
You’re so sensitive. You’re so emotional. You’re defensive. You’re overreacting. Calm down. Relax. Stop freaking out! You’re crazy! I was just joking, don’t you have a sense of humour? You’re so dramatic. Just get over it already!
Sound familiar?
If you’re a woman, it probably does.
Do you ever hear any of these comments from your spouse, partner, boss, friends, colleagues, or relatives after you have expressed frustration, sadness, or anger about something they have done or said?
Mia Freedman explains it on the podcast Mamamia Out Loud
When someone says these things to you, it’s not an example of inconsiderate behaviour. When your spouse shows up half an hour late to dinner without calling—that’s inconsiderate behaviour. A remark intended to shut you down like, “Calm down, you’re overreacting,” after you just addressed someone else’s bad behaviour, is emotional manipulation – pure and simple.
And this is the sort of emotional manipulation that feeds an epidemic in our country, an epidemic that defines women as crazy, irrational, overly sensitive, unhinged. This epidemic helps fuel the idea that women need only the slightest provocation to unleash their (crazy) emotions. It’s patently false and unfair.
I think it’s time to separate inconsiderate behaviour from emotional manipulation and we need to use a word not found in our normal vocabulary.
I want to introduce a helpful term to identify these reactions: gaslighting.
Gaslighting is a term, often used by mental health professionals (I am not one), to describe manipulative behaviour used to confuse people into thinking their reactions are so far off base that they’re crazy.
The term comes from the 1944 MGM film, Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman. Bergman’s husband in the film, played by Charles Boyer, wants to get his hands on her jewellery. He realises he can accomplish this by having her certified as insane and hauled off to a mental institution. To pull off this task, he intentionally sets the gaslights in their home to flicker off and on, and every time Bergman’s character reacts to it, he tells her she’s just seeing things. In this setting, a gaslighter is someone who presents false information to alter the victim’s perception of him or herself.
The form of gaslighting I’m addressing is not always pre-mediated or intentional, which makes it worse, because it means all of us, especially women, have dealt with it at one time or another.
Top Comments
While gaslighting mostly happens to women. It is not gender specific. Female bosses and partners also do this to men. Neither scenario is ok.
I've recently realised that my ASD partner is a gaslighter. I'm honestly unsure how much of it is intentional and how much he actually believes the lies and crap he spouts.
It's so frustrating to the point where my mental health really has suffered and I barely recognise the person I've become