Episode 21 - Gaslighting

Transcript

00:07

Ellie: Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,

00:09

David: And I'm David Peña-Guzman.

00:10

Welcome to Overthink.

00:12

Ellie: The podcast where two friends,

00:14

David: who who are also professors,

00:16

Ellie: put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

00:18

David: Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.

00:31

Ellie: Before we get into today's episode, we just want to say that you'll hear us

00:34

sometimes use words like crazy or insane.

00:36

We hope it's clear from the context that what we're referring to is accusations

00:40

that people are crazy or insane, and not that we buy into the use of those

00:44

terms, which are abelist in nature.

00:46

David: We also want to provide a content warning because in today's episode, we

00:49

discuss sexual violence and birth trauma.

00:52

Ellie: They come up in the second half of the episode.

00:56

David: It seems like everybody these days is talking about gaslighting.

01:01

It's one of those rare terms that is hot within academia and

01:04

outside of it at the same time.

01:06

Usually it's one or the other, right.

01:08

Either academics are super ahead of popular discourse or super behind it.

01:13

But right now, magically, they are in sync, and the synchronization

01:17

is happening over gaslighting.

01:20

Ellie: I know.

01:20

It's wild.

01:21

There's been a spate of academic journal issues and conferences

01:24

devoted to the topic, but then you also have like a lot of popular

01:27

op-eds and Instagram memes about it.

01:30

David: Yeah, for instance, in 2016, Lauren Duca wrote a piece for Teen

01:34

Vogue, which by the way has been killing it recently with their political

01:38

consciousness approach to reaching out to teens interested in fashion.

01:43

And she wrote a piece called "Donald Trump is Gaslighting America," in which

01:48

she enumerates all the tactics of social control and social manipulation used

01:53

by Donald Trump, and interprets them as a political form of gaslighting.

01:58

Ellie: Yeah.

01:59

And it's interesting you mentioned that as an example, in part because I do

02:02

think that that article had a lot of impact on the popularity of gaslighting.

02:08

And also because I think it's no coincidence that the term gaslighting

02:11

has gotten so much uptake during the Trump administration, because

02:15

he was, uh, Gaslighter in Chief.

02:19

I'm sure others have said the same thing, but in any case, I do worry that sometimes

02:23

gaslighting gets used so broadly that it no longer means anything at all.

02:27

So in the case of Trump, absolutely, he's a gaslighter.

02:30

However, I sometimes hear people accuse others of gaslighting them simply

02:35

when they disagree with them, right.

02:36

It's like, "Oh, your interpretation of what happened is different than mine.

02:39

Therefore you're gaslighting me."

02:40

David: Well, I don't know that I agree with that.

02:42

You are gaslighting me right now.

02:46

Ellie: Oh, wow.

02:47

Actually, I mean, the real tea is that I was at a gaslighting conference and

02:51

one of the conference participants accused another one of gaslighting her,

02:54

but that is a whole different story.

02:56

David: That is so meta, academics accusing academics of gaslighting

03:00

them at a conference on gaslighting.

03:02

I think this is kind of like the skit for a spoof of academics.

03:08

Ellie: Yeah.

03:08

And I didn't really know what to make of that situation exactly.

03:11

But just to say, yeah, it was very meta.

03:19

David: Today, we're talking about gaslighting.

03:21

Ellie: What is gaslighting and who gaslights whom?

03:24

David: How does gaslighting harm individuals, undermining

03:27

their very grip on reality?

03:29

Ellie: And how does it function more broadly in cultural settings,

03:32

through intersections of race, culture, gender, and the like?

03:37

David: Let's find out.

03:43

Ellie: The term gaslighting originates from the 1938 play, which was turned

03:46

into a movie in 1944, called Gaslight, which starred Ingrid Bergman.

03:51

In this story, a husband psychologically tortures his wife

03:54

by convincing her she is insane.

03:56

He dims the lights in the home, which is why it's entitled Gaslight, but he

04:01

convinces her that she's delusional when she asks whether it's gotten darker.

04:05

David: Yeah, and beyond the lights, he does all kinds of things to this poor

04:08

woman to mentally terrorize her and convince her that she's somehow unwell.

04:13

So, for example, he will steal things that belong to her and hide them and then

04:18

tell her that her memory is slipping away, or he also will hide his things in her

04:24

belongings, like in her purse, as a way of convincing her that she blacks out at

04:29

random moments and starts stealing things.

04:32

And there's this very powerful scene where he takes her to a fancy party and

04:37

makes a big display of her kleptomania by finding his watch in her purse, which

04:44

of course he had planted there all along.

04:46

And it really is a form of mental terrorism.

04:51

Ellie: And there's a scene from the movie that I think really exemplifies

04:54

the mental terrorism that's going on.

04:56

So let's check it out:

04:57

Gaslight: If I could only get inside that brain of yours and understand what

05:02

makes you do these crazy twisted things.

05:05

Gregory, are you trying to tell me I'm insane?

05:09

It's what I'm trying not to tell myself.

05:11

But that's what you think, isn't it?

05:13

That's what you've been hinting and suggesting for months now, ever since-

05:18

since the day I lost your brooch.

05:23

Your mother was mad.

05:26

She died in an asylum when you were a year old.

05:30

That's not true.

05:32

I've talked to the doctor who attended her.

05:34

Would you like to see him?

05:36

He described her symptoms to me.

05:38

Do you like to hear them?

05:39

It began with her imagining things, that she heard noises, footsteps, voices, and

05:44

then the voices began to speak to her.

05:47

And at the end, she died in an asylum with no brain at all.

05:51

Oh!

05:53

Ellie: David, what strikes you about this clip?

