Gaslighting and Narcissism Part 4 - The Gaslighting Anthem

(The final part of the article by Kate Abramson)

The Gaslighter’s leverage

Ordinary attempts at manipulation like ‘guilt-tripping’ sometimes work, sometimes don’t, and sometimes work only partially. Many attempts to gaslight similarly fail. What’s surprising is that they ever succeed. Consider the vast difference between being manipulated into: (a) going to a movie one would rather not see, (b) losing one’s sense of standing as an independent moral agent. How could such a thing as (b) ever happen? The movie Gaslight gives us two overlapping answers—a personal one that portrays our protagonist, Paula, as already damaged and vulnerable on account of early childhood trauma, and a second story that focuses on the various forms of leverage her husband, Gregory, uses to manipulate her. For the sake of illuminating what’s wrong with gaslighting, it’s that second kind of story on which I‘ll focus here.

There is a recognizably common set of manipulative tools used by gaslighters, and each comes with it’s own dimension of moral nefariousness. Getting someone to turn against themselves by open threat is, for instance, a different kind of wrong than getting them to turn against themselves by appealing to their love or kindness, and the immorality of the latter cannot be adequately understood in any of the proto-Kantian terms we have as yet on the table.

All of the gaslighting tools I discuss in what follows are especially efficient tools gaslighting insofar as they take place against a background of power inequities. These can be simple, structural power inequities like the relation of employee to employer, or more complicated and deeper structural inequities such as those implicated in our interactions on account of prejudicial social norms (like sexism). They can also involve more intimate, personal inequities of power—if, for instance, one person has what is colloquially called a ‘fear of abandonment’ (as does Paula in the title movie), her loved ones then have a tool for manipulation she does not hold over them; it’s a relational power-inequity.

And there can be situational power-inequities as well; when, for instance, one person is particularly emotionally vulnerable because of circumstances, the withdrawal of affection by her beloved would cause much greater harm to her than were it the other way around (think, for instance, of Collier’s withdrawal from Pat just after she’s lost the tournament).

I won’t much tarry on this point about power inequities in the explorations that follow, but I do think it’s worth highlighting here, for three reasons. First, as I’ve already suggested, doing so can help us understand how it could be possible for someone to lose her own sense of independent standing as deliberator and moral agent. Second, doing so helps to make sense of why gaslighting is so often, though certainly not necessarily, a sexist phenomenon. And third, insofar as gaslighting often—if not necessarily—occurs in the context of power inequities that too adds a dimension to its moral perversity: to not only manipulate someone, but to do so in a way aimed at radically undermining her independent standing, by using manipulative leverage one has in virtue of a power inequity is a special brand of immorality indeed.

A. Love

One tool gaslighters use to manipulate is love. Here are four ways they do so. Loving someone, ceteris peribus, plausibly gives us reason to give their views a little extra credence. We needn’t go very far in this direction to see how this can become a gaslighting tool. Suppose love simply gives one reason to consider matters further than one would otherwise. Then, when he says, “you’re paranoid”, there’s the moment to wonder, to second-guess oneself. Loving someone also involves wanting to be with the beloved, and wanting the beloved to want to be with you. In this way, it’s built into the structure of loving someone that their expressing a desire not to be around you is experienced (absent further explanation) as a fracture, however small, in love. And that too gives the gaslighter a tool. Think of the moment that Collier opens the newspaper. Or consider the way
in which the phrase “I’ll just give you some space” can function simultaneously as a dismissal (‘you’re so nuts I don’t want to hear you’), and a threat (‘continue this way and I will disappear’). Third, we want our beloveds to think well of us.

To say to someone who loves you “you’re crazy” is not only to condemn, but to thereby threaten one of the basic desires involved in loving. Finally, loving someone involves wanting them to fare well. The evident distress on a gaslighter’s face as he says, for instance, “oh have some sympathy for the guy” isn’t just about “the guy”—to the extent the gaslighter is distressed, and one wants people whom one loves not to be distressed, one will want to relieve his distress.

