I want you to close your eyes for a second. Imagine
you're in a room with someone you trust. Maybe
it's a partner, a parent, a boss. Someone whose
opinion matters to you. Deeply. And you clearly,
with your own eyes, see a coffee cup on the table.
You point to it. You talk about it. It's right
there. It's an undeniable fact. And then the
other person looks you dead in the eye with zero
irony and says, what coffee cup? There's nothing
on the table. And they're so calm, so certain.
So certain that for a split second. Your brain
just short circuits. You blink. You look again.
And you start to wonder, not if they're lying,
but if your own brain is broken. That feeling,
that is the most destabilizing feeling a human
being can experience. It's the dismantling of
the self. That stomach drop sensation of reality
just slipping away, that's where we are living
today. And while we hear the word thrown around
constantly on Twitter, on TikTok. Oh, everywhere.
The actual mechanism behind it is much darker,
much older, and much more calculated than most
people realize. We are, of course, doing the
deep dive on gaslighting. And I have to admit,
when I first saw this on our slate, I kind of
rolled my eyes a little. I think a lot of people
do. Right. I thought, OK, great. We're going
to talk about the Internet's favorite buzzword
for someone I'm mad at. But looking at this stack
of research you've brought today, this is not
just about bad breakups, is it? Not even close.
I mean, if you think gaslighting is just about
a boyfriend lying about texting his ex, you are
seeing the absolute tip of the iceberg and completely
missing the glacier underneath. Wow. OK. We're
talking about a psychological weapon, a weapon
that's been used by abusers. Yes, of course.
But also by doctors, by therapists and by totalitarian
regimes to paralyze entire populations. That
is a massive claim, paralyzing populations. We
will get there. I promise. But we have to start
with the confusion because you're right. The
word is everywhere. It's completely unavoidable.
It feels like, I don't know, since around 2016,
the usage of the word gaslighting has just gone
vertical. The data supports that perception entirely.
It's not just a feeling. If you pull up Google
Trends, the line is basically flat for years
and years. And then right around 2016, it starts
what they call a substantial increase. A substantial
increase. That's putting it mildly. And then
by 2022, Merriam -Webster names it the word of
the year. They reported a. Get this? A 1 ,740
% increase in lookups. 1 ,700%. That's not a
trend. That's a cultural obsession. It is. And
it's not just them. The American Dialect Society
called it the most useful new word all the way
back in 2016. Which is such a weird compliment
for a word describing abuse, isn't it? Useful?
Yeah. It is weird, but it implies we had a gap
in our language. It means we were experiencing
something we literally couldn't name. We didn't
have the vocabulary. That is the key. We had
words for lying. We had words for manipulation.
But we didn't have a mainstream word for manipulating
someone into questioning their own sanity. So
the mission for this deep dive is to rescue that
definition. To rescue it, we need to cut through
all the buzzword noise and really understand
the mechanics. Because if we can't distinguish
between real psychological abuse and just, you
know, standard disagreement, we're in real trouble.
Right. Because if I say, I didn't like that movie,
and you say that movie was a masterpiece... You
aren't gaslighting me. No. You just have different
taste. You just have different taste. And confusing
the two dilutes the suffering of actual victims.
So to really understand this, we have to go back.
Way back. We have to leave the Internet age and
go back to a time of fog and cobblestones and
shadows. We need to go to 1938. I love this.
I love that the origin of this, like, ultra -modern
Internet slang is actually vintage theater. It
wasn't coined by a psychologist, right? Freud
didn't come up with this. No, no. Freud had nothing
to do with it. This comes purely from the arts.
Specifically, a play by a man named Patrick Hamilton
called Gaslight. Which then, of course, became
a movie. Two movies, actually. There was a British
one in 1940, but the one that etched this concept
into history is the 1944 American adaptation.
Ah, the famous one. George Cukor directed it.
It starred Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and
Joseph Cotton. And I really want to dwell on
the plot of this film for a minute because it
isn't just a story. It's a perfect diagram of
the psychological mechanism we're discussing.
Okay, set the scene for us. This is Victorian
London. Victorian London. We're in high society.
