The presidential debates have provided survivors everywhere with a gift.
We have been speaking and speaking and speaking about the harm we experience at the hands of gaslighting men forever, and yet unless you have witnessed this behavior yourself, it can be almost impossible to believe that it exists.
Because the abuse isn’t just the mistreatment itself. The abuse is the telling us that the mistreatment is normal. Getting us to forget. The abuse is the insistence that we are not even allowed to say stop or object or even speak up about being devalued, mistreated, objectified, manipulated, or treated as anything less than full human beings. Not even allowed to think it let alone speak it in a society where we have to learn over and over that no one will take her/their word over his. The abuse is the creating a social world, an imagination, in which it is impossible to imagine or even think of liberation. That is the abuse. And so the imagination is the first line of defense. Our minds and words are our first line of defense. knowing we see what is real is our first line of defense. Trusting ourselves about what is unnamed is our first line of defense. Because to topple this entire power structure that hides and condones and masks oppression means always, always knowing the unpoken truths of our bodies are real, no matter who attempts to tell us they are not.
How does this happen? The logical switchbacks, the emotional incoherence, the moves to control the terms of discussion, and the multiple competing realities that this man creates: these are the behaviours that create trauma and dissociation in survivors.
One needs multiple minds to hold all the multiple realities that gaslighting men generate in a near-continual stream and attempt to impose.
And yet, typically, this behaviour is reserved for intimacy – an abuser may not behave this way with other friends or family. (Hullo, we act differently when we’re having sex with people than we do normally? Who’d’a thought.) And so you, friendly bystander, when a woman or trans person says they are experiencing this – when they say they feel crazy, or when they can barely speak? You believing us, you believing us matters. Our words and our minds and our imaginations are our first line of defense, and so your willingness to take the time to understand is how you can help. Because this behaviour can happen under the radar of bystanders, quietly so only the survivor receives it. Yes, your perfectly nice friend who has never done this to you, even your son or your brother, yes they can do this to their partner or lover, in an under-the-radar way that only the partner or lover is subject to.
And so when the survivor finally speaks, it can be difficult for bystanders to empathize or even understand what the survivor has been through.
What is normally hidden, reserved for the private space of intimacy, is now beamed over millions of screens for all to see. Watching this man speak can help those who have never experienced gaslighting before empathize with those who have.
A recent piece in Bust magazine notes: “It’s remarkable how many female viewers report feeling physically ill.” Trout has not touched any of them, not directly. Yet what survivors are reporting is that this kind of psychological violence is, in fact, physical violence.
Now, I’m no Clinton fan. I’m also, if it makes any difference, not American, and so I watch from (literally) the sidelines, with the ever-so-slight feeling of protection that comes of living in different country, though one that perches on the thin crust of the northern edge of the world’s once-greatest superpower.
I need that protection when I watch this man speak. I want to hold the border, the very 49th parallel, up as a barrier between me and this man, as I watch Trout lie, gaslight, evade, distort reality, and create multiple competing narratives that make no sense together. This was odd, because my usual understanding of borders is as tools of oppression and control. Yet here I was wishing for any barrier at all to the destruction that this man’s speech wreaks inside me. (If you’re wondering “Why ‘Trout’?” I’ve put the name into the title just so people see this post. My actual goal in writing is to starve the name. It is much easier for me to read a beautiful word like ‘Trout’ when my body is reacting in this way.)
I needed all the protection I could get because my brain – my literal neurons and physical brain structures – were originally molded and shaped by a man who behaved in remarkably similar ways.
With my mind and body developmentally formed by just this sort of gaslighting, I am extremely susceptible to people who create multiple competing realities and attempt to put them in my head.
Just as a survivor of sexual assault struggles afterwards to regain knowledge that they are allowed to determine who touches their own body, a survivor of serious, chronic gaslighting, who faces this abuse again in a new situation, has to work hard to know they are allowed their own thoughts.
I wanted to turn off the screen. And yet I also feel compelled to give name to these widespread experiences that have no name. We need words, because we live in a culture that readily and automatically allows abuse to go on just because it is so much easier to swim with than against the tide. Abuse is often considered polite, while naming abuse is not because it disrupts the normal flow of power. Cultures of dominance are, after all, woven through us all, not ‘out there’ but inside us.