B. Empathy

Our empathetic abilities can also be drawn into the service of gaslighting. Consider the junior colleague who’s told to have sympathy for the guy who slapped her on the butt. One can, of course, resist calls to empathy as outrageous. But we shouldn’t underestimate the cumulative effect of social forces that heighten the possibility of empathy being leveraged in gaslighting. In many of these situations, the gaslighters are people with whom one interacts regularly and with whom one has some need to get along. Those two factors together facilitate empathy, and make its pull harder to resist—this may be an inappropriate situation in which to empathize with the gaslighter, but if one needs to get along with him, it’s very difficult to simply cease empathizing with him altogether.

Second, the familiar sexist trope that women are and should be more empathetic is alive and well in us all. As Cordelia Fine notes, while women and men do not generally score meaningfully differently on tests for empathetic abilities, if you remind women of this trope, our empathetic abilities suddenly increase. And you get similar effects just by gender-priming, by for instance, having women tick a box that says “female” before taking an empathy test. The situations I’ve been highlighting are, I’d suggest, ones in which women are already gender-primed by the time gaslighting begins. They’re gender-primed because the initial situation about which they’re being gaslighted involves sexism—in that regard, the fact that they are female is already well on the table.

C. Practical consequences as manipulative leverage

The practical consequences of trying to resist gaslighting can be momentous. For instance, Liz’s job is clearly at stake. And her boss has framed matters in a particular way—she’s “too sensitive” and “a little paranoid” and should “take a few days off to destress.” Anything short of agreeing to this will amount to disagreement with her boss’s basic framework, a boss who has shown himself more than willing to act without justification against her professional interests. Liz could try to act as though she assents to her boss’s framework, while privately withholding assent. But that’s not an easy feat to pull off, for reasons that have been familiar since at least Hochschild’s exploration of the ways in which emotional management can be a job requirement in The Managed Heart.

One of Hochschild’s early examples involves flight attendants. Their job requires appearing happy and agreeable. But flight attendants quickly learn that passengers are adept at picking up on “strained or forced smiles”, and so learn
to actually be happy in order to appear happy.

Liz’s situation is not wholly dissimilar—her job depends on her appearing to assent to the view that she is “too sensitive” and “maybe a little paranoid”, and her boss is at least as likely to pick up on false appearances as passengers on an airplane—presumably more so, given that he interacts with her every day. In terms of job security, Liz might well be better off if she did regard herself as too sensitive. But if she reaches that point, she’s gaslighted.

D. Authority and purported authority

Authority and purported authority also often gives gaslighters manipulative leverage. First, people in actual positions of authority can use that as leverage to demand they be treated with unjustified degrees of credence. For instance, the authority of our employers gives us reason to give their views a little bit more credence over a subset of employee related matters. If a junior faculty member’s department mentor says, “here’s a good way to go about getting this done in the department”, his authority as her department mentor gives her reason to give that more credence, and that’s so even if the position of department mentor and authority thereof are derivative of presumptions of special competence with regard to, say, departmental matters. The line between cases of such justified exercises of authority and concomitant expectations of being given a little extra credence, and cases where employment related authority has overstepped its bounds is easily blurred. Gaslighters can exploit that fact.

Second, there is the purported authority of the crowd; what psychologists sometimes call the “normalizing” effect of multiple voices. That’s one reason why it’s significant that so many of these examples involve multiple gaslighters. The voice of many people is a great deal more difficult to ignore than one person. And a reasonable woman, surrounded by what otherwise
seem to be reasonable people, who are in one voice telling her that she’s overreacting, is not unreasonable for treating that aggregative voice with a little extra credence.

Third: appeals to ungrounded authority play a role here because, in short, sexism is real. When, for instance, the gaslighter says “you’re just a prude”, or “you’re oversensitive”, he’s appealing to norms of sexism. And while the details of why, and to what extent, that will work on any particular woman vary, the basic explanation as to why they work is not mysterious—they work because this is a sexist society, and the sexist norms to which gaslighters appeal are, to some extent, in us all. Gaslighters are using internalized sexism as weapons against their targets.

