Gaslighting "Lite" in Otherwise Good Marriages

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Let's go in this episode we're going to talk about gaslighting light or the ways that understanding the Gaslight Effect, a phrase coined by Dr. Robin Stern, who's the Associate Director of the Yale center for Emotional Intelligence, can help you navigate your healthy relationship with a person who is not someone we would characterize as a gaslighter in the more general sense, but learning to see how gaslighting shows up in otherwise healthy relationships, why it happens, how it takes two to tango, and how you can extricate yourself from this painful cycle, whichever side of it you're on with regard to a particular issue. We're going to talk in this episode about what gaslighting is, the situations in which many, many people, perhaps even you and me, gaslight our partners or other people in our lives, why that happens and what to do when you notice it happening, either to you or by you. Finally, we're going to look at how to turn past gaslighting light into relationship gold, and we'll look at some of the common areas where it happens so that you can notice where it shows up in your relationship in the future. So let's jump in. What is Gaslighting? Glennon Doyle recently did an episode of Her We Can Do Hard Things with sister with Dr. Robin Stern, and it's a great episode. I recommend listening to it. But they were talking about what gaslighting is and Robin Stern's book the Gaslight Effect and her Recovery Guide by the same name, the Gaslight Effect Recovery Guide, are wonderful resources that can help you learn a whole lot more about why gaslighting happens and what it is. But in a nutshell, gaslighting is when you're experiencing something and endeavoring to talk to the other person about it, but they flip it around on you. You wind up questioning yourself, your own character motivations, and even grip on reality because of the way that the other person characterizes what's happening and why. So it borrows from originally an English play where a woman's husband was undermining her sense of trust in herself and her memory and doing it deliberately so that he could lie and cheat and steal. And that's an extreme situation. And there are people who will do that. But what I found fascinating about the entire conversation was the way in which gaslighting really does show up anytime someone has a piece of themselves they're not willing or able to look at yet. So, for instance, unreliability. Robin Stern talked in the Glennon Doyle podcast about her father being late and not owning it. Not taking responsibility for keeping his word about what time he'd be home or how he'd communicate about that. And that's something I experienced growing up, that my dad would come home when he came home and my mom would be upset about it. And he would make that about her being unhinged. You know, he'd say, I did call, or he'd say, well, I couldn't. I was in a meeting or I was busy or I was. I lost track of time or whatever. Over and over and over and over, over years and years. And really, when we are accountable for something, we figure out how to do it differently or how to be really clear that we're not going to. But gaslighting behavior is when, rather than doing any of those clean, straight on things that take responsibility for our own actions and motivations, we flip it around and we make it about the other person being too sensitive or being controlling or overreacting. And there's another phrase for this that was coined by another female psychologist, Jennifer Freed, F R E Y D from the University of Oregon, who's the founder and president of the center for Institutional Courage. And she coined the phrase darvo. It's an acronym for deny, attack and Reverse Victim and Offender. So those are kind of three different behaviors, but they often do happen in sequence and in conjunction with each other. It's where I say, no, I didn't do that. Or I say, wait, here's where you're off base and reversing victim and offender says, wait a minute, how are you doing this to me? Pulling out the card of false accusation or you're the actual perpetrator, or the only reason I do that is because you do this. So let's get into some specific examples because as I said at the top, the piece I want to bring out is that this information is useful even if you're in a healthy relationship, because it's in the darkest recesses of otherwise healthy relationships that I think gaslighting light, I haven't come up with a better term for it yet. But you know, this sort of garden variety gaslighting, it's not comprehensive and global. It's not your Partner sort of poisoning you every day with thoughts that you're worthless and terrible and that you have to put up with them because no one else will ever love you. You know, a true abusive gaslighter will do those things globally and will deliberately endeavor to undermine your sense of yourself. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about how reasonably nice partners will sometimes gaslight. And that makes it all the more difficult to discern and can make it really confusing. So areas this commonly happens in my experience are around sex, around money and spending, around other compulsive behaviors. And certainly sexual behaviors and money behaviors are big areas where compulsion happens. But let's also make sure we name drugs, alcohol, gambling, Internet use, television watching, involvement in spectator sports are all big areas of compulsion. And then employment earning, under earning is a place where people can really have big blind spots and therefore be very defensive and get into defending and attacking and reversing victim and offender and gaslighting making. I'll get into it more later, but you know, for example, no, I can't look for a job right now. And yeah, you're earning all the money and have been for years, but can't you see I'm depressed? And I can't believe you're so not understanding. You're so unsupportive. That's why I haven't found a job is because you keep bitching at me about it is an example that I see frequently. It's very effective at backing off a caring