And that means we live in a world where empathy for survivors needs to be consciously cultivated. Our world, in so many ways, is backwards. When friends and those who are supporting me first asked how it had happened, some wanted me to show them a metaphorical cup of abuse on the kitchen table, when the trouble was that the abuse and the bystander dynamics are the whole house. It took time, and deep listening from those who know me well, to understand what I had been through. How can I explain that the harm is so large we are inside it, that only once you bear the brunt of it do you see how it was around us all along?
The unfortunate Reality TV show that is this election offers a way out of the double bind that survivors find ourselves in, where if we succumb in silence, and extend our natural empathy towards our abusers, centring them even as they extend none back, we sacrifice our bodies and minds (that’s not a metaphor: the cost to survivors of this kind of gaslighting is loss of capacity to work, think, move, speak) and if we speak up, no one believes us, because who could imagine a moral world created by a man like Trout?
Deflection, minimization, gaslighting, shaming these emanate from him in a nearly-continous flow, as Liz Plank explains in a recent video when she notes: “If you feel crazy during this election, that’s Trout gaslighting you again, and again, and again, and again.”
Even as you watch him speak – even as I watch him speak and relive being gaslighted by the last two men who dated me, and the man who raised me – it is almost impossible to imagine how he could say the things he says with a straight face.
And yet he does, over and over, on and on and on. He appears to either have no idea he is doing it, or to feel entitled to go on doing it just to maintain control.
Abusers have two main features that distort their perceptions, according to the very helpful book Why Does He Do That. They have:
-an inappropriately large sense of their own entitlement and an inappropriately shrunken sense of the entitlement of others;
-and they perpetually center themselves, which leads them to systematically disregard the feelings, needs, and experiences of other people, typically while denying they are doing so.
They will depict normal expectations that we all have of one another – such as ordinary family responsibilities, or acting with emotional reliability for our loved ones – as distressing encroachments on their (inappropriately expanded) sphere of entitlement, and will depict the normal interdependence and mutuality of intimate relationships as an excessive imposition on their presumed right to center themselves at all times.
They will story themselves, for instance, as having ‘given and given and given’ when the things they are ‘giving’ are below even the ordinary normal expectations of basic interpersonal obligation to those one is intimate with. (Like describing ‘not lying’ as a gift, or ‘going to see a psychologist when she begins to believe I’m abusing her’ as some sort of extreme generosity, when these are just the basic things one does to be a decent human being.)
Men who abuse in this way do not distinguish between their self-image and their actual self, because their true self is offline. Any attempt to name harm (such as to ask them to stop) is received as criticism, and criticism threatens to call their self-story into question, and this self-story is all they have for a self, until they get sufficiently motivated to stop, and to recover the lost part of themselves that would do moral consistency and emotional connection. That is why they use words to try to control reality, and attack or isolate anyone who tries to bring a bit of reality back into the equation. (“I have all the best words,” he says, his face beaming into the living rooms of the nation.)
For those who did not grow up inside a reality controlled by a gaslighting man, perhaps spotting this kind of abuse would be ‘easy,’ as a recent article says when it describes Trout thus: “We watch you say one thing, then say the opposite. Then refuse to admit any of it happened. […] We can spot gaslighting from a mile away.”
Perhaps for those writers, ‘spotting’ gaslighting is easy. For survivors raised inside this form of abuse, however, spotting gaslighting, let alone getting one’s own thoughts and memories back, is extremely difficult, because gaslighting during developmental years can literally shape the developing brain.
Just as women raised in families where they were never encouraged to say ‘no’ find that, as adults, they have a very hard time doing so, those raised inside a gaslighting dynamic find it very, very difficult to hang on to their beliefs, memories, and knowledge when an abuser – like Trout – gets inside their head and attempts to put multiple competing realities there.
I have been learning a lot about this, because I attempted to create accountability with an abuser earlier this year, and encountered the hard wall of just how evasive and slippery this kind of abuse can be. I have a support pod, and we asked the abuser to create his own, but he just did weird slippery evasive maneuvers instead of taking any responsibility for a year of brutal gaslighting and messing with my head. Watching Trout talk is like a big, loud, public version of the switchbacks, multiple competing realities, bait and switch, entitlement, and manipulation that I experienced with this well-meaning ‘feminist’ dude for a year. It’s almost a relief, that I have something I can point to, to say: “There. There is what happened to me. Do you believe me now?”
