Gaslighting: when you start doubting your own memory

“I never said that. You’ve made something up again.”

The sentence is spoken calmly, almost wearily, as if by someone who has been patient for far too long. She stops in the middle of the kitchen. An hour ago she was sure of what she had heard. Now she isn’t. That evening, once he has fallen asleep, she picks up her phone and scrolls through their messages to see whether it was written down somewhere. Not to prove to him that she was right. To prove to herself that she isn’t going mad.

That quiet moment — when a person starts checking their own memory as if it belonged to someone else — is at the heart of what we now call gaslighting. The word has become so common in recent years that Merriam-Webster named it word of the year for 2022. But when a word becomes fashionable, its meaning starts to blur. In this article I want to explain what gaslighting is, why it works even on intelligent, independent people, how to tell it apart from an ordinary disagreement about what happened — and what you can do if you recognise it.

Before I begin, one thing needs to be clear: this article is not a test for judging how dangerous your relationship is. If you are afraid, or if you are in danger, you will find numbers at the end that you can call today. Your safety comes before anything written here.

Where the name comes from

The term comes from Gas Light, a 1938 play by the English writer Patrick Hamilton, and even more from the 1944 film adaptation starring Ingrid Bergman. In it, a husband deliberately sets out to convince his wife that she is losing her mind. He hides objects and then accuses her of losing them. When he searches the attic at night for hidden treasure and turns on the gas lamps up there, the lights in the flat dim — she notices, and he insists she is imagining it. Slowly she begins to trust him more than her own eyes.

The word entered the professional literature relatively late. In 1969, the psychiatrists Russell Barton and J. A. Whitehead described cases in The Lancet in which relatives tried to present a healthy person as mentally ill. Later the term was taken up by psychoanalysts and family therapists, and in recent decades by sociologists and philosophers asking how it is possible to take away someone’s trust in their own perception.

You will also find a short explanation of the concept in the knowledge base under gaslighting.

What it looks like in everyday life

In the film, everything is dramatic. In real life, gaslighting is mostly quiet, repetitive and made up of fragments that each seem almost insignificant on their own. Some of the forms people describe most often:

• Denying events. “That didn’t happen.” “I never said that.” Even when it was said clearly, or even written down.
• Denying feelings. “You’re overreacting.” “You’re too sensitive.” “You’re making a drama out of nothing again.” This isn’t someone holding a different opinion; it is the message that your reaction is in itself proof that something is wrong with you.
• Shifting the conversation. You raise a subject, and within a few minutes you are discussing your tone, your past or your “problem” — but no longer the thing you wanted to say.
• Doubt about your memory and health. “You know you’ve been very forgetful lately.” “Maybe you should see a doctor.” Concern that sounds like concern but works like a diagnosis.
• Bringing others onto their side. “Your mum thinks you’re on edge too.” “Everyone can see you’re not the person you used to be.” As you run out of people to check reality with, your footing weakens too.
• Alternating with tenderness. After days of doubt comes attention, a present, a lovely evening. This very alternation is often what makes a person doubt even more: “If he’s this kind, I must really have made it all up.”

Gaslighting rarely comes alone. It is often part of a wider pattern of control in which criticism, isolation, jealousy and control over money or phones are intertwined. That wider pattern is the subject of Emotional abuse: how to recognise it when there are no bruises. A related mechanism is the one I describe in When others keep you in guilt: recognising emotional blackmail — there the tool is guilt, here it is doubt.

How often it happens

Hardly anyone measures gaslighting separately as a distinct form, so there are no precise figures for it. What we do measure is psychological violence in intimate relationships, of which it is a part. In 2014 the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights published a survey of 42,000 women from all the then EU member states. 43% said they had experienced some form of psychological violence from a current or former partner — from humiliation and intimidation to controlling behaviour.

That figure does not mean that almost half of women have experienced gaslighting. What it does say is that psychological violence is not a rare exception that happens to “other people”. And because it is harder to prove than a bruise, people often recognise it in their own lives very late.

Gaslighting is not tied to gender. It can be done by a man or a woman, in a same-sex relationship, between parents and adult children, at work. In Slovenia, the Family Violence Prevention Act explicitly counts psychological violence as a form of domestic violence — so it is not simply “a difficult personality” or “a hard marriage”.

