New Research Explains How A Gaslighter Slowly Warps Their Victim's Reality
Psychologist Willis Klein breaks down the motivations and maneuvers of a romantic gaslighter.
By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | July 3, 2023
A recent study published in Personal Relationships discusses the effects gaslighting has on its victims in romantic relationships. The study also sheds light on the underlying motivations of gaslighters, and how gaslighting plays out within relationships.
I recently spoke to Psychologist Willis Klein of McGill University in Canada, lead author of the study, to understand how and why gaslighting takes place in romantic relationships. Here is a summary of our conversation.
What led you to study gaslighting in romantic relationships?
I first became interested in gaslighting around 2017, when the term started receiving a lot of public attention. The idea of gaslighting seemed to fit in well with what I knew about cognitive psychology, and I became really curious about what cognitive mechanisms could allow gaslighting to occur.
I was surprised when I started researching the term and found out that, at the time, no psychologists had written any peer-reviewed work on the topic in over 20 years!
When I started researching gaslighting all that existed was a smattering of case studies written by psychologists and psychiatrists dating back to the 1960s, a book on gaslighting and psychodynamic theory, a few self-help books, and a single philosophy paper. Since then, the literature has really grown, but there is still a lot of room to study the topic, especially for psychologists.
What are its effects on both the perpetrators and the victims?
So far, my work focuses almost exclusively on victims. Recently, my collaborators and I have published a qualitative study where we analyzed open-ended survey responses from 65 survivors of gaslighting. In that study, we identified several psycho-social effects that gaslighting had on victims.
First of all, most of our subjects reported that they felt as though they had lost part of themselves, that their self-concept had shrunken, or that they'd become a 'shell of themselves'.
There were also frequent reports of becoming socially isolated. This could be during the relationship, because the gaslighter restricted who victims could spend time with, but often continued after the relationship had ended, as the victims had developed a mistrust of others.
A small subset of participants also reported post-traumatic growth narratives, meaning they felt that they had overcome and learned from the abuse. That being said, other subjects reported that years later they had not recovered.
What are the underlying psychological motivations or factors that lead individuals to engage in gaslighting behavior?
I think this is a question that needs more attention in the literature. In my research on gaslighting in romantic relationships, I've identified two primary motivations that gaslighters have. But we're limited by the fact that our data is the self-reports of survivors of gaslighting, so we did not interview the gaslighters themselves. With that in mind, we found that the two primary motivations for gaslighters are:
- To avoid accountability for bad behavior, like infidelity
- To control the victim's behavior
Both of these motivations have been identified in other work on gaslighting.
Some philosophers have also discussed how gaslighting can result from structural forces or how holding prejudiced beliefs can result in gaslighting, both of which are considerations that could reveal alternate motivations.
Would you say gaslighting is completely unintentional or can it be deliberate sometimes?
The framing of this question is interesting, as it reveals how much our understanding of gaslighting has changed over time.
The earliest case studies on gaslighting were written by psychiatrists who viewed gaslighting as an attempt to have an individual institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital on false pretenses to gain something, such as the victim's assets. This somewhat limited view of gaslighting would imply that gaslighting is always deliberate.
Later, psychodynamic researchers began to view gaslighting as something that was often unconscious and unintentional, and I think this psychodynamic framing is more like how most people view it today.
There are cases of gaslighting that are undoubtedly intentional, conscious, and deliberate, where the gaslighter is trying to take over the victim's finances or something like that. These kinds of stories occasionally make an appearance in medical journals and the news.
That said, most of what people refer to of gaslighting is likely less deliberate than that. I assume there is a spectrum of gaslighting behaviors ranging from highly intentional to completely unintentional, but this is still a matter of debate.
How does the process of gaslighting typically unfold in a relationship? Are there specific patterns or stages that tend to occur?
In my own work, my collaborators and I identified several common stages in gaslighting relationships.
Many relationships start with what we call love-bombing. Love-bombing is when a gaslighter is extra affectionate, generous, and attentive. We believe this stage causes the victim to develop a deep emotional bond to the gaslighter, as well as an implicit sense of trust, and indebtedness, all of which distracts from or enables the gaslighting to occur. While love-bombing is common among our participants it wasn't universal.
Once gaslighting begins we found that participants entered a feedback loop of rationalizing the gaslighting behavior that slowly intensified the adverse psychological effects of the abuse.
Other psychologists, such as Robin Stern, have identified several stages within the gaslighting cycle: specifically Stern views victims as moving from disbelief, to defensiveness, to depression.
In my own work, gaslighting appeared to be fairly unsustainable, as most participants developed an insight into the abuse and ended the relationship; that may be a sampling bias though, as we specifically recruited subjects who identified as having experienced gaslighting.
Could you elaborate on the concept of "post-traumatic growth" and how it manifested in some of the victims who recovered from gaslighting?
Post-traumatic growth is a framework in psychology that is used to study responses to adverse and traumatic life events. Friedrich Nietzsche's famous aphorism, "What does not kill me makes me stronger," nicely captures the idea of post-traumatic growth. That is, sometimes adversity can lead to positive changes and growth.
In our study, some participants reported that after their experience of abuse they developed a clearer sense of themselves, felt like a stronger person, or more at peace with themselves. It's important to note, that this wasn't the majority of participants, and some of our participants reported the opposite, that years later they still felt like a shell of themselves.
Can you provide examples of the false pretenses or tactics commonly employed by gaslighters to convince their victims of their own epistemic incompetence?
This is often pretty idiosyncratic, so there is no one-size-fits-all description . It depends on characteristics, sensitivities, and vulnerabilities of the victim, as well as the reasons the perp is gaslighting.
One common reason that gaslighting occurs in romantic relationships is to avoid accountability for infidelity. So, for example, the gaslighter might start cheating, and as a result become more withdrawn, cagey, aloof, and be staying out late without explanation.
If the victim starts to question the perp about this behavior the perp may start accusing them of being paranoid, mistrusting, overly emotional, or crazy, even though asking your partner why their behavior has suddenly changed, or why they are suddenly so cagey is totally rational.
Gaslighters may also apply stereotypes to their victims in an attempt to get the victim to question themselves. Many of the classic examples are misogynistic, like telling someone they are "overly-emotional and irrational, like all women."
In our study, there was an interesting example where an American woman was dating a non-American man who was financially exploiting her. Whenever she didn't want to give him money or buy him things, he'd accuse her of being a "greedy American" who "only cares about money."
These accusations make the victim question themselves and their motivations and can often be combined with more direct accusations of being "crazy." In a lot of cases, the gaslighter emotionally and mentally exhausts the victim over time, while repeatedly insisting that the victim is somehow disconnected from reality.