My pod’s been doing a lot of research to try to understand what is happening, because as the very helpful book Why Does He Do That indicates, the abuser manages to tell only partial versions of events, to get those around him in a sort of thrall to his distorted sense of reality, and to normalize his strangely enlarged sense of entitlement. He tells the convenient parts of the story, because he wants most of all to prevent those around him from checking in with the survivor to check his facts.
Why Does He Do That – though it predates attachment theory and may need updating with this new information – has been super helpful at explaining this behaviour. Author Lundy Bancroft, who has worked with thousands of abusive men, writes that the only way to get a clear picture of what is happening with men who abuse is to check what they say against information provided by their exes and partners. There is no other way to get a clear picture, she writes, because abusers are not accurate sources of information about themselves or others. (“I never supported the war in Iraq,” Trout says, while audio clips that show he’s lying – like this one, starting at 1:40 – are readily available).
The pundits waste no time in fact-checking Trout’s bizarre dishonesties, his blatant bending of reality. They need to. As Bancroft’s research tells us, the only way to counter gaslighting is with powerful, repeated doses of reality.
This is why when an abuser gaslights a partner or former partner, he also seeks to talk one-on-one and preemptively to those she might go to for help, to convince them of a narrative that would lead bystanders to refuse to even speak to the survivor, to cut off attempts to check the abuser’s story against any external reality.
Deeply listening to survivors, fact checking the partial-ommission stories that those who abuse use to deflect and avoid accountability, takes energy and empathy and time, and may take acting against the current of socially ‘polite’ behaviour. It is so much easier to toss up barriers to seeing intimate violence, especially when without cross-checking, the abuser’s narrative feels so truthy, and when even seeing the abuse might mean recognizing that we may have inadvertently become part of it.
A mistake we make as bystanders is to attempt to use our own rolodex of emotional experiences to empathize with the survivor – or to try to figure out the abuser. But empathizing with abuse survivors takes a different set of skills. Empathizing with survivors means stretching out of experiences we have already had, and into deep listening to the experience they have just had, or are still having, which may be completely outside our lived experience. Our own rolodex may just not provide the information we need to comprehend what they are telling us has just happened to them.
Meanwhile, empathizing with abusers can lead us to endlessly derail the centring of survivors, which is exactly what the abuser wants. It can also lead us to project our own ethical impulses onto the abuser’s actions, which would make sense if this were a reasonable person acting – but the whole point is that no matter how nice he may be to his friends or colleagues, the abuser’s actions in the context of intimacy typically do not make that kind of sense. Imagine trying to imagine why hamster-hair keeps saying “I did not support the war in Iraq,” or how he can say phrases like “no, I’m not racist against Mexicans. I’m building a wall. A wall between here and Mexico. I have no problem with Mexico. I’m building a wall.” You could imagine an empathetic reason for this incoherence that comes out of your own rolodex of experience, and it would just let him evade accountability, because he does not make that kind of sense. Abuser’s actions make another kind of sense: an abusive, entitled one. But they do not make ordinary empathic sense, so trying to empathize with an abuser who is evading accountability often just means throwing the survivor under the bus.
Bystanders may not comprehend the full depth of the harm, because of a mistaken idea that physical violence is somehow ‘worse’ than psychological violence. Well, if he didn’t hit her, we think, maybe it wasn’t that bad. I mean, we all have bad days, right? We seem to have this mistaken assumption that abuse just means coming home a little grouchy and having a bad day. We think only of our own range of experiences, and may find it hard to really hear what the survivor is telling us.
The core of all the different forms of abuse is typically the inability to take accountability for one’s actions, the inability to hear when we are harming another, the inability to own our mistakes or grow from them in a way that actually does repair. While we do need a culture that can foster accountability without ostracization, we first need a culture that actually does believe and centre survivors of gendered violence (in all its forms: rape, assault, gaslighting, control of family funds, threats to leave if the abuser’s whims are not catered to, etc.). We need a culture that can do accountability at all.