We have Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman, who
is an heiress. She's young, she's a bit vulnerable,
and she falls head over heels for Gregory, who's
played by Charles Boyer. And Gregory. Let me
guess, he's not what he seems. Not at all. He
presents himself as this perfect, genteel gentleman.
He's charming, he's attentive, but he has a very
specific, very predatory goal. He wants her money.
He wants her jewels, specifically. There are
priceless rubies hidden somewhere in the attic
of the house she inherited. But here's the problem.
He can't just go up and get them. Right. He can't
just go up and get them while she's around. He
needs to search the whole attic, but he needs
her to be out of the way. And more importantly,
he needs to isolate her so that if he gets caught,
no one will believe her. So his plan isn't just
steal the jewels. It's convince the world and
my own wife that she is completely insane. That
is the entire strategy. He begins the slow, methodical
campaign to make her believe she is losing her
mind. He hides things, a brooch, a picture, and
then blames her for losing them. He tells her
she's forgetful. Little things at first. Plausible
deniability. Exactly. But the centerpiece, the
reason we have this word. is the gas lights themselves.
Okay, explain the physics here because I think
we all take flip switches for granted now. How
did these lights actually work? Well, in a Victorian
home like that, the gas lines were all part of
a single closed system. So if you turned on a
heavy gas lamp in one room, say the attic, the
pressure would drop slightly in all the other
rooms. The lights elsewhere would physically
dim. You would see it happen. So it's kind of
like hydraulic pressure. One goes up, the other
goes down. Simple cause and effect. Exactly.
So every night, Gregory tells Paula he's going
out, but he doesn't. He sneaks out of the house,
circles back around, and goes into the boarded
-up attic to search for these rubies. And when
he's up there... When he lights the gas lamp
in the attic to see what he's doing, the lights
downstairs in the drawing room where Paula's
sitting all alone... They dim. They physically
go down. She sees this. It is a real physical
event happening in front of her. She sees it
with her own eyes, and she hears footsteps upstairs.
So naturally, when he comes back home later,
she says, Gregory, the lights went down again.
I think someone is in the attic. And this is
the moment, the namesake moment. This is the
moment. He doesn't just say, I don't know what
you're talking about. He looks at her with this
sense of pity. and concern that's what makes
it so sinister yes he says paula darling the
lights didn't flicker you're imagining things
again you're so tired you're becoming hysterical
he denies the physical reality she just witnessed
and he enlists the servants in this too doesn't
he they're not in on the crime but they're part
of the manipulation They are. He manipulates
the entire environment so completely that the
servants, who are just unaware, reinforce his
narrative. They tell her nobody was upstairs.
They confirm her forgetfulness. So Paula is left
with two options. Option A. Her husband, the
man she loves and trusts, is a criminal mastermind
lying to her face. Or, option B, her own brain
is failing her. She is going crazy. And because
of the power dynamic, because she loves him and
relies on him for her sense of reality, option
B actually feels more plausible to her. That's
the tragedy of it. She breaks. She completely
stops trusting her own eyes. She accepts his
reality over her own. It's so chilling because
it's so claustrophobic. The threat isn't physical
violence, not at first. It's the complete erosion
of her mind. It's an assault on her autonomy,
on her very selfhood. And what's really interesting
is that the word gaslighting as a verb, like
he's gaslighting her, it wasn't in the script.
It wasn't used in the movie at all. Really? So
Ingrid Bergman never says, stop gaslighting me,
Gregory? Not once. The movie was just called
Gaslighting. The term gaslighting, as a gerund,
you know, the verb form, it didn't appear in
recorded language until 1961. And even then,
it was incredibly obscure. It was basically underground.
Deep underground. I mean, it popped up in a New
York Times column by Maureen Dowd in 1995, but
even that didn't spark a trend. So people read
it and just moved on? They did. In the 20 years
after that 1995 column, the New York Times only
used the word nine times. Nine times? In two
decades? That's wild. It is. So for almost 80
years, this perfect metaphor was just sitting
there gathering dust, known only to like film
buffs and maybe a few psychologists, and then
boom. 2016 happens. And suddenly we needed a
word for reality distortion. On a massive scale.
We did. Okay, so let's get into the gears of
this. We have the movie metaphor, which is incredibly
clear. But real life isn't a Hollywood script.
