HOW DO NARCISSISTS GASLIGHT?
By: Khalif Barkhadle
Digital Journalist
Published On: 24th June 2024
Here are four ways a narcissist will gaslight you:
1. Using social proof against you.
One of the first things the narcissist will do is appeal to the people that you know and trust, get them on their good side by putting on a show, acting kind, sweet, sensitive, and making others believe that they have good intentions and would never be capable of doing any harm. Over time, they start asking your trusted friends and family in a very genuine, very concerned tone if they've noticed anything odd about you. Nothing specific, just planting a seed at first. As the narcissist's behavior worsens towards you, they start watering those seeds by secretly voicing their concerns to your loved ones, maybe about your memory, your mental state, maybe it's about your bad behavior. They will try to get anyone you might be inclined to rely on for support, and they will taint their opinion of you while painting themselves in a very good light.
2. Messing with your memory.
The narcissist will deny or scoff at your recollection of events, and this happens constantly. They will add, stretch, delete sections, or rewrite the whole event. The narcissist loves to mess with your memory, so beware if you notice that they are frequently disputing your memory of what happened or trying to convince you of things that you know never happened or at least never happened in the way that they're presenting. Other examples of ways that they mess with your memory is by hiding things on you and then putting them back in their place after you search for hours, then trying to convince you that they were there all along. It can be leaving things out for you to notice, then removing them and saying they were never there, or accusing you of moving them. They may accuse you of other things that you know you didn't say or do. So it gets to the point where you feel like you need to start taking photos or recording your conversations or making notes of things that happened.
3. Invalidating your perceptions and interpretations.
The real key to gaslighting is keeping you in a constant state of confusion. So the narcissist is constantly planting seeds of doubt in your mind about how you are perceiving and interpreting things. Wrong about your decisions, no matter how small. They're planting seeds of doubt about even how you feel or what you believe. They are constantly trying to make you feel uncertain or just plain wrong, no matter which way you perceive or interpret something. They will always have an alternate explanation or ways to add an element of doubt in your mind. The goals of gaslighting are to keep you so focused on your problematic, defective, unreliable mental state that you don't ever see the defective self that they are trying to conceal. Gaslighting starts out very subtly and in ways that mimic normal interactions, but they have sinister intentions. And that is to slowly change your internal reality, to take control of your ability to think for yourself, to make decisions, to trust your own mind and memories until you get to the point where you have to rely on them to interpret reality for you. And this makes you super easy to control and manipulate.
4. Shame dumping.
And I feel like this is the worst tactic. Although narcissists do not feel guilt, which is feeling bad about something they did, they are deeply tormented by shame, which is feeling bad about who they are. They project and externalize their shame and self-loathing onto you and other people that are closest to them. And they condition you to carry their shame by making you believe that you are broken, flawed, unfixable, unlovable, and that you are the problem. And they do this by getting you to confide those things you feel shameful about. They get you to share your deepest, darkest secrets, whatever makes you feel insecure, defective, unworthy. And then they subtly amplify and leverage your existing shame while planting extra seeds of shame for insurance, suggesting things you should feel ashamed of or getting you to do things that are incongruent with your values to prove your loyalty to them and then using that against you by installing these additional backup shame buttons for even more insurance and more leverage.
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