhood instability or a fragile sense of self. that’s the polite version. it’s also probably true. but it’s also, frankly, the kind of sentence that people nod at and then forget on their walk to the car.

the bar version, from mike, is shorter. mike says: “they do it because it works.” that’s it. that’s the sentence. mike is not a therapist. mike works in a warehouse. but mike has watched a lot of people, on tuesdays, between 7 and 11pm, and mike has a theory. the theory is that gaslighting, like most bad behavior, persists because it is rewarded. the gaslighter argues. the gaslighter wins the argument. the gaslighter does it again. on thursday.

i find this both depressing and clarifying. depressing because it suggests that the only way to stop a gaslighter is to make it stop working — which means leaving, or shutting up, or, in the most courageous case, both. clarifying because it removes the mystery. they’re not doing it because they’re broken. they’re doing it because, on a wednesday, it got them what they wanted.

how to spot gaslighting before it spots you (this took me three years)

three years. that’s the headline. it took me three years to realize what was happening, and i had a folder on my phone the entire time. so my advice should be taken with the appropriate amount of salt, and possibly a glass of water.

that said, here is what i would tell my younger self, if i could find his number, which i can’t because his number is now an unknown caller and i don’t pick up unknown callers anymore (for unrelated reasons. completely unrelated. the voicemail has been full for eight months. unrelated. moving on.):

• trust the receipt. if you have evidence, the evidence is real. it does not require additional confirmation from the person disputing it.
• watch for the calm. the calmer the denial, the more concerning. real disagreements have heat. patient denial is its own signal.
• count the times. one disagreement is a thursday. seven disagreements about the same kind of thing, in a month, is a pattern.
• notice the silence. notice how often you stop yourself from saying the thing. notice who you are around when this happens.
• maggie ran a small business once. she has employees now. they get paid every month. the concept boggles me. but maggie also told me, three cafés ago, “if you keep editing yourself in front of someone, that’s data.” i didn’t listen. i should have. maggie was right about most things. that’s why she runs a business and i write blog posts on company time.

what to do, by someone who did the wrong thing first

i’m going to be honest, because i am, in this post, in a confessional mode i don’t usually authorize. what i did, for three years, was:

nothing.

i kept the folder. i screenshotted. i argued in the shower. i wrote drafts of conversations i never had. i told myself “this time i’ll bring up the seven things and we’ll have it out and it will be fine”. then we’d have dinner and i’d bring up zero of the seven things and we’d talk about the dishwasher. the dishwasher is, by the way, a cabinet that judges you. that’s a separate post.

what i should have done, in retrospect, is what most people will tell you and what most articles will say and what your friends will eventually mutter at you when they’ve had enough wine: name the pattern out loud, to the person, once, calmly. and then watch what happens.

if they hear you, listen, reflect, and adjust — that’s a relationship.

if they reframe what you said within thirty seconds, accuse you of being too sensitive, and bring up something you said in 2017 — that’s the answer. that’s the entire test, in one exchange. it’s a brutal test. it works.

i did not give the test for three years. when i finally did, i passed and they failed, and we both moved on, and they bought a volvo. the man who calls, by the way, has nothing to do with any of this. the voicemail full thing is unrelated. completely unrelated. i’m fairly sure.

verdict — i rest my case, and so should you

carla just walked past my desk. i minimized this. i think we’re fine. she didn’t say anything. that’s usually a good sign. or a very bad sign. one of the two.

the unopened mail pile is, as of this morning, leaning. there are, i estimate, seven red envelopes in there. one of them is, possibly, from someone who used to share a couch with me. one of them is, more likely, from the man who calls. i’ll get to it. probably tomorrow. tomorrow is, traditionally, when i get to things.

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