05:55

David: For a long time, I've had an interest in the philosophy of

05:57

dreams and the difference between the dream world and the waking world.

06:02

And here you see that being weaponized through the man's claim

06:06

that this woman can no longer judge the difference between when she is

06:10

awake and when she's in a dream.

06:12

So she enters these trance-like states over which she has zero executive control.

06:18

Ellie: Yeah.

06:19

Another thing that strikes me here is his claim towards the beginning

06:23

that he is really concerned that she might be going insane and that he

06:28

doesn't want to have to come to the conclusion that she's experiencing

06:32

delusions, but he's forced to, right.

06:35

And so there's this way that he's manipulating her, not by saying

06:39

like, "Oh yeah, you're crazy."

06:40

But by saying, "Oh, I hate to come to this conclusion, but I feel I have no choice."

06:45

David: And as if it's him who is the victim of circumstances, because

06:49

he married a woman, not knowing truly who she is and earlier, before

06:54

this clip, there are a few scenes in which he does precisely that.

06:58

He accuses her of having deceived him by not having told him that she suffers

07:03

from whatever condition he believes that she suffers and he constantly

07:07

threatens to take her to the doctor.

07:10

Ellie: And that charge that you're the one deceiving me is a very troubling one.

07:16

And it's part of what makes gaslighting so difficult for those experiencing

07:20

it, because it's hard to argue with somebody and say, no, I'm not deceiving

07:24

you because then they're just going to say, "Well, that's further proof

07:28

that you're deceiving me," right.

07:29

There's this way that this charge of you're deceiving me further serves to make

07:34

her question, "Well, am I deceiving him?"

07:36

Because she's in good faith, right.

07:38

Gaslighting trades on the gaslightee's good faith.

07:42

David: Yeah.

07:42

And in fact, there are several points in the movie where she comes to believe

07:46

that she has stolen the brooch, that she has stolen the watch, or she has

07:51

lost the letter, all these objects that become the placeholders for gaslighting.

07:56

And another thing that I find quite interesting about this clip

08:00

is the reference to the mother.

08:02

The fact that her mother was already unwell, and so there's already good

08:07

evidence, you know, in this case from biology, and it may be genetics, that

08:12

she has the same fate as her mother.

08:14

Ellie: Exactly.

08:15

So putting her insanity in the context of a family curse or a family malady

08:23

serves to further this idea that, "Well, yeah, you're probably just the same."

08:27

David: And it's inevitable that you will end up in an asylum, which again, is

08:31

what gets held over her as the ultimate threat, which in the 1940s, and what

08:37

we know about the history of psychology through the 19th century and early 20th

08:41

century, was a very real danger for women.

08:44

Ellie: Oh, yeah, with things like hysteria.

08:46

David: Yeah, exactly.

08:48

The term gaslighting originally appeared in the context of women

08:51

trapped in abusive relationships with men as in the case of Gaslight.

08:56

Feminists nowadays use it to talk about a specific way in which women are

09:00

oppressed by men, namely by having their understanding of their surroundings

09:05

manipulated, again typically in the context of a sexual or romantic dynamic.

09:10

Ellie: Yeah.

09:10

And we'll talk a little bit later about the detailed psychological dynamics

09:14

of this manipulation, but for now let's try and define gaslighting.

09:18

The definition of gaslighting doesn't inherently pertain to

09:21

the oppression of women by men.

09:23

One definition of gaslighting that I find useful is that eof philosopher Veronica

09:28

Ivy, who writes that gaslighting is a form of epistemic injustice in which a knower

09:34

is called to question their own reality.

09:37

David: And as its name indicates, epistemic injustice has to

09:40

do with epistemology, which is the theory of knowledge.

09:43

And it captures those acts of violence or injustice that harm somebody, not so

09:49

much physically, or even emotionally, but rather in their capacity as knowers,

09:54

by targeting what they know, how they know it, and to how much certainty they

09:59

have in the fact that they know it.

10:02

Ellie: So gaslighting as an epistemic injustice is a harm, right?

10:05

It's something that's like wrong.

10:06

You shouldn't do it to people and you shouldn't accept it if it's done to you.

10:11

However, the second half of the definition I think really points to the complexity

10:14

of gaslighting, the idea that a knower is called to question their own reality.

10:20

Usually philosophers as well as curious folks in general, think

10:24

that the idea of questioning our reality is a good thing, right?

10:27

We want to be challenged.

10:28

We recognize that we don't live as solitary minds in the universe

10:32

and that other people might have perceptions of things that are more

10:35

accurate than our own, or at least are different and worth considering.

10:39

And so what is it about gaslighting?

10:41

How can we figure out when our questioning our own reality is an

10:45

epistemic harm rather than just like an invitation to be curious about

10:50

something we didn't know already?

10:51

David: I think the way philosophers will answer that question is by

10:54

emphasizing that there is a meaningful difference between questioning specific

10:59

aspects of your reality, like your belief in A, B, or C, and losing

11:04

your grip over that which makes your entire reality hang together as one.

11:10

So there's a difference between questioning particulars and

11:12

taking the rug out from under your feet, epistemologically speaking.

11:17

Ellie: Yeah but I think there are also some times when it's good to

11:20

have the rug taken out from under you.

11:22

For instance, like when I teach Introduction to Philosophy and I

11:25

encourage students to question their sort of like dogmatic reception of science

11:30

and believing that if anything has a study behind it, it's suddenly right.

11:33

And so I guess I'm- I'm still left wondering what makes

11:38

gaslighting gaslighting.

11:39

And this is also, David, like, this is a genuine question.

11:41

Like I really wonder this.

11:43

David: Yeah.

11:43

And it's really difficult.

