🕯️What is Gaslighting?

Where the word comes from, and where it stops

The name comes from a 1938 play and the film made from it, in which a husband sets out to convince his wife she is losing her mind — dimming the gas lamps and telling her the light has not changed. Merriam-Webster made it the 2022 Word of the Year after lookups rose 1740% in a single year, and noted something unusual about the pattern: no one news event caused the spike. The word simply stayed in the dictionary's fifty most-searched terms for the whole of 2022. People were not looking it up because of a story. They were looking it up because they had heard it and wanted to know whether it applied to them.

That popularity is also the problem, because the word has drifted to cover any disagreement about the past. It should not. Two people remember an evening differently almost every time; that is ordinary and says nothing about either of them. What the term names is repetition with a direction — the same denials, aimed the same way, until one person's confidence in their own memory gives out. A single argument where someone insists they never said that is a bad argument. A pattern where you increasingly cannot trust what you remember is the thing this word was coined for.

How to recognise the pattern

• Things you clearly remember are described as never having happened, calmly and often.
• Your reaction becomes the subject: too sensitive, too dramatic, unable to take a joke.
• You start apologising for conversations you cannot reconstruct, and rehearsing them in advance.
• You check messages back to confirm your own version of events before you dare raise it.

What to do about it

Write things down. Not as evidence for an argument — arguing about the record is the trap — but for yourself, because the pattern works by wearing down your own account and a note written on the day is very hard to talk you out of. Then tell one person outside the situation. Isolation is what allows it to continue, and a friend who hears the same three stories will often see the shape before you do.

Be slow to apply the label and slow to accept it. Someone who forgets, exaggerates or defends themselves badly is not doing this; describing an ordinary conflict this way makes the word useless for people who need it. But if you notice you have started to doubt your own mind, that observation is worth taking seriously on its own, whatever anyone else says about it — and it is a good reason to talk to a professional rather than to work it out alone.

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