Xenophobia, the seemingly hard-wired human tendency to see people from other tribes/cultures as a threat, can manifest in intimate relationships, in families, and even among the different parts of one's own psyche. Granted, this behavior must have evolutionary fitness value because sometimes the other person or tribe really does want to harm us. But sometimes they may not and even if they do, it may be diffused with the right attitude and tools, to the greater benefit of all (not just the potential winner). I started thinking about this from watching this video by Dr. Ramani (she is a representative of a whole industry of pop psychology on youtube (and now TikTok) catering to people who want to blame someone for their relationship failures and the general anomie and disconnection of our failing culture). She mentions several characteristics of gaslighting which I will address in this essay.
The original use of the term came from a 1944 movie about a man obsessed with obtaining certain jewels from the dead aunt of a woman he seduces and tries to drive mad in order to get her into a mental institution so he can have free reign of the attic where the jewels are hidden. The man is evilly evil in a way that Hollywood and pulp fiction are good at rendering, with not much nuance to his character and motivations, and the woman he victimizes is good, helpless and innocent, but subtlety in character development was not then (is it now?) a way to sell art to the masses.
In his analysis of some cross-cultural trends, the historian, writer and druid JMG tries to understand the process of making sense out of raw experience. The first aspect of gaslighting behavior discussed by Dr. Ramani involves denying someone's feelings and experience. This is a form of emotional abuse, and also makes no sense. Experience can't be denied in any reasonable way, and if someone is trying to do that they are being either irrational, malevolent or both. But interpretation of experience, part of thinking, can be (and should be, as I discuss below, and as NVC has made clear) discussed, negotiated and sometimes disagreed with (never outright denied). It's not always simple to distinguish between experience and its interpretations. The simplest interpretation happens when we assemble raw sensory data into a story, like "this is a chair", or the "sun is appearing in the east". JMG called this "figuration". It's hard to disagree with figuration, but sometimes it can be done, especially with optical illusions or Rohrschach tests. In an optical illusion or Rohrschach test, we might see several things at once and disagree with each other about what they are or even disagree with ourselves. The next level of thinking dissected by JMG is easier to disagree about: abstraction, and the next level, reflection is the easiest to disagree about.
But without disagreement and passionate yet civil discussion of our interpretation of our experiences, we have no basis for anything but isolated individuals--no relationships, no families, no tribes or cultures. The truth of interpretation and thinking here is an inter-subjective process, unlike the truth of personal experience, where it makes sense to speak of my truth vs your truth. We will never find someone who, without any discussion, agrees with us about our interpretations completely. Much agreement is already there because of common cultural negotiations, upbringing, and sometimes previous childhood brainwashing. Truth is a personal experience only when it comes to experience. But when it comes to interpretation, truth is interpersonal. It requires cognitive flexibility, epistemic humility, and ability to understand other people's perspectives and history. Even if one can reach agreement within a culture, the next level of truth seeking, is to try to achieve it with other cultures, and resist xenophobia. Even in the movie, the deadlock between the gaslighter and his victim is broken by a third party from outside.
Even within individuals, there are parts to the psyche (according to Internal Family Systems Therapy and other psychological theories) that can disagree about interpretations. We want to come to harmony and agreement, but it's a process. It's not an easy process, and it's easier to just label the other people or parts of ourselves as enemies, pathologize, shut them out and hate them. This leads to fragmentation of one's psyche, relationship, family and ultimately culture. If someone is disagreeing with your interpretation of reality, perhaps instead of labeling them as a gaslighter, try to talk to them about it and be open to their point of view (and see if they have the same openness towards yours). Ask yourself it they are denying your experience and feelings, or your interpretation of these? Ask yourself about their motives: do they want you to go mad? Do they want you to question your own experience so they can have power over you, or so they can win an argument and feel superior and in control? Or do they have a different interpretation of a shared experience? Are they denying your interpretation, or merely questioning it and being open to being wrong? But no, none of this for Dr. Ramani. She suggests not engaging with the gaslighter because their intent is obviously nefarious, about control and power over you. This is ironic because the next gaslighter behavior she highlights is withholding, allowing only certain things to be able to be expressed and talked about, or else the relationship or the love will be withheld. But shutting out the alleged gaslighter is the extreme of withholding. Whereas the alleged gaslighter only disallows certain conversations (e.g. about uncomfortable feelings like fear or anger or sadness), Dr. Ramani suggests disallowing ALL conversations with the alleged gaslighter, and seeing them as a power hungry monster is withholding love, with no possibility for an intimate relationship. I suppose if the alleged gaslighter is a real gaslighter, this might be an effective protective strategy.