Why it works — even on clever people

People who recognise gaslighting in hindsight often say: “How could I have been so naive?” But it has little to do with naivety. Gaslighting works because of three things that are completely ordinary in healthy people.

First, memory is not a recording. Every memory is partly reassembled each time we recall it. We all know this, so we are willing to allow that we might be wrong. A person who gaslights leans on exactly this healthy humility — and turns it against you.

Second, we trust the people we love. When someone close to you insists on something else with complete certainty, their certainty means something to you. The people closest to us are our mirror; we check through them whether we are seeing straight. When the mirror persistently shows a different picture, a person begins to doubt their eyes, not the mirror.

Third, doubt is easier to bear than realisation. If I admit that someone I love is, deliberately or not, taking away my trust in myself, my picture of the relationship collapses. It is easier to believe that I am forgetful. Psychology calls the tension between two incompatible beliefs cognitive dissonance — and one of the ways we settle it is by changing our belief about ourselves rather than about the other person.

In a substantial 2019 paper, the sociologist Paige Sweet showed a fourth side: gaslighting relies on social inequalities. When someone tells a woman she is “hysterical”, or tells a person with a history of mental illness that they are “imagining things again”, they lean on stereotypes their surroundings already know. That is also why others find it easier to believe them. In her view, gaslighting is not just a psychological phenomenon between two people; it happens in relationships where power is unequally distributed.

Three stages: from disbelief to losing yourself

In her book The Gaslight Effect, the psychoanalyst Robin Stern described how gaslighting usually develops through three stages. They are not strict rules and should not be read as a diagnosis, but they help many people put their experience into words at all.

In the first stage, a person still believes themselves and thinks it is a misunderstanding. In the second, they spend an enormous amount of energy trying to convince the other person of what really happened — and the other person often turns that very effort against them, with accusations that they are “attacking” or “always looking for a fight”. In the third stage the fight stops, but not because it has been resolved. The person is simply exhausted and has accepted the picture of themselves the other has been offering. Stern describes how people at this stage often say they no longer recognise themselves: once cheerful, decisive and sociable — now cautious, quiet and unsure.

What it sounds like up close

This is how a conversation might sound in which all of this happens in three minutes (composite, not a real person):

“You said you’d be here at seven. I waited until nine.”
“I never said seven. I said I’d come when I finished.”
“This morning you said seven. I remember, because I moved my training session for it.”
“See, this is it. You remember everything the way it suits you. You know you’ve had trouble with your memory lately.”
“I don’t have trouble with my memory.”
“Then why is there a story like this every week? I’m not saying you do it on purpose. But look at yourself, getting worked up again.”
Silence. “Maybe you did say when you finished.”

Look at what happened. It began with the question of what time someone said they would arrive. It ended with her memory, her emotional stability and her getting worked up. Nobody mentioned the lateness any more. And the last sentence is not spoken because she has genuinely changed her mind, but because it is the only way to end the conversation.

One conversation like this is not gaslighting. Gaslighting is when such a conversation keeps repeating — when every attempt you make to put something into words ends with what is wrong with you.

What stays with you

The effects of gaslighting are often less visible than those of other forms of abuse, but they run deep. People describe how they:

• constantly apologise, even when they don’t know what for;
• rehearse every conversation in their heads beforehand, working out how to say something without starting a row;
• start writing down small things because they no longer trust their memory;
• find it hard to make even small decisions without checking with the other person;
• feel ashamed of the state they are in and hide it from friends.

Perhaps the most painful part is that gaslighting damages not only the relationship but a person’s relationship with themselves. The doubt doesn’t stay confined to the partner; it spreads to work, friendships, decision-making. I wrote about how lost self-trust is slowly rebuilt in Deciding without endless doubt: how to trust your own judgement. And because after a relationship like this people often blame themselves for having “allowed” it to happen, I also recommend Self-image after abuse: when you believe it was your fault.

It helps to know that the shame you feel is not proof that you did something wrong. Shame is often exactly the emotion gaslighting nurtures most, because it keeps you quiet.

In relational family therapy, which I am training in, we often also look at what a person took away from their family of origin about truth and power. Not to locate the blame with them, but because it can make it easier to understand why a particular voice was so convincing. If you grew up with a parent who regularly corrected your perceptions (“you’re not scared”, “that didn’t hurt”), that voice may feel familiar from long ago. Gaslighting in an adult relationship is therefore not your fault — but it can travel along an old, well-worn path.

