#stop using that word
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but please, please,pleasedo not use the term “gaslighting” in political debates or discussion. It doesn’t belong there, and using it in that context is doing real harm to abuse survivors.
Gaslighting is when an abuser attempts to make their victim question their own sense of reality through denial or fabrication. A parent telling their child, “No, I never sat you down and yelled at you for an hour because you didn’t take out the trash. Why would you even accuse me of something like that?” That’s gaslighting. One partner using emotional manipulation and vague claims to convince another that having a single beer after dinner is evidence of a drinking problem? That’s gaslighting. Someone countering your political opinions? A politician saying something you disagree with? Not gaslighting.
I get that things are contentious right now. I understand a lot of people are angry about a lot of things. But the word “gaslighting” is important to abuse survivors. It’s a powerful term, and the only one that adequately describes the mental agony of having someone try and rewrite your reality, of having them attack your own sense of self to try and make you depend on them to define what you remember and what you don’t, of wondering if the horrible things you remember even happened. When you take the word “gaslighting” and fling it around your political arguments, you cheapen it. You water it down. You turn it into just another buzzword used to shut people down on Twitter, to win a debate that is utterly meaningless by any estimation. (Hate to break it to you, but it’s true. Social media debates don’t change anyone’s mind and, according to most counts, have only ever succeeded in making everyone angry.)
When survivors, still in that fragile questioning phase where they don’t know if they deserve to use the word abusejust yet, see gaslighting used so casually, they’ll assume that what happened to them was no more horrific than one person disagreeing with another on social media. What’s worse, their abusers can now accuse them of gaslighting for something as simple as challenging their false version of events.
I won’t be hearing arguments on this. No “but it IS gaslighting because….” No “but when my parents argue with me, it feels like gaslighting.” Your feelings do not define a word. That word does not belong to you. Leave it alone.