The next behavior she talks about is contradicting shared memories. Some people have better memory capability (and it also varies according to whether the memory is short, long, or pre-cognitive) than others and we have much self serving bias in our memories. Again this is where it helps to have written documents, photos, videos, and other people who were there besides a couple, to figure out the truth about the past, part of what motivates formal courtroom law. Again it helps to be humble about one's memory, and also to realize when the other person might be just well intentioned but deficient in their memory capacity, or having different interpretations of what happened. I do agree with Dr. Ramani that an intimate relationship is not just about winning or finding out the interpersonal truth (whether about the past or the present), but about achieving love and intimacy. The gaslighter whom she describes apparently is not interested in intimacy but in power and winning, just like lawyers. However, I would not stop there and condemn this person, but try to figure out where this fear of intimacy comes from. Could it come from their early experiences with caretakers who did not provide for their needs as infants? Did not value and affirm their intrinsic worth? Were lawyers themselves who behaved like lawyers in the home, not just the courtroom (meaning cared about winning and being right instead of connecting and relating and finding out mutual truth)? Did not protect them from harm from others? Did not affirm their feelings when harm happened but tried to divert the topic to something or someone else, or to shame or guilt the child (diversion is, according to Dr Ramani, another gaslighter technique, but maybe it's also trigger for her and others from parents' behavior during childhood)? Could it be that they have protective parts that see intimacy as a threat because they were not accepted and valued for who they were by those who were closest to them? These are some of the early childhood experiences that lead to an insecure avoidant attachment style. I don't mean to pathologize any attachment style, but to understand it and help figure out how to have harmony in a relationship with whatever attachment style one has. IFS has a variety of techniques for dealing with (unburdening) protective parts and exiled inner children for avoidant attachment style folks.
I'd like to be able to question certain ideas of the New Age movement such as the idea that we must be whole within ourselves before we can enter into relationships, because I think this is a two way process, where relationships with others help make us whole and also the higher level couple, family or tribe can have a wholeness and complementarity that is missing in its individual parts and that this is not necessarily a problem, but a feature of all emergent systems. I'd like to question the idea of IFS that constraints in a system are necessarily bad and should be eliminated, because there is much work (see Simon Deacon's Incomplete Nature) on the idea that some constraints are necessary for emergence of higher order systems in the first place, and that though they restrict certain freedoms, they also make possible certain things that were not possible or likely at the lower levels. The individual tree roots are constrained by the mycelial networks underneath from going wherever they want or being selfish about nutrient allocation, and the mycelia are constrained by the tree roots and trunks from doing whatever they want and getting nutrients selfishly and competing with each other as they please. But these constraints enable emergent forest behavior and collaboration that was not possible without the constraints. If I question these ideas, am I questioning people's dogmas, or their realities? Can I be then dismissed as a gaslighter, as a strategy to not have to question one's interpretations of reality? I wonder what can be done with someone who is dismissing others with a label. Perhaps asking them questions about what they feel and why instead of dismissing them back. Maybe NVC can be a tool for figuring out the underlying feelings. Maybe "I feel gaslighted by you" might morph into "I feel devalued when you don't agree with my way of looking at things or when you don't fully believe something that I am sure about".
Some years ago, in an article in TVOL, and in much of the early post in this blog, I argued that if we are going to create a new culture, we need to detach from the mainstream one and obtain some memetic isolation from it. Here I see the opposite problem, where the unity of couples, families, tribes and cultures can be destroyed by memetic isolation, in this case by pathologizing and excluding other individuals (or groups of individuals) in each of these higher order entities. This may be a good thing if there is disharmony due to these individuals or groups, but what if the disharmony is at a different level? What if for example we mistakenly think that our disharmony comes from another individual, whereas in reality it comes from our own internal system of psychological parts and their childhood traumas? Ot what if we can have harmony by ourselves or in shallow relationships with others, but the disharmony with deep relationships is not due to the other person (e.g. gaslighter, narcissist, love bomber, etc) but to our own system? I'm imagining that Dr. Ramani would see this as just a gaslighting strategy of questioning her own reality, and perhaps sometimes this is the case, but not always? Could it be that if she and enough others repeat the spell that gaslighters are evil, power hungry people who want to drive us mad, that people would believe it, just like the germans believed all kinds of things about Jews?
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