partner, even though that caring partner is under a lot of pressure and really needs things to change, needs a partner, not just a dependent. But that kind of argument makes them feel like a horrible person for asking for partnership, asking for support, asking please find a way to earn some money, even if it's not in your ideal job, because I'm buckling under the pressure of everything I'm holding, which is often earning money, trying to keep the budget balanced and trying to keep kids well parented and their own well being taken care of in the absence of a fully engaged partner who then, you know, may also be using drugs or you know, even, even legal medications and alcohol and even just recreationally, maybe not totally addictively, but you know, sort of numbing and, and not being fully present and partnered. And I see many partners not able to totally address these issues because of this kind of gaslighting light, because their partner flips it around on them and there may be some legitimacy. Maybe they do get fed up and yell sometimes and because of the Legitimacy of that side of it. Like oh yeah, when you say that I'm not understanding. Yeah, there are moments when I'm not and I'm irate. And so because that person is self responsible and self reflective and really wants to be their best self, they go away and work on themselves again. And the other partner who just gaslit them about it, they had a point. No, it's not right to yell. It's not productive or constructive. But then they made that the whole issue and now we've once again skipped over the issue of partnership. And are you really showing up in earnest and pulling your weight? Are you addressing the issues that keep you depressed and not earning? Or are you just backing your partner off? So that's an example that I dove into in the middle of my list here. But to get back to the list of common areas that this happens, I also mentioned earlier time and communication about it, sort of accountability for being available as a partner and as a co parent. So I frequently see one person is home with children and not able to do what they feel like doing and the other person is out and sort of free to come home when they come home. And there might be agreements or there might be requests to the contrary, but this is a place where when somebody's not being accountable, they will often than gaslight about it. And they may or may not be doing anything nefarious while they're out, but they're also not being reliable. And then when that's questioned, that's when the gaslighting light comes up and then finally shared responsibilities at home. So if there's something you've talked about bajillions of times, whether it's managing finances or the way that you're going to load the dishwasher, or disciplining children, being the parent who intervenes when a child needs more help or isn't fulfilling what's expected of them. These are places where gaslighting may happen, where one partner is asking the other partner for something they're not doing and the partner who's not doing the thing may flip it around and make it about their other partner. So as you look at these different areas, where in some marriages gaslighting light can pop up, where one partner may bring up a request or a desire for more partnership, more reliability, more honesty, more transparency, more engagement, then that may bump up against a bruise in the partner who's receiving the request. It's probably an area where they have some disowned material, some shadow part of themselves. I don't mean Just dark, I mean, just unconscious. So they have strength they aren't aware of, or they have vices they aren't aware of. It's a blind spot. And when we have blind spots, we can react. Subconscious parts of us react in a knee jerk fashion that might be out of character for us, might almost be like a different person's behavior. And that subconscious part does that in order to defend the right to not look at that stuff, you know, in order to protect the blind spot. The reason we have blind spots is because we think we can't afford to look at them. We think that it's too scary, too dangerous, would destabilize our personality too much. And this is how we get sort of those no fly zones in marriages that can last for years. Because every time one partner gets close to it, the other partner's subconscious defenses fly up and say things that are pretty compelling to the first partner. So if you find yourself resonating with what I'm saying, you feel like, yes, my partner does that around this area. And that's why this area has been a rock in my shoe for months, for years, for decades. The first thing you need to do is start to see, start to slow down those conversations where it happens, start to notice where you've started to avoid the conversations and see your part in the process. And that's not me gaslighting you, saying you cause it. What I'm saying is I can see it in my own life, where it never happened without my participation. Every place where I've actually said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, slow down. I just said I need you to call by 5 and let me know if you're going to be home at 5:30 as expected, or if you're going to be later. That's all I said, that's a reasonable request. But what you did with that was start to make it about me and distract from my actual request. Can we back up? When I get clear and kind, yet precise, when I don't escalate from the counter accusations, but I don't let it get spun around on me when I don't take on those other pieces, then things get clearer. We actually get to the question at hand. Glennon Doyle mentioned in her podcast that often the counterattack is accurate. When we say it's hurtful to me when you do this and the other partner says, ah, you're too sensitive, for instance, or you're so sensitive, they may have a point there. We might be really sensitive, or we might be saying, I wish we had sex more and our partner might say, you're too busy. You're always in your head, you don't want to have sex. When I want to have sex. Those things might be true. And you might want to address those on your side. And when your partner has that