In order to create a culture of accountability we need the capacity to recognize abuse in all its forms. This idea that ‘physical’ abuse is somehow distinct from ‘psychological’ abuse is outdated, based in a Manichean divide between mind and body that is itself a deeply messed up Western fantasy that prevents us from knowing our own bodies. Its primary function is to further disbelieve survivors, or tell them they are imagining it.
In the 1800s, before the germ theory of disease, people would have thought it absurd that tiny living creatures cover our skin and live inside our bodies, keeping us well and making us sick. They would have thought it absurd that tiny microbes, bacteria, viruses, can transfer invisibly from body to body, for how can something invisible make you sick?
In the 60s, Marshall McLuhan wrote that the light from a TV screen isn’t just something you’re ‘watching.’ It is physically crossing the room and touching your body, entering your skin and your eyes.
In the 90s, people thought that it was ridiculous that anyone could be allergic to perfume, because it’s just a smell. How could you be allergic to a smell?
A gas leak can kill you. Unless an odour is artificially added, it can kill you before you can catch or even detect it. We add that odour for a reason: we must make danger perceivable, so we can understand how to prevent it.
What happens when this man uses words to get at the millions of triggered women listening to him? It isn’t only his body language that presupposes threat. As an abuse survivor, what I am susceptible to – I don’t even want to write the word ‘vulnerable,’ because that seems to open up a tunnel by which he can get me – is the multiple competing realities. The bait and switch designed to make you feel crazy. The gaslighting. The getting inside your head and trying to get you to abandon your own reality and adopt his, even and especially when his make no sense, when his realities are internally incoherent, or when his words bear zero connection to his actions or to reality.
This kind of abuse is one of the most devastating forms of harm that any human being can do to another. Gaslighting shatters people. Physically.
And the worst thing about it is that those who regularly do this to others will then turn it around and say that you are doing it to them, by imposing on what they perceive as their ‘right’ to do this to you. Because what is consensus reality, anyway, right?
Here’s an example.
I say “The sky is blue.”
He says “The sky is green. It has always been green. What are you thinking? ‘The sky is blue.’ It’s never been blue. Look again.”
I look up. And because I have been raised by an abuser, because my brain has developed around precisely this kind of abuse, I see green.
I say, bewildered, but trusting him: “no, no I’m pretty sure it’s usually blue.”
He replies, getting upset: “You’re trying to control the narrative. I don’t feel safe now. I have to have room to control the narrative.”
And there I am, scared and confused, trying to believe both that the sky is green, and that me confusedly trying to remember reality is me ‘controlling the narrative’ – which of course I would never want to do.
Cue me having overwhelming dissociative symptoms. Cue him saying my dissociative symptoms mean there’s something wrong with me, because he’s acting totally fine.
He spent nearly a year telling me that he was acting completely normal, had no issues at all, and that the only issue was that all the women in his life were ‘crazy’ – And I completely accepted – even encouraged – his world view. Because that’s what you do when you care about someone, you encourage them to trust their worldview. Right?
This is what it’s like being a survivor of gaslighting abuse. This is how at risk I am to further abuse.
Here’s another example.
A guy I like says he’s into me. I say “ok, we gotta talk. I’m an abuse survivor. I’m in the middle of healing from serious formative abuse. I can only get close to guys if they are choosing to be actively part of my healing and are exceptionally careful with me. If we get involved at all, you’re going to have to treat me really, really well, act as safe and as good to me as the men who have treated me well.”
He explains what a feminist he is. How self-aware he is. How he does a ton of his own emotional work. He spends a few days explaining all of this to me, how he’s super super good to women and really committed to his feminist practice and totally gets it and is a big nurturer.
I think I’ve won the lottery – a cute guy I’m into who also is into helping women heal! I’ve been treated really, really well by several partners by this point and I know how awesome it is to be in a relationship with a guy who really treats you well. Who listens, who is comforting, who is responsive, who owns his shit, who values you just because you’re you, and because you help him grow. I know this well and between his words and his carefully cultivated feminist reputation I take him at his word that he is another one of these.