11:45

One way in which I think about it is that one of the targets of

11:49

gaslighting is our subjective faculties, rather than the contents that those

11:54

faculties make available to us.

11:56

So when we think about the faculties of a subject, things like memory, imagination,

12:01

rationality, what gaslighting does above all is that it convinces people

12:06

that they can no longer rely on their typical modes of going about the world

12:12

and acquiring knowledge about the world so that they no longer have faith in

12:16

themselves or in their capacity to know anything with any degree of certainty.

12:21

So everything is suddenly up for question, and I think we can agree that

12:24

when everything is up for question, without the possibility of any kind

12:28

of grounding, then we have a problem.

12:30

Ellie: I think you're onto something there, but by that definition,

12:34

somebody like Socrates, who famously said, "What makes me wise is that

12:38

I know that I don't know anything," would be the victim of gaslighting.

12:42

So I would be inclined less to define gaslighting in terms of its ability

12:48

to make somebody question their own reality and more in terms of sort of

12:52

identifying further what the epistemic injustice that Ivy mentions is.

12:58

And one way that I think about the epistemic injustice there, or the harm

13:02

that's done to somebody who's being gaslight, is that when they question

13:07

their own reality, that questioning is manipulated and used by another person

13:14

in order to further undermine them and give them no potential for actually

13:18

coming to knowledge of something.

13:21

So it's like a refusal to engage with the person who's questioning their own

13:26

reality, sort of like on equal footing, and instead using their doubt and saying,

13:32

"Oh yes, you doubt that you should doubt all of these other things as well."

13:36

It's like an opportunity that they're taking advantage of.

13:40

I don't know if that really gets us very far either though.

13:43

David: I mean by that definition then, Socrates himself would be also potentially

13:46

a gaslighter because that, yeah, maybe because that's what he does, right.

13:49

He goes around Athens, constantly making people question all their beliefs.

13:54

And claiming that he himself has no positive beliefs in anything.

13:58

He's just the master of the method of questioning, but there is never

14:01

really a point in Socrates' life at which he questions his own ability

14:07

to reason and to argue, right.

14:09

He's fully committed to the idea that he is the smartest person in the world,

14:13

which is what the Oracle told him, right.

14:15

He goes to the Oracle and the Oracle of Delphi says, "There is

14:19

no person smarter than Socrates."

14:21

And he sort of eats it up and runs with it.

14:24

So his own ability to resign is never in question.

14:27

Ellie: Okay.

14:28

And, you know, taking this sample of Socrates as potential gaslighter

14:32

in a slightly different direction, I think what's interesting is that we

14:37

made a case that maybe Socrates should be understood as both a victim of

14:41

gaslighting and as a gaslighter, which like I definitely do not want to, you

14:46

know, stake a claim about that, just more like a sort of silly thought experiment.

14:50

But I think this does get it an interesting question, which is

14:55

the status of the gaslighter.

14:58

My sense is that a lot of gaslighting happens in cycles where somebody

15:03

who is gaslighting has also been gaslit themselves and is using those

15:08

manipulation tactics on other people, or maybe even like in some cases the

15:13

same people can gaslit each other and also be gaslit by each other.

15:16

I'm not sure about that.

15:17

But I do think that this raises the very important issue of whether

15:23

gaslighting is deliberate or not.

15:25

Does a gaslighter need to know that they are doing the gaslighting?

15:29

David: Well, I'm curious about your thoughts about this.

15:32

What would an accidental, unintentional form of gaslighting look like?

15:39

Ellie: So one of the examples that comes to mind remaining within the scope of

15:43

individual relations to each other, so leaving aside for now, structural, racial,

15:47

and cultural gaslighting, which we'll talk about a little bit later, I'm reminded

15:51

of the example that Veronica Ivy gives in her piece "Allies Behaving Badly," which

15:56

is about how cisgender allies of trans folks sometimes gaslit those trans folks.

16:01

And Ivy distinguishes between what she calls a psychological form of

16:05

gaslighting, which is what we see in the movie Gaslight, it's a deliberate form

16:09

of psychological warfare and what she calls a more subtle, often unintentional

16:14

form of gaslighting, and this she describes as occurring when a listener

16:18

doesn't believe a speaker's testimony.

16:21

And this is due to the speaker having a credibility deficit, due to an

16:25

identity stereotype or a prejudice.

16:28

So for instance, the accusation that a white man might make of a Black woman,

16:33

who's experiencing racism in the workplace and is already at a deficit because Black

16:39

women's knowledge is not valorized in the way that white men's knowledge is.

16:43

And so when she says, "I'm experiencing racism in the workplace," he doubts

16:48

her simply by virtue of the fact that he has this narrative of like, well,

16:52

of course, she would see things that aren't there because she would be

16:55

seeing a racism that doesn't exist by virtue of her own black womanhood.

17:00

David: In that case, I definitely agree with you that gaslighting can

17:04

be unintentional and it can be subtle.

17:06

So it's kind of the death by a thousand paper cuts form of gaslighting.

17:11

Uh, so it's more like, gas matching, with just like little matches

17:15

being lit over and over again.

17:18

Yeah.

17:18

I just made that term up to contrast that with the more

17:20

intentional kind of centralized approach that we see in the movie.

17:24

Ellie: I don't know.

17:25

I don't know about that term.

17:26

David, maybe like mini gaslighting.

17:28

David: You don't need gas for matches.

17:33

So maybe it's like- matching, match-lighting, match-lighting is

17:37

the right one, um, or paper clipping.

17:41

Ellie: Okay.

17:41

Touché.

17:42

David: Uh, papercutting.

17:42

Papercutting might be better.

17:45

Well because of the death by a thousand paper cuts.

