hexcision:

slashmarks:

some additional clarification:

gaslighting is not disagreeing with your interpretation of what happened, subjectively. It’s disagreeing with the literal, objective, even physical facts of what happened, and telling you you’re remembering them wrong.

this can be done on a societal scale, but it’s a lot less like “millennials are lazy and entitled” and a lot more like “the united states has never practiced military interventions in latin america”

like, for instance, my mother used to cuss me out when she was angry and call me a bitch, and tell me I was ruining her life, etc.

she would sometimes tell me that I was whining and making a big deal out of nothing after this happened. this was a cruel, abusive thing to tell a twelve year old. it wasn’t gaslighting, though.

she also used to rely on the fact that I have memory problems and later tell me that those events literally never happened, and I was making them up completely or had “dreamed them.” this is gaslighting.

someone who wasn’t there for the events, doesn’t know what happened, and isn’t on an orchestrated campaign to make you trust their memories in place of your own isn’t gaslighting you. that doesn’t mean they’re behaving well or aren’t abusing you, but gaslighting is a specific abuse tactic, not just anything someone does that’s out of line.

this is a good post and very informational but i’d just like to add that i’ve also noticed that non-psychotic/non-schizospectrum people have a form of gaslighting psychotic/schizospectrum people specifically which involves using our psychosis/schizospectrum status against us in order to make us out to be unreliable, delusional, having hallucinated it, etc. 

this is definitely a form of gaslighting and it is a terrifyingly popular one. if you’ve experienced this, are experiencing it presently, or experience it in the future, you are not alone, i’ve been there myself and you can talk to me about it if you need or want to.