How does this mechanic actually work between
two modern people? Because I feel like I could
easily, you know, accidentally gaslight someone
if I just have a bad memory. This is a critical
distinction, and it's where most of the online
confusion comes from. We have to separate gaslighting
from lying and from disagreement. They are three
completely different things. Okay, play this
out for me. Let's use an example. I eat the last
cookie from the cookie jar. You come in and ask
who ate it. I say, I didn't eat it. Is that gaslighting?
No, that's just a simple lie. You're hiding a
specific action to avoid getting into trouble.
It's a cover -up. Okay, so what if I take it
a step further? What if I say there never were
any cookies in that jar? You're crazy for thinking
we even bought cookies this week. Now we're getting
warmer. We're moving towards the territory. But
even that, if it just happens one time, is probably
just a bizarre, elaborate lie. So what are the
missing ingredients? Gaslighting requires two
specific components that have to be present.
A power imbalance and a pattern over time. It's
not a one -off event. Okay, explain the power
imbalance. Why is that so necessary? I mean,
if a random guy on the subway tells me the sky
is green, I don't start questioning my sanity.
I just think he's, you know, maybe had a long
day. Precisely. You have no emotional investment
in that stranger's opinion of reality. You have
independent autonomy. Gaslighting only really
works when the victim needs the manipulator's
version of reality to be true, either for emotional
safety, financial security, or professional survival.
So it has to be a spouse, a parent, a boss. Yeah.
Someone whose opinion fundamentally defines your
world. Yes. The dynamic requires the gas lighter
to consistently, persistently put forth a false
narrative. And the gas lighted person struggles
to maintain their autonomy against that barrage.
It's a war of attrition. So the goal isn't just.
to win the argument about the cookies no the
goal is to make you believe that your memory
is so fundamentally faulty that next time you
won't even ask about the cookies you'll just
assume you were wrong to begin with it's training
it's grooming it's conditioning the victim to
outsource their reality testing to the perpetrator
so instead of i think the cookies were there
it becomes i don't know if that happened i better
ask gregory that is just terrifying but i want
to push back on something i feel like in genuine
arguments especially with a partner We often
remember things differently. I said X and they
say, no, you said Y. Is that gaslighting? Because
that happens all the time. No. And this is the
absolute core of where the Internet gets it wrong.
In a genuine conflict, I might be stubborn. I
might be wrong. I might even be shouting. But
I'm usually trying to convince you of my perspective.
I'm listening to you, even if I'm angry and disagreeing.
So there's a chaotic but real. Exchange of ideas.
Right. Gaslighting is characterized by the constant
negation of the other person's perception. It's
not I disagree with what you felt. It is your
feeling is wrong. It's your reaction is irrational.
You are hysterical. You're being oversensitive.
It attacks the validity of the person's emotional
response, not the content of the argument. You've
got it. It shifts the ground from what happened
to what is wrong with you for thinking that happened.
And the psychological impact is, well, it's severe.
It's incredibly severe. We are not talking about
being annoyed or frustrated after a fight. Victims
of long -term gaslighting exhibit symptoms of
severe anxiety disorders, major depression, and
a complete and utter collapse of self -esteem.
They lose themselves. They often describe it
as a loss of self. They genuinely don't know
who they are anymore without the abuser's constant
input defining their reality. Which brings us
to this problem of concept creep. It's a term
I've been seeing a lot because the word is so
popular it's being used for everything. The Washington
Post called it out as therapy speak. Therapy
speak is a great term for it. It's when these
clinical terms escape the clinic and get sort
of mauled in the streets. We see it all the time.
Right, like OCD is just used for being neat and
tidy or trauma is used to describe having a bad
day at work. Or narcissist, for anyone who takes
a selfie, it's the same phenomenon. And with
gaslighting, the danger is dilution. Well, Robin
Stern, who's a PhD at the Yale Center for Emotional
Intelligence, I mean, she literally wrote the
book on this, The Gaslight Effect. She's very
worried about this. She notes that the word gaslighting
is now often used in an accusatory way just to
shut down an argument. It's a trump card. If
I just yell, you're gaslighting me, I instantly
win the moral high ground and you have to defend
yourself. Exactly. It's become the new, you're
being a jerk. But if we label every disagreement,
every instance of someone being stubborn as gaslighting,
we make it impossible to identify the real victim.
