The Hidden Logic of Gaslighting

The Hidden Logic blog series offers a deep exploration into the psychology underpinning relationship patterns and behaviours, investigating their psychological functions and the potential root causes in childhood experience.

In this second post, I am diving into the psychodynamics of emotional abuse by examining its most insidious and disorienting tactic: Gaslighting.

What is Gaslighting?

Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation where the perpetrator systematically attempts to convince the victim to doubt their own memory, perception, or sanity. It is a calculated and sustained assault on the victim’s sense of reality.

What does this systematic assault look like? It can include:

• Denial: The perpetrator vehemently denies things they have clearly said or done ("I never said that, you’re imagining things").

• Contradiction: They challenge the victim's recollection of events, offering a skewed version that favours the perpetrator ("That's not how it happened; you have such a hopeless memory").

• Trivialising: The perpetrator dismisses the victim's feelings as excessive or irrational ("Why are you so sensitive? It was only a bit of banter").

• Accusation: They project their own behaviour onto the victim ("You're the one who needs help; you're clearly unstable").

  
  

The crucial difference is duration and consistency. Unlike the one-time explosive event of love bombing, gaslighting is a drip-feed of doubt, a continuous erosion of the victim’s connection to objective reality.

The Disorienting Effect on the Victim

For the victim, this continuous doubt creates confusion and self-questioning, triggering thoughts like, "Perhaps I am too sensitive," or, "If they are so certain that's not what happened, maybe my memory is failing me."

This sustained attack acts as a disorientation mechanism. The victim becomes so focused on defending their reality and trying to 'prove' their sanity that they lose sight of the perpetrator's original harmful action. The discussion shifts entirely from what the perpetrator did to what is wrong with the victim.

The victim begins overriding their own senses and judgement, desperately seeking external validation from the perpetrator. This tendency to distrust one's inner world and rely on the external world is a direct and successful assault on their capacity for reality testing.

The Metaphor of the Smoke and Mirrors

The term "gaslighting" originates from the 1938 play (and subsequent 1944 film) where a husband slowly lowers the gaslights in their home and then insists his wife is imagining the dimness. This is a powerful metaphor because it describes the systematic, invisible nature of the abuse.

Crucially, the perpetrator's goal is not merely to win an argument; it is to install the idea that the victim cannot be trusted. The victim is left constantly checking, questioning, and apologising for their own perception, obsessively trying to align their reality with the perpetrator's. They are left wondering, “Am I losing the plot?” This is the cycle of self-doubt that keeps the victim psychologically tethered, endlessly searching for a stable truth that is constantly being moved.

The Hidden Logic

To understand the perpetrator's behaviour, we must accept that their actions are driven by unconscious compulsion, not conscious intent.

Both the future perpetrator and the future victim emerged from childhoods marked by emotionally unavailable parents, which fundamentally impacted their sense of self and their capacity for object constancy. The defence mechanisms of splitting and impaired object constancy, discussed in the previous post, are amplified here.

The act of gaslighting is the direct manifestation of the perpetrator's need to externalise their own fragile sense of self-worth and the victim's conditioned tendency to internalise blame.

Perpetrator vs. Victim in Gaslighting

Role	Perpetrator: Externalising the Pain	Victim: Internalising the Blame
Survival Need	The need to maintain an "all-good" self-image at all costs. Reality must be bent to accommodate this.	The desperate need to find a stable "other" and the conditioned belief that something is fundamentally wrong with the self.
Behavioural Goal	To transfer all responsibility, blame, and undesirable qualities (like forgetfulness, instability, cruelty) onto the partner.	To desperately seek the truth of the situation from the person who is creating the lie, confirming the belief that their own judgement is flawed.
Defence Mechanism	Projective Identification (Amplified). The perpetrator cannot accept their own flaws. They unconsciously force the victim to carry and express their chaos and uncertainty, then point at the victim's 'instability' as proof of their own superiority.	Trauma Bonding and Repetition Compulsion. The victim is bonded not to a person, but to a pattern of interaction that mirrors the disorienting, conditional attention of their childhood, pathologically striving to fix the chaos created by the perpetrator.

The gaslighting dynamic is the perpetrator's unconscious attempt to escape internal responsibility by weaponising the victim's self-blame. By convincing the victim that their own reality is flawed, the perpetrator achieves two unconscious goals: they secure the illusion of their own superior sanity, and they ensure the victim remains dependent on them for the 'correct' version of reality.

Gaslighting is the mechanism by which two wounded individuals re-enact a painful childhood script where the perpetrator gains control by demanding the victim surrender their mind, completing the psychological assault begun by the seduction of love bombing. Understanding this logic is the essential step toward reclaiming one's emotional reality and breaking the cycle of self-doubt.