Gaslighting

Gaslighting is manipulating someone into questioning their own memory or perception of reality, repeatedly, so that they depend on the manipulator's version.

The longer explanation

The word comes from the 1944 film Gaslight and spread through the 2010s. Merriam-Webster named it Word of the Year for 2022 (reported by Wikipedia; we couldn't open the dictionary page). Wikipedia notes that some mental health experts worry it's now used too broadly, and quotes Robin Stern of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence: using it for someone who is simply insistent or trying to influence you isn't what gaslighting is. The core is a pattern of denial and distortion that erodes your trust in your own mind, not a single disagreement.

Example

You remember them saying they'd call. They say they never said it, that you always twist things, and that you're too sensitive. It happens again next month.

What it is not

Disagreeing about what happened, forgetting something, or telling a different version of a story isn't gaslighting. One instance isn't a pattern.

Online use vs research use

Online, "gaslighting" is used for almost any disagreement or lie. The research and clinical meaning is narrower: repeated, deliberate distortion of someone's reality to gain control.

Avoidant or narcissist?

People sometimes call an avoidant ex a gaslighter because they minimise feelings ("I never said I wanted a relationship", "you're overreacting"). Minimising can come from discomfort with emotion and a need for distance: avoidance is protection. Gaslighting is a pattern of distorting your reality to control you: abuse is control. They can co-occur, so look at the pattern, not one line. A 2025 meta-analysis (Mohay et al.) reported that vulnerable ("covert") narcissism links most strongly with preoccupied (anxious) attachment, moderately with fearful, and only weakly with dismissive; grandiose narcissism wasn't linked to attachment style. It's correlational, and it describes groups, not any one ex.

I know what I saw. I'm done defending it.