Fast forward a few months, and I am losing my mind, and can’t figure out what is happening. He has been destabilizing me all day every day for months. When I finally blurt out “this is my worst nightmare, getting involved with an unreliable guy,” instead of saying ‘oh, shit, I am acting unreliable, aren’t I, and I committed to act really safe with you, didn’t I, wow thanks for letting me know, how can I do better,’ he does a classic bait and switch, though I only understand it later.
He has been actively training me not to rely on him, and telling himself that this is his right. He acts intentionally unreliable while telling me he is being good to me, inconsistently enough that in between the most blatant episodes I can lull myself into believing his words about how good he’s being to me, but destabilizing me often enough that I can never quite count on him to be there. My friends are extremely alarmed at his strange behaviour they witness towards me, but I only hear his words, and keep telling everyone they “just don’t know him the way I do.” After months of being deliberately trained out of emotional safety in a moment by moment way while he lies and lies to me about what he is doing, I am shaken and triggered and having all my old dissociative symptoms, the symptoms I so carefully explained to him before he got involved with me.
Instead of hearing me, and apologizing or recognizing he is treating me badly despite having committed to the responsibility to treat me well, when I blurt out “but this is my worst nightmare,” instead of offering any kind of compassion he shoots back what he seems to think is a perfect parallel. “This is my worst nightmare,” he retorts. “My worst nightmare is anyone relying on me.”
Nothing even remotely resembling hearing me, nothing remotely resembling an apology for gaining and breaking a survivor’s trust, no recognition of what a strange ‘right’ this is for him to claim. He says it as though training others not to rely on him is something he ‘deserves’ – relationship without reliability, sex without accountability.
Even as he says this, he switchbacks on me moments later to say, somehow, angrily “I am being so reliable, I’m being so good to you, what is wrong with you that you don’t feel safe yet!” I have heard him tell me how good he is being to me over and over by now. And I have such a hard time comprehending reality when his words contradict it. He somehow manages to tell me this is real, that he’s ‘being so reliable,’ even as he also tells me it is perfectly normal that he is being unreliable, because he is entitled to act unreliable because his worst fear is anyone relying on him.
To cultivate empathy for survivors, think of this together with what you see Trout doing. With him saying incoherent things like “I’m not racist. That judge is Mexican. He’s proud of his heritage, just like I’m proud of mine. I have no problem with Mexico. I’m not racist. I’m building a wall. A wall between here and Mexico, not another country.”
If you wish to cultivate empathy for survivors of this kind of gaslighting and moral incoherence, that means facing and really hearing the parts that are hard to hear, facing and empathizing with the parts that hurt. And recognizing that your friend, who you know, who has never done this to you, may indeed be doing it to or about a current or former partner.
I attempt to live inside both of these competing realities at once. I somehow manage to believe, simultaneously, that he is both being unreliable because it’s ok for him to be unreliable (and shameful and wrong of me to expect him to be there for me), and that he’s being rock-solid reliable and there is something wrong with me if I don’t feel safe.
I manage to accept both of these realities simultaneously, because I care about him, and my brain is built this way, and he wants me to.
How can anyone live inside both of these realities? And yet I trust him, completely, and so somehow I do. Meanwhile he continues this constant, extremely alarming destabilization in his actions, while lying in dozens of different ways about why and about whether that is even happening.
That’s layer one. Hold that in mind – or try – can you? because here comes layer two.
As this is all going on, I also slowly discover that he has created two other alternate realities and seems to be attempting to live inside both of those at once too.
In one, he is – in his oft-repeated words – “deeply in love with me” and is my partner. This is the reality I take to be our consensual reality, the one we discussed for days and weeks and what I understood we were doing together. I had been amply, amply clear that given what I was healing from, I was only in a position to be with him if he was ready to be exceptionally solid with me, and if our relationship was out in the open, official, and real. I have had my trust shattered by a primary attachment bond, and I deserve to be treated with dignity and to have partners act in a very, very trustworthy way, and I had made all of this extremely clear to him at the start. He had said all the things he wanted me to believe.
He is simultaneously creating another entire reality, one I slowly come to understand he is building around us unbeknownst to me. In this alternate reality, he has “no romantic feelings for me” (also his words), and he is apparently just “hanging out” with me having casual sex. He says this to me at times as though we have agreed, as though I already know this. He switches back and forth between these realities depending on his mood, who we are around, and which story he has led them to believe. As the months go on he becomes more blatant about this, switches back and forth openly to my face, as though I somehow also live in both of these realities.