17:47

Anyhow, um, moving away from my unreliable, metaphorical faculty,

17:51

what I like about this unintentional, non-deliberative way of thinking about

17:56

gaslighting is that it puts gaslighting in dialogue with other concepts that have

18:00

been relatively useful for people doing anti-racist, anti-sexist work and so on,

18:06

like the concept of implicit bias, or the concept of unconscious prejudices,

18:11

whereby our acts and our behaviors, even unbeknownst to ourselves, are already

18:16

slanted in particular ways, by virtue of the culture of which we are apart.

18:21

Ellie: I like the way that you put that, because I think you're right

18:24

that gaslighting helps us, for instance, understand what's going

18:27

on with microaggressions, which are little behaviors or statements that

18:32

serve to stereotype and/or devalued people in different situations.

18:37

And, if someone experiences a lot of microaggressions and then calls

18:42

that situation, what it is and the people who have been perpetrating the

18:45

microaggressions are like, we didn't do anything, right, I think it's fair game

18:50

to call that gaslighting because you are undermining a person's perception

18:54

and sense of reality so I think the expansion of gaslighting to include forms

19:00

of manipulation or behaviors that aren't deliberate is really important, because it

19:05

helps us make sense of things like that.

19:06

But I also wonder whether it's a double-edged sword, because then it leaves

19:09

us open to all of these very complicated adjudications of whose reality is right.

19:16

And that doesn't seem to me to be so much a problem with something like

19:19

microaggressions in the workplace, because I would simply say, "Hey,

19:22

the Black woman who's experiencing microaggressions has more authority

19:25

to talk about the microaggressions she's experiencing than the white man."

19:28

And so I like, I feel pretty comfortable with saying who's in the right there,

19:32

but there are a lot of other cases, for instance, interpersonal relationships

19:36

where people are manipulating one another, where the reality of the

19:39

situation may not be super clear cut.

19:41

And it's really hard to figure out, when people are co-constituting a

19:45

given situation, whose interpretation is right, especially when people are

19:49

accusing each other of gaslighting.

19:52

David: Yeah, but I think when we're talking about gaslighting,

19:54

we're going beyond merely having interpersonal conflict that is part

20:00

and parcel of living together or being part of the same community.

20:04

We are talking about a harmful way of affecting other people's

20:09

realities, again by making them come to question things that ask subjects,

20:14

they are entitled not to question.

20:16

So I still want to hold on to a distinction between those more

20:20

general forms of interpersonal conflict and what we might call

20:23

gaslighting, even if, of course like with every distinction, the in-between

20:27

is a little bit gray and porous.

20:29

Ellie: Yeah.

20:30

And I think when theorists of, and are talking about gaslighting, they're

20:33

usually doing so in a way that refers to what Karen Adkins describes as wreaking

20:38

significant epistemic and moral damages through small, often invisible actions.

20:45

So there is something extraordinarily intense about gaslighting, and

20:49

I just wonder whether that's a little bit at odds with some of the

20:52

ways that gaslighting gets thrown around in everyday discourse today.

20:56

David: And what these theorists are also recognizing is that in spite

20:59

of their diversity, gaslighting tactics follow recognizable patterns.

21:05

So they fall into certain types or into certain categories that

21:08

allow us to classify them, to name them, and to come to better

21:12

understand their internal mechanics.

21:14

For instance, the philosopher Cynthia Stark argues that gaslighting often

21:19

involves two tactics, which she calls sidestepping and displacing.

21:24

And we know that it involves a lot of other tactics that have other names, but

21:28

these two in particular stand out for her.

21:30

Sidestepping is dodging evidence that supports the testimony of the victim.

21:35

So when the woman says, "No, you are making me believe all these

21:40

things that are not real," the gas lighter will simply change the

21:44

subject or simply dodge the issue.

21:47

Now what Stark calls displacing is a slightly different tactic, which

21:51

entails attributing defects in thinking or perceiving or remembering, or just

21:56

character flaws in general, to the victim.

21:58

So for instance, your memory is fading, we know that you can't really think

22:03

rationally because you know, it runs in your family or whatever the case might be.

22:07

And according to her, these strategies appear again and

22:12

again in cases of gaslighting.

22:14

Ellie: Well, and that's so helpful actually, David, because I do think that

22:17

helps resolve some of my worries about the leaky nature of the concept gaslighting,

22:23

because I think it's really important to locate the mechanism of gaslighting in

22:28

the way that the gaslighter responds to the victims questioning their own reality,

22:34

right, rather than like gaslighting just happening on the side of the victim

22:37

or on the side of the perpetrator, we have this relational dimension here.

22:42

And so these two tactics of sidestepping and displacing I think are really

22:45

useful because once we see one of those, rather than a genuine engagement

22:49

or reckoning with the victim's reality, that's when we have a case

22:54

of gaslighting rather than a simple disagreement about a state of affairs.

22:58

David: Yeah.

22:58

So if I'm fighting with my roommate and I say, "Hey, roommate, let's sit down

23:02

because you're doing all these things that are bothering me," and we have to

23:05

process that so that we can live together, what my roommate ideally will do is

23:10

listen to what I have to say, and then work with me in trying to resolve it.

23:13

And even if they don't quite agree on the details, they might say, "Look,

23:18

I'm sorry that you're feeling this way.

23:20

I just see it differently."

23:22

Even that is something that the gaslighter will never do, because the gaslighter will

23:27

always adopt a unilateral interpretation of who is at fault and that's never them.

23:32

Ellie: Exactly.

23:33

Yeah.

23:33

There's like no recognition of the relational co-constitution

23:36

of the situation.

23:37

And I also just want to say that, I think I have now decided that Socrates

23:41

is not a gas lighter because sidestepping and displacing are not tactics he uses.

