Trauma by Gaslight

brought to me from Marmotte on CGHubvia sexytofu's Bitch You Ain't Crazy

A huffpo article popped up on my peripheral radar. i think its actually the first article I've ever read in its entirety over there, and indulged my inner voyeur by peeping their comments (dirty). As yet another who is not any kind of authority on this, I'm going to speak some psychobabble from my experience anyway. It is part confession, part extrapolation and interpretation, and all sincere; it is all written with as little conceit and as much heart as I can muster.

Since I don't feel like supporting huffpo SEO any more than necessary, and the original author doesn't do a very good job of showing his work (his premises do not wholly support his conclusion, empathetic to it though I am; I think he relies too heavily on eroding rational thought to make his point without addressing the underlying mechanics), I recommend reading SexyTofu's summary blag on it.

The story is about the technique of emotional manipulation called 'gaslighting', wherein the perpetrator prompts emotional responses through his or her own behavior, then criticizes the other for her or his emotional response. The core mechanics of this very Pavlovian technique is its reliance on conditioning, stimuli, response.

From another of her posts, ST's example of the boyfriend who wouldn't let her cry is actually an excellent (unaware) example of subtler gaslighting. On the surface, he set forward a rule that she couldn't cry, and if she did he would leave. In other words, his behavior did nothing to erode the relationship, it was her fault for crying. Her responding with emotion reduced to abandonment and rejection. The psychological fulcrum of the technique rests on breaking the subject's will to consider their emotions and feelings as valid. This is not a difficult thing to accomplish. Too many of us already have an embedded sense that our emotions are a liability. They steer us in the wrong directions; they cause fear and flight.

stream of consiciousness

In reality, fear and flight cause emotion, emotions navigate us back to equilibrium and are an alarm when we are out of balance. When they are muted and silenced, conditioned and battered they can no longer affect the change in perspective for which we rely on them.

What does this mean when we are not staring into our emotions, when we flee any mention of introspection; what are emotions to us when dealing with them as necessary on an as-needed basis?

Emotions:

Effectively and myopically, they are the malcontents. They cause problems. Rabble-rousing raucous trouble makers.

A boyfriend comes along and tells SexyTofu (who I don't presume to know, but will pretend to act like I have a tenuous grasp on the situation she presented (NOTE: she has a much better moral to the story)), "Yeah. Those inconvenient emotions, and their responses, you need to drop them."

When phrased like this, it lowers the threshhold for pushing the subject's fulcrum to the point where she or he will willingly start subjugating her or his own emotional responses to invalidation.

The conditioning relies on that simple wedge between the subject and her or his feelings of emotional validation and reassurance.

Once the wedge is in place, there is a metaphorphosis in how the subject perceives problematic behavior (i.e. having emotions, feelings that indicate a problem in the relationship's mechanics).

For ST's BF, when she cried [S*cry], it made him feel [M*discomfort] "like a dick" and he would leave [S*rejection]. The conditioning sets in as her sense self decays [invalidate feelings, rebuke self] and her sense of security (trust in the relationship) begins to depend on her ability to not cry.

His behavior is able to continue unabated due to her escalating fear of rejection and abandonment; escalation due to the reinforcing of the understanding wherein her emotions cause her to be bandoned and rejected. When he behaves in a way that he knows should result in [S*cry], and it doesn't, his response is likely to continue at the same or an accelerated rate of [behavior].

So the wedge is in place, the regime for conditioning is assured and basically self-sustaining (that is to say, the subject will perpetuate it all on her or his own). This is pretty devious and we haven't even gotten to the deliberate part. This is what makes the whole thing so scary. This is just one way of dissecting interdependence / independence / codependence of emotions. It's so messy!

As an aside, and in disclosure, I can't say that I have or haven't deliberately "gaslit" a situation before. I will say I have not deliberately done so, much less in some kind of pervasive pattern. I have used my emotions as bargaining chips and performed emotive blackmail (I have since mended my ways to be on the guard against my passive-aggressive behavior). Here is a situation; (A) says to (B) "I want a tofu sandwich." (B) says to (A), "I can make a seitan, tempeh, or black bean sandwich; but I can't make tofu right now." (A) says to (B) "Ok, but that's what you said before. And before. This is important to me. Please, go get the tofu so you can make me a tofu sandwich."

Here we come to an impasse, where basically the immoveable object meets the irresistabl force. (B) can try assuage (A) by pleading, apologizing, or whatever; but emotional consolations do not a need sate.

As is obvious (after the fact) to anyone who has been here with one need or another, if it (A) truly is a need, and it (B) truly can't be met, it can get truly nasty before long. Emotional abuse can fly from either direction, whether direct or indirect. I could have deflected and prefaced that with "When backed into a corner..." but at the end of the day hurt is still hurtful and the circumstances only matter when it comes to the indictment.