as their first and only response, they're not addressing their side of it either. So you can hold both. And that's how we start to unravel this gaslighting light cycle, is by saying, okay, yeah, you may have a point there. I'll look at that part. Let's get back to what I was asking you to look at. Okay. And when we can do that, when we can not get distracted, which I had done in my relationship, I did that for months and years at a time. Kurt would say to me, well, you're too prickly. Or, you know, there was a time like you're overweight or you're not in touch with your own sexuality. Just all of these things that I would just take on and go and run with. He didn't even really mean them. They were just sort of handy things that unconsciously he would pull up to say, but I was so earnest and so hardworking. It's like, okay, I'll go fix that. And then I'd come back to him and I'd be like, well, I fixed that now. And then he could come up with another one. Because any of us can when we're in defensive mode. You know, we have a 15 year old now and he can come up with all kinds of things I'm doing wrong to make sure that we don't talk about what he needs to do. That's all of us, right? We all have that. I was exactly like that at 15. And at 15, that's developmentally appropriate. But at 30 or 45 or 60, we need, in order to be a fully alive, fully activated individual, and certainly in order to be a partner who is a nourishing presence in a relationship, we have to become willing to slow down and own our side. Not just in words. This is another piece of. It is a way that we can be bought off when we're asking for more, is that our partner says, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll work on that. But then they aren't self accountable. And so then who brings it up next? The person who made the request in the first place, of course. So another piece of unraveling this is asking the partner who says, okay, yeah, I'll work on it, or who has fended you off in the past, asking them, can you build A support structure for yourself so that you're tracking this and you come back to me about it so I'm not the one holding it all the time. So that we don't have another conversation two weeks from now where again, I'm asking for it, and again you're giving me lip service about it. So I know how scary these things are because it can feel like we're threatening the relationship when we start to try to change the order of things here. But in truth, this is a way of standing for the relationship, standing for the continual, never ending awakening of both of you. I want to look at the unexamined parts of me that limit our love. And I ask that you look at the unexamined parts of you that make it harder for me to live with you. And that limit your capacity to give and receive love. And when you start to do that, another piece that's scary is that your partner may not rise to the occasion. That is a meaningful risk. And I have walked many people through that side of it. But the truth is, what they tell me years later is at least I found out. I really called the question, and it didn't change the truth. They were always unwilling to really become their full selves. What they were really about was protecting those blind spots, was staying frozen at that level of development. So given that that's what they're really about, I'm really glad I know now. I'm glad we called the question because it freed me to move on. I know is what people tend to tell me. And in between those two places of beginning to call the question and feeling good about having done so, there's a lot of fear and pain. But there's so many other situations where I've helped people begin to navigate this, begin to untangle, slow down, not get spun around. You know, for me, it felt like, you know how you put on the blindfold and they spin you around before you hit a pinata? It felt like that. Like I would bring something to Kurt and he would twist it all around and I would wind up so confused because he's so nice. But I was so dissatisfied, I didn't know which way was up. And by slowing down and really tracking for myself, know, like, this is all we're talking about, and this is a legitimate thing to talk about, even if I am X, Y and Z, this thing I'm asking for is a reasonable thing to ask for. This is a legitimate topic, and I get to really ask for this. And in my marriage and so many others, that has been tremendously rewarding. It has illuminated blind spots that then become, you know, kind of like an empty lot that was full of weeds and old tin cans that becomes a flourishing garden. Those blind spots turn into areas of new life, and that's what I really want for you and your partner. So whether you have been guest lighter or guest Lighty light, and I've certainly been both, I hope that this episode gives you a starting place to begin to unravel it. I look forward to hearing your questions about it and what this brings up for you. And we can do follow up episodes if that's useful. But as we've looked at what gaslighting is, how it happens in otherwise perfectly healthy relationships, the way it takes both partners to keep it going, and the common areas where it happens, I hope that this has helped you start to shed some light on some previously murky or confusing areas. Have a beautiful day and I'll see you next time. I'd love to hear what you're going.

To take away from this episode and what questions you have. Where do you feel this conversation in your body? Drop me a DM on social media anytime. Links are in the show notes. You know, reviews are really what help others recognize how this podcast is different from other relationship and sex podcasts. So thanks in advance for leaving a review right now in your podcasting app before you move on with your day.

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Hit that subscribe button in the app so you'll always get notifications of new episodes when they drop. Thank you so much for being here. I'm Michelle Isenberry Christensen and this has been Sex Love Power. I'll see you on the next episode and until then, may the light within.

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