Gaslighting

Abstract

Stern, a psychoanalyst, recounts cases where clients are caught within gaslighting relationships. Because there are two parties to this pattern, "the mutual participation" makes it such "that the gaslightee holds the key to her own prison" (xxi). [...]comes defense, when the receiver tries with all their might to convince the gaslighter that he or she is just wrong and does so to win approval. Not long after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the George W. Bush administration misled the public about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction. While some Democratic Senators had doubts about the false claims, after the destruction of the World Trade Center, some were less willing to uphold their own perceptions and voted to back the deceptive Bush administration.

Gaslighting The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life, Robin Stern, New York: Harmony Books, 2018, 271 pp.

Gaslighting as a term had been around since the 1960s but came into vogue when Donald Trump announced for President. A gaslighter seeks to manipulate another or others into thinking that their own perceptions of reality are mistaken, and for the gaslightee to believe what the manipulator claims instead. It owes its origins to a 1938 British play, Gaslight, by Patrick Hamilton that in 1944 became an American movie. It starred Charles Boyer as a husband who deceives his wife, Ingrid Bergman, and manipulates her into thinking that she is mistaken about events and occurrences. He wants her to doubt her sanity as part of his desire to manipulate his spouse to get her inheritance. A police inspector played by Joseph Cotton suspects something foul and helps Ms. Bergman recover her self-belief and exposes the deceptions of her husband.

One of those who brought gaslighting to the public's attention is Yale psychoanalyst Robin Stern. Her 1996 The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life has been revised and republished in 2018. It is essential reading in the Age of Trump.

Dr. Stern gives two examples of gaslighting by Donald Trump and his campaign. Using Trump as a model of a gaslighter is appropriate. As of June 25, 2018, there were 2,800,000 hits for gaslighting on Google, and 365,000 hits for Donald Trump and gaslighting.

The first instance Robin Stern relates concerns comedian John Oliver's HBO weekly show "Last Week Tonight". On Halloween night 2015 aspiring candidate Trump tweeted, "John Oliver had his people call to ask me to be on his very boring and low rated show. I said "NO THANKS" Waste of time & energy!" Oliver tweeted back, "At no point did we invite Donald Trump to appear." Trump being Trump, as Stern relates, he then claimed Oliver's staff invited him to be on the show four or five times. Oliver reflected that he found this exchange "genuinely destabilizing" and in doubt of his own memory had his staff check and then reassure him in reality no invitation had been made. Thinking about this more in March 2016 Oliver made the claim that Trump had gaslighted him (xxiv-xxv).

The second Trump example stems from an incident between a reporter and Trump's then campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. He yanked the arm of reporter Michelle Fields as she approached the candidate to ask a question. This was caught on video and Lewandowski was charged with battery by the police. The Trump campaign said Fields was delusional and they had other film, never released, which disproved the clear evidence of the video and the recorded accounts of other eyewitnesses. Given the false declarations of the Trump campaign, Fields began to doubt her own experience even though she had the bruises to back up her memory. After recounting this deception by Trump's people, Stern concludes, "we are living in a Gaslight Culture," in that we are "profoundly influenced by a culture that repeatedly encourages us to believe in ideas that are obviously not true" (27-28).

Dr. Stern emphasizes that it is not just the culture or manipulative individuals that make for gaslighting. It takes two to tango. "Gaslighting is always the creation of two people-a gaslighter who sows confusion and doubt, and a gaslightee, who is willing to doubt his or her own perceptions" (xix). The focus of the book is on how this process works where one party is a gaslighter and the other is someone who is receptive to this undermining. The gaslightee is susceptible to being deceived, and so what Stern calls the gaslight tango proceeds.

Stern, a psychoanalyst, recounts cases where clients are caught within gaslighting relationships. Because there are two parties to this pattern, "the mutual participation" makes it such "that the gaslightee holds the key to her own prison" (xxi). The individual can recognize the dynamics and change his or her behavior. That is the hope and aim. Stern came to recognize the gaslight effect within her clients, among her friends, and within herself. She said her realization of being gaslighted "ultimately led to the end of my own first marriage" (xxi).

Her focus is primarily on romantic and work relationships. Stern shows how gaslighting goes through three stages and there are three different gaslighting personalities. The first stage is disbelief. When the gaslighter says something off the wall, the other party cannot comprehend that the gaslighter is serious. Second, comes defense, when the receiver tries with all their might to convince the gaslighter that he or she is just wrong and does so to win approval. The last stage is depression. This is when self-doubt has sunk in; one turns on oneself, and believes more what the gaslighter maintains than one's own notions. The gaslightee has so "completely bought into her gaslighter's negative view of her that she could no longer access her true self" (12).