We're crying wolf. We are crying wolf on a very
specific and very dangerous predator. If a woman
goes to the police or a therapist and says, my
partner is gaslighting me and the world has decided
that just means he disagrees with me a lot. She's
in real danger. We strip the word of its red
flag status. It's power to warn. We do. And we
need to pivot here because while we're all debating
the colloquial use of the term on Twitter, the
actual clinical history of gaslighting, even
before we had the word, is absolutely horrifying.
It really is. We tend to think of this as a domestic
issue, a husband and a wife. But the research
you pulled on institutional gaslighting, honestly,
it reads like a horror movie script. This is
the section that really messed me up when I was
prepping. The involuntary commitment strategy.
It is so dark. So there's this study by Barton
and Whitehead published way back in 1969. They
weren't using the word gaslighting per se, but
they were documenting the specific phenomenon
where family members use these exact tactics
to get relatives locked away in psychiatric wards.
Just to get rid of them. To get rid of them or
to get their money. They documented one case
where a wife wanted to elope with her lover.
She didn't want the mess of a divorce. She just
wanted her husband. gone. So what did she do?
She started framing him as violent. She would
provoke him, start huge fights, then run to the
neighbors crying. She would lie to their friends,
create these public scenes. She manipulated the
social reality around him until the authorities
believed he was the danger. So he gets locked
up and she's free to run off with the lover.
And just imagine the husband is sitting in a
padded room telling the doctors, I didn't do
anything. She's lying. Which, of course, in that
context, just makes him sound paranoid and delusional.
It's the perfect trap. The more you protest your
sanity, the crazier you sound. That's a catch
-22. There was another case they documented involving
a pub owner. His wife wanted the business. She
claimed he was a violent alcoholic. She gaslit
him and the doctors to get him committed so she
could take over the pub license. It's pure greed.
It is. But the one that really stays with me...
This one is truly sinister. It was a retirement
home manager. She wanted to get rid of a resident
she just didn't like. So she started secretly
dosing the woman's food with laxatives. Oh, my
God. Yes. The resident obviously starts having
accidents. She's losing control of her bowels.
She's humiliated. She's confused. I can't even
imagine. And the manager then points to this
and says, look, she has advanced dementia. She's
incontinent. She needs to be in a secure psych
ward, not here. That is monstrous. Because the
victim's own body. body is betraying her. She
is having accidents. The evidence is real, but
the cause is completely manufactured. That is
the ultimate gaslight. When the manipulator turns
reality itself, your own body, into the weapon
they use to prove you're crazy. And there was
another case, the paranoia case from 1977, Lund
and Gardner. Yes, this one just breaks my heart.
It was an elderly woman who kept getting committed
for episodes of psychosis. She would be sent
to the hospital screaming, agitated, completely
disoriented. Okay. But the weird thing was, the
second she was admitted to the hospital, the
symptoms vanished. She'd become lucid. She was
calm. She was perfectly rational. That should
have been a massive red flag to the doctors.
It was eventually. They investigated. And it
turned out the staff at her retirement home were
systematically gaslighting her. But here's the
twist. This woman actually did have a history
of psychosis from about 15 years prior. Ah, so
they had the file. They knew her history. They
had the file. They knew her trigger points. They
knew exactly how to harass her to induce a state
of panic. They knew that if they pushed her enough
to make her scream and shout, the doctors would
just look at her chart, see history of psychosis
and ignore anything she said. They weaponized
her own medical history to discredit her present
reality. Exactly. It really goes to show that
you can't gaslight this effectively without some
form of institutional power backing you up. The
doctors, the charts, the system, they all become
unknowing accomplices. And speaking of accomplices,
we have to talk about the therapists themselves.
Because we like to think the therapist's office
is the safe space, the one place you can go for
a reality check. It's supposed to be. But Theo
Dorpat's book from 1996 says otherwise. Gaslighting,
the double whammy, interrogation, and other methods
of covert control and psychotherapy. It's a mouthful
of a title, but it's a groundbreaking book. Dorpat
argued that therapists can be the most dangerous
gaslighters of all. How is that even possible?
