On Gaslighting
When I started to use Substack properly (like a week ago), I wanted to do something different here. I will write about politics and culture and books as I do elsewhere, but I’d like this to be a more personal space. One where I can share the things I wouldn’t on other platforms.
As you might know, my most recent book The Hour of the Wolf is a memoir. It is about the wild world that we humans have betrayed, about friendship, mythology, dogs and also about a coercive relationship and a lot of gaslighting.
I spent my thirties in a relationship with a man who practiced a certain kind of magic on me. It was a deceptive power he wielded, often manipulative and controlling. The man, as I call him in my new memoir The Hour of the Wolf, told me when we met that he was drawn to me because he could see I was in pain. My father and several other family members had been assassinated when I was younger and I had grown up in exile. The worst day of your life, The Man assured me, could also be the best. You just had to learn how to trick your mind.
And anyone’s mind could be fooled.
These were not things that ordinary people knew, only those with a deep insight into human suffering. You could forget pain, you could erase hurt, and you could sidestep discomfort by simply refusing to engage with whatever offended or bothered you. The man did help me, to his credit. I have suffered anxiety and panic attacks most of my adult life and there was a certain sort of sorcery to his teachings. He helped me with my grief and the attacks by teaching me how to still my anxious mind. But what I didn’t realise at the time is that he also groomed me to tolerate and withstand a lot of coercion and control that he would exercise over me. I was very lonely in the relationship and very isolated, by design. It took me many years to see that ours was not a special relationship, as The Man had claimed, but a dangerous one.
In his wisdom, he could be unflinchingly cruel to me and then sagely remind me that there was no value in holding onto the memory of my hurt. Why burden oneself with unpleasantness? Live in the moment!
The present is a gift we ought to be grateful for.
He could turn an ordinary conversation into an explosive scene when he didn’t like something I said and would scream at me in restaurants and storm out, leaving me to apologise to startled waiters and diners. I wanted so desperately all my life to be a mother, to have children, and The Man, who was so often emotionally abusive and manipulative, was his worst self on this front because instead of saying he didn’t share my desire and would never, he gaslit me shamelessly. Did I not have any faith in him? Maybe I couldn’t have children – and yet here I was hassling him? Why didn’t I go freeze my eggs if I was so desperate to be a mother? Women can have children until they’re in their 40s, come on.
I share all this because it was a revelation when I realised – very belatedly – that I was being incessantly gaslit. I had imagined that because I was smart and independent, something so bogus couldn’t possibly happen to me. But it had. For years and years.
We have all been gaslit. Anyone paying attention to world politics in the last three years will have felt distinctly out of their minds. One could argue that all governments engage in the dark art but there is a difference between gaslighting and lying. The aim of gaslighting isn’t to deceive alone, but as Kate Abramson – who wrote the definitive book on gaslighting – says “to fundamentally undermine their targets as deliberators and moral agents.” How can you act if you simply don’t know what is real and what is not and where you stand between the two?
As a political phenomenon, Israel is a masterful gaslighter. They bomb a hospital, then claim that Hamas rockets blew up from the inside. They say they will let aid trucks in and then refuse them entry. They claim no one is starving, while experts tell us what Israel has done to Gaza is the fastest orchestrated famine in history.
Trump is another pro, albeit a bit lazy – why gaslight when you can just change your mind mid-way? He’s the president of peace who has attacked or threatened to attack three countries in the last month.
Today, it feels like gaslighters are ubiquitous. They’re in your family, or your relationships, your doctor, your work or in The White House. Besides deception, they excel at playing on our worst fears and exploiting and befuddling every situation so expertly that one has no idea what is real and what is imagined anymore. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly wrote that gaslighting includes “a special kind of transfer” whereby the gaslighter disavows “his or her own mental disturbance, tries to make the victim feel he or she is going crazy and the victim more or less complies.”
We tolerate this particular sort of derangement from loved ones because we imagine them to be exceptional. But gaslighters are not special, they are absolutely generic. So basic and so banal that it could be your mother or your partner, but their patterns are the same. Don’t be so sensitive, can’t you tell it was a joke? You’re overreacting. Wow, it definitely didn’t happen like that. Their greatest hits are all the same. There’s nothing original or intelligent about a gaslighter. They shame and shout at you and then ask you to apologise, they cause scenes and then come back sulking at what you made them do. I know toddlers who are more emotionally evolved.
When I got out of the relationship, I vowed to learn every lesson there was. I wouldn’t be gaslit again. And if I can help it, no one else will be either. If any of this sounds familiar, if you feel like you’re being gaslit, you probably are. Talk to someone, tell a friend, once you begin to pick at the threads, they unravel surprisingly fast.
1One last thing before going, let me know if there are conversations and topics you’d like to see here. We are doing the anti-imperialist book club conversations and I’ve spoken to Masoud Golsorkhi on Iran and Courtney Bonneau who is reporting from Lebanon so far but let me know if there are other topics, themes that you’d be interested in.
At some of the book events for The Hour of the Wolf, I’ve mentioned some excellent IG accounts of coaches who help people identify narcissists and gaslighters. These two are quite good I think. I’m not an expert, obviously, but just sharing things that I found useful.
Alas! It was very much heart breaking to hear your story, whatever it is, kudos to that man who stood with you. Hope you relieved from it. I will try to purchase your book, Thank you.
NB : I am obsessed with your writings.
Thank you for sharing elements of your painful and turbulent journey. It takes a lot of courage to revisit such trauma let alone write a book. Kudos to you and I will purchase your book soon IA.