23:46

He wants to get into the meat of the conflict.

24:06

David: We can think about the psychology of gaslighting from two different,

24:10

although related, angles, that have the perpetrator, who is doing the

24:14

gaslighting and that of the victim, who is at the receiving end of it.

24:17

I want us to talk about both of these angles, but let's start

24:20

with the psychology of the victim.

24:22

Ellie: Yeah, I think most women are probably familiar with the experience

24:27

of being called crazy, right.

24:30

David: Definitely.

24:30

Ellie: And I, by no means, want to say that all women experienced

24:33

gaslighting in the same way, right.

24:35

That would be a horribly non-intersectional approach.

24:38

But I do think it's very common for women to get called crazy.

24:42

And this being used to undermine their authority.

24:45

And I'm not- not speaking from personal experience or anything.

24:52

Um, but I think what happens in gaslighting is that it's not just

24:55

about undermining somebody's authority, but it's also about undermining

24:58

their very sense of reality.

25:01

So, as you said earlier, David, it's like, you're not just having something

25:03

you believe questioned, you're having the rug pulled out from under you entirely.

25:09

So gaslighting serves to make people doubt their perception of events.

25:13

And it's a successful tool of manipulation because it leads the victim to adopt

25:17

the gaslighter's perspective over their own, partly because the gaslighter

25:21

just seems so confident that they are right and that the victim is wrong.

25:25

David: And again, it goes all the way to making victims believe that they

25:29

can no longer adjudicate the difference between the dream world and the real

25:32

world, which to me just highlights how deep gaslighting cuts, because that's

25:38

probably one of the most fundamental distinctions that we need just to

25:41

function in the world, right, to know that, "Hey, this, this is reality now."

25:46

And this is exactly what happens in that movie, uh, Rosemary's Baby.

25:50

This is like another example of gaslighting and film because in that-

25:55

Ellie: way.

25:55

David: Yeah.

25:55

So in that film, the main woman, Rosemary, is raped by the devil in her sleep.

26:02

And then she kind of wakes up in the middle of it and has

26:05

this weird kind of half memory, half dreamlike experience of it.

26:10

And when she wakes up, she asks her husband like what happened last night?

26:14

And he's like, "Oh yeah, you and I had sex.

26:17

Um, it was me the whole time.

26:18

You were just kind of not really awake and not really asleep."

26:22

And then meanwhile, she's got the devil's baby inside her.

26:25

Ellie: Oh my God.

26:26

Yeah.

26:26

And I think gaslighting around sexual violence is just so rampant.

26:32

That is where the banality of evil exists, in this idea that women are constantly

26:37

led to believe, well, you probably asked for it, or what were you wearing, right.

26:42

That's a form of gaslighting the victim, precisely using that tool that

26:46

you talked about from Cynthia Stark, which is the tool of displacing,

26:50

attributing to a defect in character what happened to the victim.

26:54

David: And the case of sexual violence highlights what we've

26:57

described as the epistemic harm associated with gaslighting.

27:02

And it brings to the fore that credibility deficit from which women suffer under

27:07

patriarchy because what we know from these cases is that systematically, when

27:11

women say I have been raped, I have been sexually harassed, I've been sexually

27:16

assaulted, people don't believe it.

27:19

They just don't think that it is true.

27:22

Um, and this includes school counselors, this includes judges,

27:27

this includes police officers.

27:29

It includes even family members.

27:31

And so it brings to the fore that epistemological dimension about who

27:35

knows what, and under what conditions.

27:38

Ellie: Yeah.

27:38

Because women already aren't believed as much as men are in society, and you

27:43

know, a different aspect of the psychology of being gaslit turns on isolating

27:48

the victim from their support network.

27:51

So for instance, a lot of perpetrators of gaslighting, especially when gaslighting

27:54

is happening in the context of intimate relationships that are abusive, will

27:57

tell the victim's friends and family members that this person is just

28:01

going through a difficult time, right.

28:04

This is one way that perpetrators get to seem like they're in

28:07

the right, because they're just looking out for the person, right?

28:10

Like, "Oh, it's so terrible.

28:11

She's just being a little crazy right now.

28:13

Or she's going through a hard time."

28:16

Telling the victim's friends and family I'm really looking out for

28:19

her is a version of concern trolling, This idea that like you're trolling

28:23

somebody by feigning concern for them.

28:25

David: Yeah.

28:26

And that happens in the film over and over again, where the guy will say, "I don't

28:31

want to send you to the asylum, but again, I might have to for your own wellbeing."

28:36

And I want to return to the point that we made about how this is carried out through

28:40

microaggressions, because in many cases, all of these microaggressions that, again,

28:44

add to this concern trolling are hidden or in many cases passed off as jokes.

28:51

And I find the weaponization of humor in particular to be an important element

28:57

for understanding the psychology of gaslighting, because its ultimate goal

29:01

really is to convince the victim that they are over-reactive as a way of, in fact,

29:07

rendering them over accepting, right?

29:09

If you break somebody down by convincing them that any kind of

29:13

resistance they might put up is evidence of their fragility, then

29:17

you, in fact, render them fragile.

29:19

And they will take all the bullshit that you want to throw their way.

29:22

Ellie: Yes.

29:22

And I think that's a great example of the way that the victim ends up feeling

29:26

totally broken down in character.

29:29

They not only don't trust themselves, but they actually lose a sense of themselves

29:33

entirely and sort of end up needing to glom on to the perpetrator's view of

29:38

reality and maybe also their identity, just to have some sort of life raft.

29:43

David: And your comments about how the victim is isolated points to the

29:47

impossibility of finding that raft.

29:50

In the movie, the woman is isolated in every imaginable way by her husband.