Their entire job is to listen and validate. Yes.
but they also hold what he called the interpretive
power. Let's say you are my patient. You come
into my office for your appointment and I'm 20
minutes late. You're annoyed, understandably.
You say, it's disrespectful that you kept me
waiting. Which is a completely valid complaint.
A normal human reaction. But if I am a gaslighting
therapist or even just a very defensive one,
I might say, your anger right now isn't about
me being late. It's actually a projection of
your unresolved issues with your father who abandoned
you as a child. Wow. So I can't just be mad that
you're late. My feeling has to be a symptom of
something else. Exactly. Your reality is pathologized.
Your valid reaction is mislabeled as a symptom.
Dorpat called this covert control, and he warned
that this kind of unintentional abuse can cause
severe nervous breakdowns. I can see how. He
even linked it to patient suicides in the most
extreme cases. Because if the one person you
pay to be your reality anchor tells you that
your feelings are a sign of sickness, where do
you go from there? You have nowhere left to stand.
It sounds like the ultimate ego trip for the
therapist. I know your mind better than you do.
Which brings us right back to the question you
asked earlier, why? Who are these people? What
is going on in the brain of a gaslighter? Are
they all just villains twirling their mustaches?
Right. Is it calculated evil or are they broken
in some way too? And the uncomfortable truth
is that for many, gaslighting is a defense mechanism.
It's all about their own anxiety regulation.
Wait, hold on. They gaslight other people to
calm themselves down. Think about it. A gaslighter
is often someone with an incredibly fragile sense
of self. Ironically, they cannot handle being
wrong. They cannot handle being the bad guy in
any story. So when they forget to pick up the
kids from school or they cheat on a partner or
they make a huge mistake at work, the shame and
anxiety are so intolerable that they must rewrite
reality. So saying I never agreed to pick up
the kids isn't just a lie to get out of trouble
in that moment. It's a way to protect their own
ego from the reality that they failed. Exactly.
It restores their sense of control. It quells
their own internal payoffs. It absolutely destroys
you, yes. But for them, in that moment, it feels
like survival. Is it something they learn? Or
are people just born this way? It's widely considered
a learned trait. It's social learning. You grow
up and you watch your father do it to your mother.
You see that when dad denies reality, the argument
ends and he gets to sit down and watch TV in
peace. And you learn, ah, this is a tool that
works. It's an efficient tool for conflict avoidance
and self -regulation. Ruthlessly efficient. Now,
of course, there is a strong correlation with
certain personality disorders. Like what? Narcissistic
personality disorder, or NPD, is the classic
one. Also, borderline personality disorder, BPD,
and antisocial personality disorder, or sociopathy.
People with these profiles are much more prone
to using manipulation to regulate their environments
and their emotions. But not everyone who gaslights
has a personality disorder. Not at all. Plenty
of otherwise normal people stumble into these
behaviors just because they're emotionally immature
and terrified of conflict and shame. We've talked
a lot about the individual, the one -on -one
dynamic. But I want to zoom out now because the
outline here pivots to these broader contexts.
And some of these affect millions and millions
of people. They do. The core mechanism of gaslighting.
Gaslighting, denying someone's reality in order
to maintain power, it scales up perfectly. Let's
start with one that is huge right now, especially
on social media. Medical gaslighting. I see women
sharing stories every day about years of pain
being ignored by doctors. It is a massive systemic
issue. Medical gaslighting is when a patient's
direct, firsthand report of their own symptoms
is dismissed, downplayed, or minimized by a medical
professional. And the statistics are clear. This
disproportionately happens to women and people
of color. It's the old don't worry your pretty
little head about it diagnosis or it's all in
your head. Or it's just stress or it's just anxiety
or the classic maybe you should try losing some
weight. I was reading a case about a woman who
went to doctors for years with severe abdominal
pain. For years they told her it was anxiety.
They told her it was just her period. And what
was it? It turned out to be stage four ovarian
cancer. That is infuriating. And tragic. The
delay in diagnosis caused by doctors prioritizing
their own biases over the patient's reported
reality was ultimately fatal. That is gaslighting
with a death count. Then there's the workplace.
We have Kate Abramson's 2024 book on gaslighting.