The individual being gaslighted might not always readily perceive what is being done to him or her as there are different types of gaslighters, and the undermining effort may not be quite evident. First, there is the glamour gaslighter. Stern says she had a relationship with such a glamorous gaslighter, that she fell "under his magic spell" thinking she inhabited "an enchanted world where my beloved and I were the luckiest lovers the world had ever known" (15). At first, the glamour gaslighter is a charmer who sweeps someone off his or her feet. But then the gaslightee not only becomes accused of something that he or she has not done but is expected to confirm the accusation. At times the criticisms can turn into harangues then suddenly the accuser apologizes. Or you may first get criticized in front of friends then complimented in a way "that takes your breath away, so you begin to doubt your own perception" (17). As one wants to believe all the astounding praise one receives, the turning things from blame to praise or from praise to blame can throw some off, and then the gaslighting tango proceeds into psychologically dangerous territory.

Equally difficult to perceive is what Stern calls the good-guy gaslighter. This is someone who wants to appear to be nice but does things to get his or her own way, without the other being able to sense they are being manipulated. A result is that the gaslightee often feels confused. They may sense something is awry, but the good-guy façade makes it hard to put one's finger on the true intent (20-22). The third type, the intimidator, is the easiest to detect. This individual treats the other with contempt, explodes with anger, gives the silent treatment, threatens to leave, or accuses a female partner of being like their mother. There is a regular effort to demean and devalue the partner in this dread-filled dance.

Stern maintains there is a gaslighting epidemic where particularly strong women are "caught in debilitating relationships," and where both men and women struggle "to disentangle themselves from employers, family members, spouses and friends who are clearly manipulative and cruel" (2425). She sees this phenomenon as part of a culture in which gaslighting is regularly used as backlash against women's changing roles, and against growing individualism where people are not as connected to families and communities as in the past. Recovering one's sense of self and honoring one's perceptions is a way out of the entanglements of gaslight tangos.

Throughout the book, Stern traces the unfolding of some gaslighted relationships. She writes about Katie and Brian, a dating couple. Katie is outgoing and friendly-willing to engage with people she encounters at parties and on the street. Brian is both considerate and sweet, but afraid of newcomers. Whenever Katie encounters a man and is her usual sociable self, Brian says she is flirting and that the guy is after her. Brian and Katie have regular disagreements about what is going on here. There are times, when to get his approval, Katie doubts her own intentions. Eventually, Katie saw that how she responded made Brian more possessive. She then came to reassess the whole relationship, and because Brian had trouble stopping himself, Katie was no longer sure the relationship, despite all its strengths, was worth maintaining.

Stern tries to bring the gaslightee to recognize what the gaslighter is doing and the part the gaslightee plays in being gaslighted and to learn how to regain self-regard. The person can then try to change things and make better decisions for him or herself. Stern has faith that people can become gaslight-free, leave unfulfilling relationships, and embrace their own visions and joy (233).

For psychohistorians, gaslighting can help us reformulate certain dynamics of important historical events, where the focus has been more on the deception of leaders than what made the electorate willing to believe falsehoods. Two examples of are The Vietnam War and the reaction to the 9/11 attack on the U.S.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson said the North Vietnamese had attacked American ships. This was the Gulf of Tonkin incident. It never happened, but it took years to uncover the falsehood, and Johnson used this manufactured event to get Congress to pass a resolution allowing him to retaliate. He later used the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as justification for his mammoth escalation of the Vietnam War. At that time, much of Congress and the citizenry did not believe a President would lie about such things. Oops! The infamous credibility gap owed much to President Johnson's manipulative ways.

Not long after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the George W. Bush administration misled the public about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction. The President would not wait until the U. N. could definitively confirm or deny these claims and led us into the Iraq War in 2003. In 2018, the U.S. was still mired in Iraq. While some Democratic Senators had doubts about the false claims, after the destruction of the World Trade Center, some were less willing to uphold their own perceptions and voted to back the deceptive Bush administration. The majority of the public ini- tially bought into the false claims about Hussein. Psychohistorians need not emphasize only the way leaders misled us, in effect tried to gaslight the nation, but also need to investigate more thoroughly why at these particular times much of the public did not detect these falsehoods.

The tango of gaslighting is also pertinent in the Trump era, where Trump made over 2,000 false statements in his first 355 days as President (Kessler and Kelly, 1/10/2018). It is not only that Trump averaged over 5 misleading statements a day, but the question is, why so much of the public still has faith in him. We may have a gaslighter in the White House, but we also have many willing to be deceived among the populace. Many in the American public have been caught in what resembles a gaslighting dynamic since Trump became a politician running for office. Psychohistorians and other trying to make sense of these patterns can ascertain how both sides of the gaslighting dynamic looks-and seek evidence to help understand not only the gaslighting of the powerful, but why becoming a gaslightee has become part of American political and cultural life.

References

REFERENCE

Kessler, G., and Kelly, M., 1/10/2018, "Trump Has Made More Than 2,000 False or Misleading Claims Over 355 Days," Washington Post„https://www.washingtonpost .com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/01/10/president-trump-has-made-more-than2000-false-or-misleading-claims-over-355-days/?utm_term=.5fad912c0574.