29:56

He will hide her mail, letters that her family sent her, expressing

30:00

concern about her wellbeing, he will intercept them and then tell her

30:04

that they're not writing to her.

30:06

He will also convince the housekeepers that she is accusing them of doing

30:11

the stealing, which is not true as a way of, again, alienating her

30:15

from the other people in the house.

30:17

Ellie: Wow.

30:17

David: So all around from the beginning to the end of the movie, phenomenologically

30:22

speaking, this woman just experiences the walls closing in on her from every

30:27

possible angle, until she's alone in the middle of the ocean without a life raft.

30:33

Ellie: Yeah.

30:33

And I think the idea of alone is complex here because on the

30:36

one hand you're absolutely right that the victim is isolated and

30:39

cut off from her support system.

30:43

At the same time, in a sense she's not alone, because she doesn't even have

30:47

her own personal identity or integrity as an individual anymore, right.

30:52

She's like just a shell of a human or just like reduced to a puddle that becomes

30:57

part of the puddle of the perpetrator.

31:00

All right we're in a weird way with metaphors here now.

31:02

David: No, but I think the idea of being alienated, not just from others, but

31:06

also from yourself is captured really beautifully and really powerfully

31:11

in the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, in which this woman again

31:15

is gaslit by her husband and she just slowly recedes into the background,

31:20

becoming part of the wallpaper.

31:22

So she is-

31:23

Ellie: Yes.

31:23

That early feminist classic story.

31:26

David: Yeah.

31:26

And so she just sort of blends into her surroundings, disappearing like a ghost.

31:31

Ellie: Yeah.

31:32

That's a really interesting connection.

31:34

What do you think is happening on the perpetrator's side while all

31:37

of this is happening to the victim?

31:39

David: Well, I mean beyond the fact that there are POS', I'm not sure where to take

31:45

this in a philosophically rigorous manner.

31:47

But when I think about gaslighters, it's true that I do think about the

31:51

classical case of the manipulating husband who pulls the strings in

31:55

a choreographed orchestrated way.

31:58

But I also think about the more subtle, unintentional, maybe even

32:02

unconscious, forms of gaslighting that we talked about earlier.

32:07

And I think the lightness of the aggressions, their micro-ness, is

32:13

absolutely essential for understanding the psychology of the perpetrator,

32:17

because it allows them to not cross a certain threshold, which is typically

32:22

physical violence or verbal violence.

32:24

So that you can in fact have certainly the mastermind approach to gaslighting,

32:29

uh, where you're executing a strategy that maybe you've planned ahead of

32:32

time, but then you also have, again, those men who, in the process of

32:36

gaslighting, truly convinced themselves that they're not really gaslighters.

32:42

They're just nice guys who are trying to look out for the

32:45

well-being of the women around them.

32:47

And I think the latter are just as dangerous as the former.

32:51

Ellie: So gaslighters are often trying to turn their victim into their

32:54

fantasy of what the victim should be.

32:57

I think what's happening a lot with gaslighters is a denial

33:00

of another person's autonomy.

33:02

They- they might not even actually realize that they want to deny somebody else's

33:06

autonomy, they just think that they have a grasp on reality, complete hold on it.

33:10

They're what philosophers call solipsists, and the psychologist Eleanor

33:13

Greenberg writes about this dimension of gaslighting as changing the victim,

33:17

which can sometimes take a literal form, so like demanding that they

33:21

change their hair, their dress, their mannerisms, all of which are really

33:24

classic signals of domestic abuse.

33:27

But it can also be takes subtler forms of wanting to change their personality,

33:30

their values, and that sort of thing, all these disorienting tactics.

33:34

David: Yeah.

33:34

It's like men, as a class, we suffer from a Pygmalion syndrome, right.

33:38

We want to create these fantasies in our image and we get off on the

33:43

idea that we have that shaping power.

33:46

Ellie: When you're talking about this, David, all I have in my head

33:48

is that Chicks song, "Gaslighter," which goes, "Gaslighter!

33:53

Denier!".

33:55

And I will stop there and let listeners now have it in their head for the rest

33:57

of the episode, if you've heard it.

33:59

If you haven't, may check it.

34:00

David: Is that a recent song?

34:01

Ellie: Yeah.

34:01

They came out with an album called Gaslighter in what was it like, 2019?

34:06

David: Also, who are the Chicks?

34:08

Ellie: 2020.

34:09

Oh, formerly the Dixie Chicks.

34:10

They-

34:10

David: Oh, Oh yeah.

34:12

Okay.

34:12

Okay.

34:13

It's like, uh, Lady Antebellum and Lady A.

34:15

Ellie: Exactly.

34:16

Lady A.

34:18

Um, speaking of racism, let's talk about racial gaslighting, cultural gaslighting,

34:23

and other forms of structural gaslighting.

34:33

David: If you're enjoying overthink, please rate and review us on Apple

34:36

podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts

34:49

. Ellie: So as we've discussed, the term gaslighting originated in

34:52

the context of abusive romantic relationships between men and women.

34:57

But a lot of theorists have realized that the term describes a much

35:00

wider phenomenon, transcending its original context and applying

35:04

not just to individuals, but actually to social groups.

35:08

And I'm thinking here about recent articles on gaslighting, including

35:12

Nora Berenstain's article on structural gaslighting, which is called "White

35:15

Feminist Gaslighting" and Elena Ruiz's concept of cultural gaslighting.

35:20

David: So how do they define those terms?

35:22

Ellie: So structural gaslighting as Berenstain describes it basically

35:26

obscures the connections between structures of oppression and the patterns

35:31

of harm that are related to them.