She talks about this a lot. Abramson makes a
great point about how it functions in a professional
setting. Imagine an employee goes to HR to report
harassment. She says, my boss made a sexist comment
to me in a meeting. Okay. And the HR manager
or the boss's boss responds with, oh, you know
he didn't mean it like that. You're being too
sensitive. Can't you take a joke? That phrase,
you're being too sensitive, it seems to be the
universal slogan of the gaslighter, doesn't it?
It's the skeleton key. It unlocks everything
because it immediately shifts the problem from
the action, the harassment, to the reaction,
the victim's sensitivity. It protects the institution
by pathologizing the person who complained. Which
leads us directly into racial gaslighting. This
is a heavy term, but help us unpack it. How is
this different from just regular racism? That's
a great question. If racism is the structural
oppression itself, then racial gaslighting is
the psychological defense mechanism used to deny
that the oppression exists. It's the pathologizing
of dissent. Can you give me an example of that?
Sure. When a black employee points out that a
company's hiring policy seems to be biased and
the response from management is you're being
divisive or you're always obsessed with race
or my favorite, that's actually reverse discrimination.
So instead of addressing the actual data of the
hiring policy, the conversation is shifted to
attack the perception and motive of the person
pointing it out. Exactly. It's a way to coerce
marginalized people into doubting their own lived
experience of racism. It forces them to ask,
am I just being paranoid? Is it just me? It upholds
the existing power hierarchy by making any challenge
to that power seem irrational or crazy. And that,
my friend, is the perfect bridge to the biggest
stage of all, the politics. The macro scale.
This is where it gets really big. I saw a reference
to a 2008 book, State of Confusion, that argued
political gaslighting is basically what you get
when modern marketing techniques meet old school
propaganda. It is. And the goal in politics often
isn't even to make you love the leader. It's
just to confuse you so much that you disengage
entirely. If you don't know what's true anymore,
you can't fight back effectively. You just give
up. And we have to be really clear here. Our
sources point out that this is a tool, not an
ideology. It happens on both sides of the aisle.
Absolutely. It's a tool of power, not a partisan
policy. Anyone with the ambition to use it can.
So on the right, journalists use the term constantly
during the Trump years. It really exploded then.
Things like alternative facts. The idea that
you could just say the crowd size at the inauguration
was the biggest in history, even when photos
clearly showed empty space. That was a textbook
example, a direct challenge to visual reality.
The message was, don't believe your lying eyes.
Believe what I tell you. But then you see it
on the left, too. The sources point to a moment
in 2025 when Jake Tapper on CNN asked Minnesota
Governor Tim Walz if the Democratic Party had
engaged in gaslighting the public regarding the
2024 election. Right. The essence of the question
was. For months, we were told everything was
fine. The polling data said everything was fine.
But now we see that it wasn't. Were we being
managed? Were our perceptions being managed?
So when any political party controls the official
narrative so tightly that it starts to conflict
with what voters are seeing and feeling with
their own eyes, that's political gaslighting.
That's the charge. But if we want to see the
final boss of political gaslighting, the most
extreme, terrifying example. We have to go to
East Germany. The Stasi, the Ministry for State
Security. The Stasi. I read about this technique
they perfected, a method called Zersetzung. It
translates to decomposition or biodegradation.
Which is just a horrifying name for a government
program targeting its own people. It's chilling.
It was pure psychological warfare. See, in the
1970s and 80s, the GDR, East Germany, wanted
to look respectable to the West. They couldn't
just keep arresting every dissident and throwing
them in jail. It looked bad on international
television. So they needed a quieter way to neutralize
opposition. Exactly. They developed zersetzung
to psychologically paralyze hostile negative
people without ever having to arrest them. How
on earth did they do it? They gaslit them. On
an industrial scale, Stasi agents would break
into a dissident's apartment while they were
at work, but they wouldn't steal anything. That
would be too obvious. So what would they do?
They would move the furniture, just slightly,
an inch to the left. They would take a picture
off the wall and hang it on a different wall.
They would change the time on the person's alarm
clock so they'd be late for work. They would
go into the kitchen and replace the brand of
tea in the cupboard with a different brand. That
is just maddening. You'd come home and your entire
house would just feel long, off. Imagine that
happening every single week. You tell your friends,
I think someone is breaking into my apartment
and moving my tea. Your friends look at you like
you finally lost it. Why would the secret police
break in just to change your brand of tea, Hans?