So how much do you try to hurt yourself with judgments when you realize you've put yourself in those cement shoes;

• Does it matter how you feel about the fact that you can't meet that person's need?
• Should you tell them how their need makes you feel?
• Is that abuse and manipulation?
• Does its designation as abuse depend on some vague sense of your motivation, or sincerity?

Now on to the gaslighting. What is it? Specifically,  it is a covert method of control whereby the manipulator uses the interpersonal problem of interpretation to disinform the subject of her or his own mental and emotional state.

hyperboleIn other words, when you gaslight a situation, you undermine the subject's faith in themself to contrive a falsehood as truth. A problem I have with the huffpo article that spawned this thread is his tone of condescension. Not he himself; he is not as an individual or as some proto-male codescending to women, singly or writ large. Rather, he speaks down to the real danger of this behavior. He reduces it to a reinforcement of the sentiment that female emotion is based on irrationality. Perhaps he skipped the preface or hasn't played the tape to the end, or maybe he just is reading aloud the middle passages, but really reinforcing that perception is a part of the conditioning and not even particular to gaslighting.

Gaslighting is a control mechanism meant to wholly convince someone that they should be interpreting their needs and responses to behavior through the filter of some other, in particular, the manipulator. 

As the subject you are meant to dispossess those tools for navigation and maintaining equilibrium. You are meant to become a pass-through and feedback loop for the manipulator. Where the manipulator begins by trying to create safe passage for shitty behavior, he or she ends by creating an echo chamber to buffet himself or herself and his or her insecurities and discomfort.

It is difficult enough to reconcile one self to one's own demons; bearing the brunt of keeping the demons of another at bay is another story altogether.

Fortunately, the subject of gaslighting needn't remain in the flickering domain. Discussion of and solutions for gaslighting abound. A common thread, once the pattern has been identified, is that control and power in the relationship has to be restored to a co-equal balance. Foundationally, the subject needs to learn how to trust their emotions again and to effctively rely upon and be able to talk about their feelings.

Obviously, assuming that the person isn't a full-fledged sociopath, the manipulator needs to cease undermining the subjects sense of being able to relate to the world through his or her emotions. Moreover, the manipulator needs to learn how to deal with his or her own demons independently. The subject is turned into an implement, a tool; the subject creates a feedback loop that allows the manipulator to distance himself/herself from reality and his/her emotions. For Sexy Tofu, the boyfriend's discomfort spawned the construct in the relationship whereby he was able to avoid feeling like a dick for his behavior. By taking responsibility for his actions first, then addressing the causes for them he could have started down a different path.

By not turning her feelings against herself, and instead using his feelings as a barometer for whether what he was doing was making him happy, he could have avoided just killing time and inflicting emotional damage on another human being. silencio by marmotte

So in the end, what is gaslighting? It is a sociopathic waste of time; it hurts others at the expense of gratuitous ego-reinforcement. Although one way of using it is to call out unwanted behavior as irrational, it is patterned after eroding the person's confidence in their emotions and feelings and self. Don't know if you're living under gaslighting? Evaluate the needs you have in your relationships, especially the ones that aren't being met in one-on-one relationships. When you are relying on one other person for the fulfillment of those needs, what characterizes the interaction when the other is confronted with your lingering needs?

Quetzlcoatl by MarmotteLike I said in the disclosure above, I don't think gaslighting is really a clear cut dynamic. It relies on fulcrums and wedges an pulleys and levers, and those are intrinsically wound up in many other avoidance and distancing coping mechanisms. To my knowledge I have not tried to deliberately gaslight any truths, but emotional extortion and passive-aggressive behavior are certainly borderline and easy to find yourself mixed up in. While you may not be able to characterize or diagnose a pattern of this behavior (I can only cite one specific case), I think a reasonable takeaway is this:

IF it is disturbing to realize that you maybe can border on behavior that was manipulative to the point of hurtful, or even traumatic, THEN you probably aren't a sociopath.

Happy consolations! You might not be a sociopath!

Are you unable to see conflict? Well....

Mad props to Sexy Tofu and her sexy blog. Happy to read it and also, I will repeat myself; [You should check out the link for the actual moral to her no-cry-rule-boyfriend story, it's a bit sexier than where I took it.]

Additionally, aside from paint flowchart, click through those pics and see about maybe getting some of Marmotte's stuff. I mean, DAMN. That's hot stuff.

Note: I deliberately steered clear of abuser/victim language in this post as I think it predisposes the reader to identify too closely with the latter. For the purposes of illustration, it is important to maintain a certain distance to avoid having feelings toward the manipulator/abuser, and to be able to focus on what would be happening as you identify with the dynamics in the victim.