35:33

So for instance, going back to that example earlier about a Black woman

35:36

who's experiencing microaggressions in the workplace and sees that as

35:39

part of a broader system of racial domination, that woman is gaslit if

35:44

HR or her boss or whomever fails to recognize that the harm is being done

35:48

to her are part of a long history of anti-Black racism in the US, and makes

35:54

it seem like what's actually a political problem is just a personal problem.

35:57

David: So is structural gaslighting then the same as cultural gaslighting?

36:03

Ellie: No.

36:04

Structural gaslighting is broader than cultural gaslighting, because

36:07

you can have structures that don't, say, relate to culture, at

36:09

least as far as I understand it.

36:11

But Ruiz defines cultural gaslighting as social and historical support

36:16

mechanisms that basically produce abusive mental environments within

36:19

settler colonial structures, and these end up furthering the ends of

36:23

cultural genocide and dispossession.

36:25

So they basically encouraged colonized folks to think that they're deserving

36:30

of colonization and to erase entire histories of oppression and genocide.

36:35

David: Yeah.

36:36

And because these concepts of structural and cultural gaslighting shift our focus

36:41

from the individual to the broader social structures and cultural patterns

36:45

that shape our lives, again, without our conscious intention, they help us make

36:50

sense of multiple forms of discrimination and not just discrimination on the

36:55

basis of sex as it appears originally in that movie and the first wave of

36:59

scholarly research on gaslighting.

37:02

For example, the philosopher of disability, Shelley Tremain, wrote an

37:06

essay about gaslighting in connection to disability, in which she applies this

37:10

concept of structural gaslighting to what we call mental illness and the ways

37:15

in which people typically deemed mad quote unquote, are gaslit by the very

37:21

medical establishment that creates the categories of mental illness and mental

37:26

health, putting them into these boxes on account of not being neuro-typical.

37:31

And there is a quote in her essay that I want to cite, because I think it

37:34

captures the essence of her argument.

37:37

She writes:

37:38

"People who, for any number of reasons, do not conform to highly regulated

37:42

standards of, for instance, social behavior and interaction, such as

37:47

people who are classified as quote unquote, mentally ill or perceived to

37:51

be insane, are routinely discredited, ignored, vilified, and stigmatized.

37:58

Until the relatively recent formation and rise of the mad pride movement

38:03

and related social movements, the hermeneutical resources that many

38:07

disabled people required to collectively understand the political character of

38:12

their situation were unavailable to them."

38:15

Ellie: And I think Tremain's point about gaslighting in the context

38:17

of disability provides a point of conversation with feminist accounts of

38:21

gaslighting in the medical establishment or what is called medical gaslighting.

38:26

It's very well-documented that women are often not believed as much

38:30

as men are when they report their pain or other medical ailments.

38:34

And this is especially a problem for fat women, who are often distrusted

38:38

and their own accounts of pain and other medical ailments, and also

38:42

women of color, especially Black women.

38:44

You can't talk about the medical establishment in the US without talking

38:48

about the history of horrific terrors that have been perpetrated against Black

38:52

women, especially enslaved Black women, who then were also gaslit and made

38:56

to think that their pain wasn't real or that their injuries were imagined.

39:01

David: Yes.

39:02

I recently read an article precisely about this that was published in the

39:05

Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics in 2001, which argues that for example,

39:11

women, and they did not control for race, so it talks about women as a

39:14

category rather than say, Black women, are underprescribed painkillers because

39:20

doctors typically assume that they're being overly dramatic and catastrophic.

39:24

So women presenting with the same symptoms as men will simply be told that, "Oh,

39:30

you know, it's probably in your head.

39:32

Maybe you're just stressed out.

39:34

Maybe it's not as big of a deal as you're making it out to be.

39:37

So here take a Tylenol and you'll be fine in a couple of days."

39:41

Ellie: Yeah.

39:41

And this is especially a problem for Black women because historically,

39:45

racial pseudoscience from the 18th and 19th centuries literally

39:49

believed that black people had higher pain thresholds than white folks.

39:54

For instance, this was one reason that chattel slavery was justified.

39:57

It's like, "Oh, well, they don't experience pain in the

39:59

same way that white people do.

40:00

They can stay out in the sun longer than white people can."

40:03

And this led to things like Black enslaved women being

40:06

experimented on without anesthesia.

40:10

David: Well and in connection to this, I think it's important for us to recognize

40:13

that this is not only historical.

40:14

It continues in the present, because researchers have found that even today,

40:20

more than 50% of med school graduates will say yes to the question of

40:27

whether Black people's skin is slightly thicker than white people's skin.

40:32

So we're talking about 21st century people who are going into medicine

40:37

as doctors having easily refutable beliefs about the science of race.

40:43

Ellie: Oh my God.

40:44

It's just unconscionable.

40:46

I'm also thinking here about Black women's mortality rates

40:49

in pregnancy and childbirth.

40:50

Black women are three to four times more likely to be at risk of pregnancy

40:55

related deaths than white women are.

40:57

I think this really came to the fore a couple of years ago when Serena

41:00

Williams almost died in childbirth.

41:02

Williams has a history of developing blood clots and she developed one

41:06

after giving birth to her daughter.

41:08

When Williams went to the hospital for this, for severe symptoms, including

41:12

coughing that was so intense that she ripped her C-section wound, she

41:16

was not taken seriously by the nurse.

41:18

And this is particularly egregious in the case of Serena Williams, because as

41:22

a world-class athlete, she knows her body better than like anybody else, right.

41:27

And so the idea that a nurse would not take her account of what was going

41:31

on seriously is particularly damning.

41:34

She knew that she had a history of blood clots.

41:36

She told the nurse, "Hey, I think I know what's going on."

41:38

But the nurse thought that Williams' pain medication might've been confusing her.