He seems to have no awareness, from moment to moment, that the thing he is saying completely contradicts everything else he has said. In each moment he appears utterly certain of himself, switching back and forth between these realities, acting as though it is me who is crazy.
Imagine trying to believe both of these things, as you are getting constantly, constantly destabilized by the person’s actively undermining behaviour.
Imagine while he is lying about his actions to you, and telling you to believe he is acting in a way other than he is actually acting, he also tells you not to “control the narrative.”
Imagine you are told all of this not by a random politician far away, but by someone you deeply trust, someone who is regularly inside you, someone who you want to support and love and be good to. Imagine you love this person and – far from ‘trying to control the narrative,’ have been encouraging them to ‘develop their own narrative,’ have spent months actively empathizing with them as they tell you that the reason they don’t really know how to be good to you is their ex’s fault, because their ex “always tried to control the narrative” and “trained them” out of being loving and affectionate, and you just buy it and buy it and buy it. You want to be the good girlfriend who is loving and supportive. You don’t want to do a thing they say has hurt them.
Imagine you have no defenses. None at all.
It breaks me. Even now, to try to exist in these multiple realities simultaneously does something strange to my head. It disrupts my entire body, it destabilizes my nervous system.
Had you not seen Trump speak like this over and over and over, you might find it difficult to believe that anyone could.
That’s not even the whole of it.
Even as this is happening he also tells me for almost a year that no man has ever treated me better than he is treating me, that my own memories of being treated well do not exist.
As he tells me this I find my memories slipping away. Memories of one of the first men I had sex with, at age 19, who has remained a friend to this day 20 years later, who stayed up all night at the Dead Sea in the brisk desert wind, rubbing my body to keep me warm when we missed the last bus home from the sea and spent the night out on the beach. Who responded to me: when I turned to him, he turned to me. Simple things, and yet these were my first experiences of safety. I now feel these memories slipping away.
Memories of my longest partner, who in our first year of friendship unselfishly nursed me back to health when I had pneumonia and hadn’t slept in months because of PTSD.
Memories of my partner for three years during my undergrad, who fed me, rocked me to sleep, tucked my winter scarf snugly into my jacket collar to keep me warm when I left the house, cuddled me when I was sad or scared, and would quietly come up and put a big fat multivitamin on my tray in the school cafeteria as his way of telling me he loved me.
I think I can remember these things, years of my life, years of being treated well by nurturing men. But it’s all slipping away, like an eraser scene from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
I remember being treated well. Now I do. My friends – and my supportive, loving exes – have all helped me rebuild reality. But this person told me for nearly a year that my memories didn’t exist, and I felt them breaking up and sliding away. As I struggled to keep them, struggling to speak and to hang on to my own memories, I tried to say “NO. Men have treated me well. Men have treated me well. I know being treated well exists because I have experienced it.” But even as I say it, I am not sure. Can I really remember Merlin’s arms around me in the desert at age 19? Can I really remember Jordan propping up pillows and rubbing my back for hours when I couldn’t breathe, so that I could get a few minutes of sleep at a time, until bit by bit I began to sleep again, and then began to get well? Can I really remember Kevin rocking me to sleep when I cried because my father had written me another manipulative email?
“Being treated well exists” I say, and I name these men like a litany, hanging on to reality, facing down both my abuser and this bewilderment inside me. Bewildered because I don’t trust myself: this “quiet, self-aware, nurturing, feminist man” couldn’t possibly be doing this to me, I must be imagining it, he is such a feminist man, he told me so himself. As my memories flit in and out, threaten to break up and flutter away like so many bits of tattered cloth, moth wings over my eyes and mouth.
When another friend intervenes to help, bystander dynamics come into play. Centring survivors is shockingly hard. Abusers centre themselves, and get everyone around them to centre them as well, by making centring them appear natural. The space they leave available for anyone other than themselves to be centred is a nearly nonexistent breathing room around the edges.
Relieved at the protection, I ask my friend to explain and speak for me, because by this point months and months in I have all but lost the capacity to think or speak. And then I try, I try to say “There Are Four Lights” – ie men have been good to me, men being good to me exists.