When it isn’t gaslighting

Because the word has spread so widely, it would be unfair of me not to write this too: not every disagreement about what happened is gaslighting.

Two people can sincerely remember the same evening differently. Memory is shaped by what we felt, what seemed important to us, what we expected. If your partner says “I remember it differently”, that is not abuse — it is a description of their experience. Nor is it wrong for someone to be mistaken or to forget. Forgetting is not manipulation.

There is one more trap. The word “gaslighting” can itself become a weapon. If we declare every different opinion a partner holds to be gaslighting, we have made conversation impossible — and taken away the other person’s right to their own experience. That calls for care on both sides.

So how do you tell the difference? Not by a single sentence, but by the pattern. Questions you can ask yourself: Does this always go in the same direction? Am I allowed my own version, or is there only one? Do I come away from our conversations clearer or more confused? Is this relationship drawing me away from people who used to be close to me? These questions are not a test — they are a way of shifting your attention from “who is right” to “what is happening to me”.

Exercise: a record that is yours alone

This exercise is not about gathering evidence against anyone. It is about reconnecting with your own perception. You can do it today.

1. First, make sure what you write is safe. If there is any chance the other person reads your phone, computer or notebooks, write somewhere they cannot reach — or don’t write it down at all; do the exercise in your head, or in conversation with someone you trust.
2. Choose a single event from the last few days. Describe it as plainly as you can: when, where, what was said, what happened. No interpretation and no judgement.
3. Separately, write down what was said about it afterwards. How the other person described the event when you talked about it. Simply notice the difference between the two accounts.
4. Write down what you felt — and where in your body. The body often remembers what the mind later doubts. Tightness in the chest, heat in the face, tiredness.
5. Read it again a few days later. Not to use it in an argument, but to check whether your version still seems likely to you. Often it does. And that is important information.

If the exercise makes you feel very low, or what you notice frightens you, that is a sign it is time to talk about it with someone outside the relationship — a friend, a family member or a professional.

What you can do — and what you can’t

When people recognise gaslighting, their first decision is often to explain everything carefully to the other person. Once he understands what he is doing, he’ll stop. Sometimes that really happens — mainly when it was an unconscious pattern the other person brought from their own family, and they are willing to look at it. Often, though, it doesn’t. With someone who uses gaslighting to keep control, every new attempt at explaining becomes a new conversation about what is wrong with you.

More important than convincing the other person is breaking the isolation. Gaslighting thrives where you have nobody to check reality with. One friend, one sister, one counsellor who tells you “I would have heard it exactly the way you did” can do more than a hundred arguments.

It is also important to know that couples therapy is not an appropriate form of help when there is abuse in the relationship — including psychological abuse. A joint session can become a new place where your version is dismantled in front of a witness, or the session can be followed by punishment for what you said. Why this is so is explained in more detail in Why couples therapy is not the right help when there is violence. Individual support, specialist organisations for people affected by abuse and, when needed, a doctor are a better starting point. I am not a specialist in abuse; but individual therapy can be a place where you slowly start to hear your own voice again.

If you fear for your safety or your children’s safety, don’t wait until you are “completely sure” what is going on. Help is yours before that:

• SOS helpline for women and children affected by violence: 080 11 55 in Slovenia (free, anonymous);
• Klic v duševni stiski (crisis line): 01 520 99 00 in Slovenia (every day from 7 pm to 7 am);
• police: 113;
• emergency services: 112.

Help is also available from social work centres and from non-governmental organisations such as Društvo SOS telefon and Društvo za nenasilno komunikacijo (Association for Nonviolent Communication), which can also help with a place in a safe house when that is needed. A call commits you to nothing — you can call simply so that someone hears your story and tells you what is true.

What to remember

• Gaslighting is the repeated undermining of your perception, memory and feelings until you start believing the other person more than yourself.
• It works because it leans on healthy qualities — trust in those close to us and the awareness that we can be wrong — and because it often happens in relationships with unequal power.
• One misunderstanding is not gaslighting. What decides is the pattern: whether it always ends with you and your “problem”.
• More important than convincing the other person is breaking the isolation and checking your experience with someone outside the relationship.
• Where there is abuse, couples therapy is not appropriate; your safety comes first — in Slovenia, SOS helpline 080 11 55, police 113, emergency services 112.