41:43

So basically Serena Williams ultimately recovered, but medical

41:46

gaslighting almost led to her death.

41:48

David: Yeah.

41:48

It's like, "Oh, Serena Williams, you're telling me all these

41:51

facts about your medical history.

41:53

You are dreaming, this is nothing but a dream."

41:56

You know, it's like weird racial Houdini-ism, uh, within

42:00

the medical establishment.

42:02

Ellie: God.

42:02

I don't know if I like love that term or hate it because it just seems

42:05

like, like, the story is so fucked up.

42:07

I hate the idea of having like a funny term to associate with it,

42:11

but I also think your term is-

42:12

David: Well, I don't think the term is funny particularly, and I

42:15

do think it's accurate insofar as it involves as sleight of hand, kind of

42:19

in the style of magicians, and what do magicians do other than control

42:24

our perception of reality, including our perception of our own reality.

42:28

And Serena Williams' experience with medical gaslighting almost embodies, in

42:33

the flesh, Ruiz's definition of medical gaslighting, which she defines as quote:

42:39

"The interpersonal phenomenon of having once experience of illness

42:43

marginalized, including having one's self-reported or presenting symptoms

42:48

downplayed, silenced, or psychologically manipulated by a clinical provider

42:53

or healthcare professionals."

42:54

So this is exactly what happened to Serena.

42:57

She said, "I am having these symptoms and I am telling you what they mean."

43:02

And both the presentation and the interpretation of the symptoms

43:05

were called into question.

43:07

Ellie: And I think a lot of women can relate to some form of

43:10

experience of medical gaslighting.

43:12

Like- like even I have been medically gaslit and I am a white,

43:16

thin, able-bodied young woman.

43:19

Um, without going into like too much detail here, I had some digestive issues

43:23

that were long misdiagnosed, and weirdly like totally downplayed to the point that

43:28

my doctor at some points would say, like, "There's nothing wrong with you, I don't

43:32

know why you're making up problems."

43:33

And then on the other hand would go to extremes and be like, actually,

43:37

"I think you have this really intense disease, which luckily I didn't have."

43:40

And so, yeah, the- the truth was more somewhere in the middle and now I've

43:44

been able to like sort out my digestive issues, um, which like, frankly just

43:48

came down to the fact that I am lactose intolerant and nobody ever noticed.

43:52

And my point is like this is nothing compared to the story

43:55

of Serena Williams, right?

43:56

And to the stories of so many fat women, Black women, disabled women, and women

44:00

of other intersections of identity that have less privilege than I do.

44:03

David: Yeah.

44:03

And so it's important to keep the intersections in mind, but it's

44:06

also important to keep the overall pattern that this is something

44:10

that happens to women more than men in the medical establishment.

44:14

And in a piece published in The Atlantic, Ashley Fetters makes the argument that

44:19

the entire industry of alternative medicine, which, you know, can include

44:24

some more helpful things and some less helpful things, on the less helpful end

44:29

of things, I'm imagining somebody like Gwyneth Paltrow, um, but this entire

44:34

industry was built on the back of this history of doctors being dismissive of

44:40

women's health concerns, especially around reproduction, pregnancy, childbirth,

44:45

which forced women effectively to start looking for anything or anybody that

44:50

might actually listen to their concerns.

44:53

And so it's medicine's fault that people don't have faith in it.

44:58

Ellie: And I will say that that exclusion of women's knowledges, indigenous

45:03

knowledges, and other forms of knowledge production that don't adhere to the,

45:07

you know, very rigid model of medicine have led to it's being very difficult to

45:13

separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to alternative medicine, the

45:17

Gwyneth Paltrows from the actual healers.

45:20

David: That's right.

45:20

And I think here about a case of medical gaslighting along the lines of gender that

45:25

hits very close to home, which is that when my mother gave birth to my younger

45:30

brother, who is, uh, right now in his teens, she was major- yeah, hi, José, uh,

45:37

she was majorly gaslit by the hospital where she gave birth, because she gave

45:43

birth to her son then she took him home.

45:46

And for a while, she had to battle the hospital over a bill for an abortion

45:52

where they tried to convince her that she didn't have the baby that

45:55

she had and that she was holding.

45:57

So she's like, I don't know how to prove to you that I had my baby other than-

46:03

Ellie: Oh my God,

46:04

David: it's like habeas corpus.

46:05

I produced the body.

46:06

Like it's here.

46:08

Like I can just put it off, like I'll just show up and put it on the table, I guess.

46:12

Um-

46:14

Ellie: So obscene.

46:15

David: So there was this protracted battle between my family and the hospital

46:20

over thousands of dollars that they wanted to charge over this mysterious

46:25

abortion that never took place, but they were convinced my brother did not exist.

46:30

Ellie: I'm hoping, at least in that case, your mom was not gaslit

46:33

in the sense of actually having her reality be undermined, right?

46:36

David: Yeah, no, I mean, hard to doubt the existence of like, a kid that's,

46:42

you know, attached to your hand.

46:45

That would be kind of funny if later in life she's like, I didn't have you really.

46:51

Ellie: She's continuing cycle of gaslighting by convincing

46:53

José that he doesn't exist.

46:56

David: There is a paper trail of his non-existence.

46:58

Ellie: Well, on this note of encouraging David's younger brother to doubt his

47:02

own existence just as Socrates would have done, thanks for joining us today.

47:06

David: Have a great day.

47:11

Ellie: We hope you enjoyed today's episode.

47:13

Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever

47:17

you listen to your podcasts.

47:19

David: You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life

47:23

advice at dearoverthink@gmail.com.

47:27

Ellie: You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod.

47:32

We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K.

47:37

Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.

47:40

David: Thanks so much for joining us today.