Gaslighting

Gaslighting is when you try to keep a person from standing up for herself by making her doubt her own perception of things. The term comes from a 1938 play in which a guy lives below the apartment of a woman he murdered for her jewels. Every night, he goes into her apartment to look for the jewels, causing the lights in his own apartment to dim. His wife notices this, and wonders where he goes every night, but the guy tells her that she's just imagining the lights dimming, and that it's weird for her to ask him where he's going. He almost succeeds in convincing her that she's mentally ill. Not all gaslighting is so calculated, of course; for example, Don gaslighted Betty on Mad Men when he wouldn't admit to cheating on her. He wasn't intending to psychologically torture her, but he did take advantage of her internalized sexism and history of emotional problems in the hopes that she wouldn't make him face up to something she knew he'd done.

I used female pronouns in my definition because it makes grammar easier, and also because gaslighting is easier to do to a woman. Women apologize more, are more self-deprecating, try harder to adjust ourselves to other people's needs. As a result, it is easier to convince a woman that her perception of something is wrong.

Gaslighting is a confusing phenomenon because it's hard to think about how to prevent it. I don't really want to live in a world where everyone assumes they're right all the time. The world is too much like that already. But as things are, the people who are confident that their perceptions are the right ones have such an easy time manipulating people who don't. That isn't good.

I guess the solution to gaslighting is to teach confidence to open-minded people. Being self-deprecating and willing to suspend disbelief are good qualities but we live in a world where they're turned into weaknesses. I guess we have to find some kind of middle ground where people are open to the idea that they're wrong, but also aware that someone might be fucking with them.

Obviously, I'm bringing up the issue of gaslighting because it is such a big issue for me, and I think developmentally disabled people in general. In ABA schools, they mark kids down for "non-compliance," even if non-compliance consists of a kid wanting to stim, or being too tired to do work, or arguing with a teacher's idea of the "right" way to say something. People in workshop and group home settings spend their whole life being told not to complain, to be quiet, to be pleasant. And this does create a lot of nice people, but it also means that, for example, developmentally disabled people often don't speak up if they are sexually abused. And for ASD people, I think it can lead to meltdowns because we are encouraged not to express discomfort so we hold it in as long as we can.

I mentioned in a previous post that pretty much every time I've had something medically wrong with me, it's taken a while to be diagnosed because the symptom has been pain and I've been trained since I was a kid not to express pain. When I was a kid, getting my hair brushed, washed, blow-dried, or cut caused me incredible discomfort and I would cry and yell and complain, but I was always told that I was overreacting and it wasn't really that bad. So I figured it wasn't. So when I had appendicitis I figured it wasn't really that bad. And so on.

This is interesting because in terms of the appendicitis I was, on the surface, gaslighting myself. And also, the reason I wanted to write this post is because someone posted in a disability LiveJournal community about how their mom said they were "eating oatmeal over and over" and they wanted to know if they were actually eating an abnormal amount of oatmeal. A community member, presumably visibly disabled, commented asking what this had to do with disability and why the person didn't make their own decisions, since they were an adult. Well, the reason I perceived the post as disability-related, and I assume the reason the OP chose to post it in that community, is that the OP has an ASD. For a person with ASD, "over and over" can be a trigger that makes the person think, "Shit! I'm doing something that is a symptom of ASD and therefore is wrong! I better change what I'm doing to something normal!" I identified with this a lot because when my mom tells me I'm doing something "obsessive" or I'm "cycling," I react with quite a bit of anger and shame, a lot more than an ordinary person would if their mom told them the same thing. And then in the future I feel bad about doing the thing my mom said was "obsessive."

So here I'm also gaslighting myself, right? As is the poster. It's just an innocent comment about oatmeal, right?

Even if it's not, even if their mom is intentionally trying to fuck with them because she knows how they'll react as a person with ASD--well, you can't really tell the difference, can you? If some person tells me I'm eating oatmeal over and over, and they aren't thinking about my history at all, I'm just gaslighting myself when this makes me feel sort of embarrassed and apologetic and forced into submission because I'm an Abnormal Person and as a Normal Person they know what I should be doing. It's my fault, sort of.

But it's only sort of my fault, because it's privilege. Privilege is invisible but everyone keeps it going, conscious or not. And it's usually only the people who are negatively affected who have to be conscious. The other people can be like, "Hey man, what are you freaking out about?" Which, in this case, ironically amounts to gaslighting about gaslighting.