You're just stressed. So you become totally isolated.
You start to doubt your own memory, your own
sanity. And they did more. They would order embarrassing
items, like sex toys, to be delivered to the
person's workplace to create shame and suspicion.
They would send doctors to the person's home
to tell them they were sick when they weren't.
It's a complete manufactured reality. The goal
was to induce a total crisis of confidence. They
wanted the dissident to be so consumed by their
own personal psychological chaos that they simply
didn't have the mental or emotional energy to
organize a protest. And it worked. The state
never had to lay a hand on them publicly. It
is the ultimate proof that gaslighting is a weapon
of control. Okay. We have stared into the abyss.
We've seen the Stassi. We've seen the bad therapists.
We've seen the husbands in the attic. Now, for
the listener who is sitting there and feeling
a tightness in their chest, because some of this
sounds way too familiar, we need to talk about
habilitation. How do you get out? It's one of
the hardest things a person can do. Breaking
free is incredibly difficult because by definition,
your primary escape tool, your own mind, your
own judgment has been compromised. Right. You
can't just trust your gut when your gut has been
systematically retrained to distrust itself.
Exactly. So trust yourself is actually terrible
advice to start with. It's like telling someone
with a broken leg to just walk it off. You need
external tools. You need crutches. Okay. Give
us the toolkit. What are the crutches? Step one,
and this is the most important, the reality diary.
You have to externalize your memory. You can't
trust it, so write it down. When a conversation
happens, when a promise is made, write it down
immediately. Date, time, what was said, verbatim
if you can. So when the gaslighter says two weeks
later, I never said that, you're making that
up, you can look at your book. You have a transcript.
You have a transcript. And it's not for showing
him or her. Don't argue with it. They'll just
say you wrote it down wrong or you misheard.
It's for you. It's a private anchor you can look
at and say, I am not crazy. This happened. Okay,
that makes sense. What's step two? Step two,
the reality proxy. or what I call a board of
directors. You need a trusted friend, a sister,
a therapist, a good one who is completely outside
the bubble of the relationship. Someone you can
call and say, Am I crazy or is this really weird?
Yes, and you have to be totally honest with them.
People who are being gaslighted often hide the
abuse because they feel ashamed or stupid. You
have to open the books. Let someone else help
validate your reality until you are strong enough
to do it for yourself again. And what about the
practical side? I feel like a lot of people stay
because the gaslighter controls the money or
the house. That is almost always part of the
trap. Financial control is a huge component.
So the habilitation plan must include a logistical
exit strategy, quietly gathering important documents,
saving a little bit of money in a secret account
if you can. You cannot heal your mind while you
are still dependent on the poison for your survival.
It's a full rebuild of the self from the ground
up. It is. But the ultimate goal, the thing you're
working towards, is to reach a point where you
don't need the other person to agree with you
for your reality to be true. That's the heavy
lift, isn't it? That's the final graduation.
I know the light's dimmed. I don't need you to
sign off on it. I know what I saw. I know what
I heard. I know what I felt. That is the mantra.
We've covered so much ground today, from the
fog of 1938 London to the Google trends of 2022.
from a single attic to the SCSI headquarters
in Berlin. It's a journey through the fragility
and the resilience of the human mind. And I think
the reason this topic hits so hard for so many
of us right now is that, in a weird way, we're
all feeling a little bit like Paula in that house.
How do you mean? Well, look at our world. Deepfakes.
AI -generated images. Social media algorithms
that feed you a completely different news reality
than the person living next door to you. We are
living in that state of confusion. We absolutely
are. The entire modern information ecosystem
is in some ways designed to make us question
what is true. So the provocative thought I kind
of want to leave everyone with is this. In an
era where reality itself is constantly being
edited, filtered and spun. are we all being slightly
gaslighted by the sheer volume of the noise?
It's a very valid fear. It's hard to find a solid
footing. And if so, then the lesson from that
old black and white movie is maybe the only one
that matters anymore. When the lights dim, don't
let anyone, no matter how powerful or convincing
they are, tell you they didn't. Trust your eyes.
Trust your eyes. That's it for this deep dive.
Take care of yourselves, and we'll see you in
the next one.