And instead of “oh, I see he is gaslighting you, hey buddy stop gaslighting her,” what I hear from our mutual friend is that I better stop right there, and take that back, because my abuser “feels bad when you say that.”
Instead of hearing me, or taking the time to really see what is happening for me, or helping me set a boundary with my abuser – “thou shalt not erase people’s memories” – the mutual friend who has offered to help instead turns to me forcefully and says “ok, now, well, stop that, because I think he feels bad when you say that other men were better to you than he was.”
Boom. Bait and switch. He is allowed to erase my memories, but I am not allowed to say “stop erasing my memories?” Because that makes him feel bad.
Apparently I’m never, ever allowed to be centred. It always, always has to be about the man’s feelings. Me losing my mind as a result of a year of active gaslighting couldn’t possibly be the least bit important in light of a man’s feelings.
Apparently me saying there are four lights is a ‘mean’ thing to say to the person who is gaslighting me.
Apparently him controlling reality is just normal, and me hanging on to my own memories is ‘hurting his feelings.’
This expanded sense of entitlement, the baseline setting of interpersonal responsibility set in a distorted place, is what Why Does He Do That describes as a key behavior that abusers have in common. They believe they are entitled to a distorted set of rights-without-responsibilities and that anyone attempting to expect emotional reliability from them is imposing on their inherent right to centre themselves. This very baseline of their belief system causes them to gaslight people, because their perception of reality is deeply distorted.
“There are four lights” hurts his feelings? How exactly does it hurt his feelings? It impinges on his natural entitlement to tell me that my own memories do not exist, that no one has ever treated me better than he is treating me. Notice even as you read, the cultural tendency to centre men, to empathize with abusers. Even I feel it as I write this. Of course he felt bad, you think. You’re saying another man was ‘better’ than him. Maybe this brings up bad feelings about his manhood. Him him him. But at some point, we have to centre survivors. I gave him my support, love, and empathy for eight months. So. Much. Empathy. And it just got absorbed in the black hole of his entitlement, and turned around as harm.
He told me all of these realities simultaneously, and yet also told me for a year that I was the one who had something wrong with me.
In some ways focussing on rehabilitation and empathy for abusers can add to the existing tendency of abusers to continually centre themselves. It’s tricky. We have to centre survivors and simultaneously hold abusers accountable in ways that neither encourage their massive distortions of their entitlements, nor throw them away. This is the centre of a Nurturance Culture that does not condone violence, nor condone disposability.
Because make no mistake: gaslighting is not ‘psychological’ harm. When he did these things to me, the harm sent hormone cascades throughout my body. When he creates multiple competing realities and insists that I believe both simultaneously, my entire nervous system goes into a state of alarm. When he hangs up the phone after lying to me, this action sends every system in my body out of whack. Emotions are physiological. Words cause physical harm. Why Does He Do That reports that where there is both physical and psychological violence occurring, survivors report that it is the psychological violence that causes the worse harm.
We must do away once and for all with this imaginary ‘scale’ with ‘physical harm’ at one end and ‘psychological harm’ at the other. All gendered violence is physical harm. The harm that is caused by words and gaslighting, creating multiple realities, replacing people’s memories – using brainwashing strategies to destabilize survivors- this is every inch as ‘serious’ as what we used to understand as ‘physical’ harm.
When we hear a ‘nonpology’ – as Trout beautifully demonstrated earlier this week, simultaneously saying ‘I apologize,” and saying “that was locker room talk” so clearly not sorry at all – when we are forced to realize that this slipperiness and deflection is precisely how abusers operate, when we are forced to realize we actually believed, for a second, because we applied our own ethical system to this person who lacks one – we are again harmed physically. Viewers report feeling sick to their stomach. Feeling hit in the solar plexus. Losing sleep. Everything from the pituitary to the amygdala to the function of our kidneys to our muscle tone to the communication between our organs is altered by exposure to this abuser’s words.
If my adrenals go into overdrive cortisol production and that creates a whole host of health problems, from accelerated aging to hair falling out to lung infections to cancer, isn’t that physical abuse?