E. Sexism and self-doubt

There’s one particular sexist norm that warrants special highlighting in this context. Call this the sexist norm of self-doubt. We encounter this under various guises every day. One form of it is the normative expectation that men will be forthright and confident, while women who are equally so get called foul names. Another variety shows up in our classrooms, when women hesitate to speak, and later say, “I didn’t think it was important”. Another form is gendered-deference, as when women in our classes defer to male voices, affording those men unjustified excesses of credence. And so on. It’s part of the structure of sexism that women are supposed to be less confident, to doubt our views, beliefs, reactions, and perceptions, more than men. And gaslighting is aimed at undermining someone’s views, beliefs, reactions, and perceptions. The sexist norm of self-doubt, in all its forms, prepares us for just that. Thinking in this way about the gaslighter’s tools shows us aspects of the wrongs of gaslighting that go far beyond what can be captured by Kantian talk about using someone as a mere means or failures of recognition respect.

Yes: using someone’s love, their empathetic capacities, their practical dependence on their job, or their own internalized sexism against them, to manipulate them into giving up their independent moral standing, are horrific failures of recognition
respect.

But the fact that these are the gaslighter’s tools is itself morally significant. To use someone’s love as a tool for gaslighting her is to take a capacity that’s central in moral life and more generally and pervert it; it’s to take a capacity that is of incalculable value and turn it into a tool for the destruction of the person who loves. Likewise, we rely every day, and all the time, in our interactions on our empathetic capacities, and there is a special darkness in using that capacity to turn someone against herself, to undermine the very moral capacities of which empathy is so important a part. And there is yet a different sort of wrong involved in using internalized sexist norms against a person, to gaslight her, and keep her trapped in those very sexist norms. This too is a wrong that cannot be adequately captured by talk of using a person, or failures of recognition respect. It is a distinctive kind of moral wrong, one that has political and social dimensions, in that it unjustly, and by means of discriminatory norms, limits the psychologically real possibilities for a woman going forward, and furthermore, in so doing, constitutes a moment of preserving and reinforcing larger structures of injustice.

Damages

When gaslighting works well, its target ends up feeling, “carved up”, “nobody”, or she may say she feels lost, that there’s nothing left of her, or with De Beauvoir “‘I’m no longer sure . . . even if I think at all”. She has lost her sense of independent moral standing, and for a time, even some of her ability to engage in the deliberations constitutive of that independent standing.

In the psychological literature, this final “stage”, as it’s sometimes called, of gaslighting has a name: severe, major, clinical depression. That’s hardly surprising. Yet we talk often in everyday life of clinical states as ones that—insofar as they are clinical—are inappropriate responses. In this context, I don’t think that’s useful. Let’s distinguish two issues: first, is a person’s psychological state such that psychological help would be a good idea; and second, is her psychological state a fitting response to her situation? Someone who is suffering in ways that meet the criterion for major clinical depression does need psychological help. But we should treat it as an open question whether her needing psychological help shows that her response is not fitting. Imagine, for instance, someone grieving the death of a child. Surely being unable to function in the world, to remember, sleep, keep track of the details of everyday life are not just understandable, but fitting responses to so horrific a loss. That doesn’t mean it might not also be helpful to a person facing that loss to get psychological help working through it.

A gaslighted woman has lost, albeit partially and temporarily, herself. And in various ways, her depressive responses
are fitting—she is grieving; she’s grieving the loss of her independent perspective, her ability to form and maintain her
own reactions and perceptions, the loss of the friendships that became or turned out to be mere gaslighting relations, and her own largely blameless complicity in all of this. It may take her time, and work, to come to see her symptomatically depressive reactions in these terms; like many forms of significant grief, it can take work and self-understanding that’s not easily or immediately accessible to experience its manifestations as grief. But, devastating though it is, it is precisely
that.

There is another significant moral point to so reframing the final stage of gaslighting. Doing so shifts our perspective from one in which we see a gaslighted woman as a mere object of treatment—qua clinically depressed—to one in which we see her as an ongoing member of the moral community, grieving losses of insuperable value. And it frames her depression itself, if in a peculiar way, as the last form of resistance to gaslighting—if she can grieve the loss of herself, then in fact, she is not entirely
lost. Her depression is not then merely the outcome of the wrongs she has suffered and endured; it’s a fitting evaluative response to what she has been subjected and the first signpost on the road back.