“That is a form of gaslighting, so from a young age if you’re not able to trust what your parents are saying, you go on to not be able to trust anyone else.” It has also been shown that denial is a common tactic of child abusers. Those parents might have the best intentions – to protect their child – but it actually come across as unreliable, she says. Muir noticed that children who witnessed alcoholism, domestic abuse or substance abuse in the home were often told it didn’t happen when they confronted their parents about it. What other cultures can teach us about forgiveness.'Sometimes, people who gaslight you in life aren’t doing it out of malice or to deliberately harm you but rather due to a lack of self-awareness,” or perhaps even to protect you. “Gaslighting can happen in work, family or platonic relationships as well as romantic ones,” says Cheryl Muir, a relationship coach based in the UK. While the origin of the term gives the impression it's a tactic of the master manipulator, some of us might gaslight without ever realising. While you may have heard about gaslighting in this context of relationships, it’s actually present in many other aspects of day-to-day life.

The word itself comes from the name of a 1944 movie in which the male protagonist convinces his wife she is losing her mind. It was used by the medical profession for decades before being named the buzzword of 2018. A form of emotional abuse, it can be used to make the victim question their own mental wellbeing.

Gaslighting is defined as manipulating someone into thinking they’re wrong even when they’re right. While the word has been in our dictionaries for over half a century, its precipitous increase in usage began around 2013 and hasn’t slowed since.

Over the past few years, the use of the term “gaslighting” to refer to this phenomenon has shot through the roof. Has someone ever told you something that made you doubt your own memory? And have you been convinced after the fact that they were doing so to manipulate you? This is what some experts call “structural gaslighting”. You might be familiar with gaslighting in the context of relationships, but this manipulative tactic also works en masse.

Gaslight movie 2020