BENGALURU: A meme going around shows these two people arguing in their kitchen, where one of the partners wants to cook something on their gas stove but can’t find the lighter, and is calling out to their partner, “Have you seen the gaslighter?” and the partner is saying, or is thinking of saying, “Yes, I am looking at a gaslighter right now.”
In reality, very few of us recognise gaslighting when it is occurring, and even fewer would ever dream of ever calling out someone to their face that they were a gaslighter. Most times, we recognise the emotional abuse, the steady erosion of self-worth, the almost casual seeding of self-doubt and the erasure of self that comes under the umbrella of gaslighting, only after a very long time, and that too, time spent away from the toxic person.
In intimate relationships, when we rarely even realise something as toxic because it starts ever so lightly, as a gentle, almost loving , disappointment. “You cook so wonderfully usually, but you just over-season things. I never told you because I love you so much, but I thought you could take that feedback now. Can you just watch the salt a little bit?” or “You studied in such amazing colleges, I really thought you would have read this book a million times and debated about it with your friends.
I can’t imagine you didn’t know about it and I am telling you about it!” or “You look so beautiful, I thought you would be so wonderful, but it looks like you picked up some less than nice ways of how to be in bed. Just small things that people never told you about, maybe, but I am ok to tell you because we are so much in love.” Love comes as the velvet glove that hides the rot ten fist of the gaslighting. If it were not in an intimate relationship, we would likely not take any such attempts at pulling us down.
A random stranger commenting on our choice of clothes might not faze us one bit, but when a partner tells us we are so loved, and that we usually do so well in social functions, but just hints if we really understand the gravity of the event we are going to, and asks if we really want to wear that dress, or carry those accessories, it hits us.
When a loved one says the same thing, we are likely to become that much more conscious of it. When they say, “I love you, and so I am telling you, “We let our defenses down, and let it enter our self concept, and do its damage. Gaslighters will use love to seep into our consciousness, like how monsoon water just finds some weak spot or the other to spread itself through even the most beautiful house. To protect ourselves from being targets of gaslighting means to not let love be a universal key. Love doesn’t give anyone permission to hurt you.