Gaslighting - a malaise of our time

Gaslighting – the attempt to destroy another’s sanity and grasp on reality – has come back under scrutiny with coercive relationships openly discussed and dramatized in The Girl on a Train and in Helen’s domestic abuse in BBC radio’s The Archers. Add on top a US President who routinely accuses others of transgressions he is more guilty of himself and it begins to look like a malaise of our time.

   Being on the receiving end of blatant misrepresentation, a twisting of facts to make the gaslighter appear saintly and the victim at fault, is head-screwing. Partly I suspect since initially you can’t believe that anyone could be so overt and shameless. Confrontations brew up a storm of rage so the unwilling recipient withdraws into a frightened acquiescence. There’s only room for one reality and it isn’t the real one.

   I survived one such prolonged psychic assault until eventually baling with the steely thought that ‘no one destroys me’. Others aren’t so lucky, are more dependent, feel they have no choices. Women especially are conditioned to take guilt on board too easily though it’s not really gender specific.

   Understanding the underlying psychological mechanism that drives such behaviour won’t solve the problem, but it can help to make an intolerable situation bearable or open up the possibility of escape.

  Which returns to the subject of last week’s blog – that we are abysmally unaware of how the mind develops and works, or in this case gets road-blocked early on. This isn’t stuff that tinkering with thinking habits will straighten out. 

   In the chaos and turmoil of a baby turned toddler’s inner life, there is an understandable drive to build solid self-esteem. What happens to the bad feelings of shame and anger that threaten to undermine the fragile edifice? Give them to someone else. I’m wonderful, you’re at fault. Rather than integrating the great and not so great characteristics into a whole person.  What develops is a false self-image, dependent on others, essential as carriers of the what-I-can’t-face-about-myself bits.

  It can also work the other way round as the I’m-perfect part is projected onto an ideal hero, leaving the individual feeling constantly inferior; and the figure on the pedestal inflated way beyond their worth.

   Both are ways of handling the toxic package that is shame, the earliest and most corrosive of emotions. Feeling guilty about an action or a thought is uncomfortable.  I’m ashamed of being me is a whole different ball game, eroding self-worth out of existence. 

  The narcissist gaslighter and victim have problems with humiliation and self-disgust. One disavows it completely, the other accepts it as proof positive of what they’ve always suspected. Neither sees themselves are they really are  - individual human beings with pluses and minuses.

   Brainwashing to impose a distorted reality is a fascist dictator or cult chief’s modus operandi. The susceptible are swept up in the idealised delusion that the great leader knows all, even in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Naysayers have to be discredited by smears, slander or more extreme methods. There can be no room for doubt and uncertainty. Group-think rules, with no variation from the accepted one, to prop up the ruler’s grandiosity and to give the subjects a sense of belonging and identity.

   Christopher Bollas, the London analyst, talks of the ‘empty heart’ of such personalities who project their ‘dead core self’ onto the victim who then becomes ‘a disposable nonentity.’ And behind it all there is overwhelming rage which threatens to obliterate the leader’s personality altogether if they were to face their inner desolation. The split between the I’m-the-greatest self and the I’m-nothing is too immense to be bridged. 

   A compelling and helpful analogy was drawn between such personalities and artists by French analyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. Her take was that both recreate reality to suit themselves. Not that narcissists and perverts are necessarily creative except in this regard – they shy away from an unbearable world to invent their own fantasy land with themselves on the throne. 

   In the original 1944 Gas Light movie, based on Patrick Hamilton’s play, the beleaguered wife eventually shops her husband to the police but not before she tortures him by doing as she was done unto. A taste of his own medicine.  What prevents some downtrodden, manipulated spouses from taking revenge is a sense deep down that they are dealing with an incapable and damaged infant in an adult body. Pity as well as fear holds them in place. They also start from a place of low self-esteem which the narcissist homes in on like a wasp to a jam-jar. 

    As an inter-personal dilemma there are no simple choices. The narcissist is the least likely to seek treatment. Their false sense of superiority prevents them admitting to any imperfection. Below that lies an empty chasm which threatens to devour them and has to be avoided at all costs. The coerced one, their trash receptacle, is left with making what feels like a selfish choice to put themselves first or stay imprisoned as a pawn on a malign chess board. 

   Out in the political and cultural world? All of us are guilty of assuming someone else has THE answer or is leading the perfect life to which we can never aspire, shutting our ears and eyes to anything that might topple our idol from their pedestal. Truthfully it’s our pedestal. We put them there. Cut them down to human size and life seems duller without celeb glitz and harder work having to find our own answers.  We all project what we don’t like or refuse to own about ourselves. There’s a tiny part of everyone wrapped up in the better and worse tangle. 

  Every week I think I must find a funny blog topic to sparkle up the week.  Next week, I promise – to myself.

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