The age of ranking abuse on a scale of severity from ’emotional’ to ‘physical’ is over. All that outdated idea serves to do is to make the abuse seem ‘invisible’ or to disbelieve survivors, make them have to ‘prove’ that things are happening inside our bodies when we get psychologically abused, and that these things are neither ambiguous nor our imagination nor our fault. Trout doesn’t have to touch anyone to cause massive disruption to our physical bodies. Survivors of psychological abuse all over the world are getting physically harmed watching this man speak.
All abuse is physical abuse. And all deserves to be taken seriously.
It is time to mark the harm, to give it the cultural equivalent of a blue stain or an odour of eggs, so we can see it as it as it enters the body, see it as it travels. Check the facts against an abuser’s words. And ask the survivors in your life how they are doing.
Gaslighting is physical harm to my body, caused by words.
_______
PLEASE SHARE THIS POST
If this post speaks to you or makes you think or reflect, please help out: share as widely as possible.
I love this Bay Area Transformative Justice pod mapping worksheet so much that big, dramatic, hyperbole feels called for. ie I wanna shout it from the rooftops and say it again and again: if you consider yourself a feminist man, or you allow others around you to let you walk around with this identity and you enjoy having that reputation, or if you find you get laid or get dates or partners because of this reputation, and if you have not yet mapped out your pod of people who you would want to call you on it when you act in abusive ways, then do this right now. like today. like right away. Because it is everything, it is wonderful: https://batjc.wordpress.com/pods-and-pod-mapping-worksheet/
For a world in which everyone can feel safer, including those who harm and those who cause harm. Thank you.
If you have been told that you abuse: this video from Everyday Feminism is also great, and I highly recommend you watch it and take in carefully what she is saying about her own experience of fucking up and then being fully accountable. Owning doesn’t centre you. It is not about your intentions or your emotions or your reasons for the fuckup. It centres the other person, the one you have harmed. Name fully your acts, take the time to fully get and own how they caused harm, and express in a responsive way how you intend to address them, and check if what you offer actually is effective for repair of the harm you caused. You can also have compassion for yourself of course but that’s not the owning part. That’s it. Nobody has to be perfect but you have to know how to do repair if you want to be part of social justice movements, because you’re going to fuck up and you have to know how to hear it and fix it without flipping out. http://everydayfeminism.com/2013/11/how-to-apologize/
This is an incredibly on point and insightful piece from Everyday Feminism I highly recommend you read and act on right away: Abusive ‘Feminist’ Men Exist — Here Are 6 Things Men Can Do to Stop Them
For more on working with shame and hope, here is a piece that looks at how the fear of being ‘not good enough‘ can be self-fulfilling
Minimizing, deflecting, bait and switch are core features of abuse. Here’s a resource that emphasizes the importance of expressing empathy when you apologize for harming someone. Without empathy your apology – like Trump’s “I did it, I’m not proud, I apologize,” will feel meaningless: Mindful Tools: How To Apologize
A note on gender binaries and cishetprivilege: I want in this post to talk about masculinity, and about power, and that is gendered. I want to do it in a way that doesn’t reinscribe violent gender binaries that cause erasure (and clearly I haven’t managed to do that here). This feels tricky to me, how to talk about power and masculinity – which we need to talk about – without erasing or reinscribing either cishetnormativity, or the ways intimate partner violence – which can happen to people of all bodies in all kinds of relationships – plays out in specific ways when it maps along gendered lines.
I want to talk about masculinity and power dynamics in the kinds of relationships that I know intimately, yet i want to be clear that these are not the only relationships and that these are not the only bodies. I don’t feel really well placed to write about how these power dynamics play out in queer and genderqueer relationships. I have been learning about it from people who understand how that works, but I can’t write about something I don’t know from the inside. I want a way to not erase my own experience of the ways all the emotional labour I tried to do to stop him from abusing me gets completely erased, while not erasing the ways trans and queer folks and QTPOC get even more erased than me. I haven’t figured out how to do this yet.
Language like ‘female of centre’ and ‘male of centre’ can be helpful. It can also erase that what I’m facing in my own life has been abuse by cishetmen and bystander dynamics created by the normalization of centring masculinity. I am in the middle of multiple conversations about this, finding the path through the cliffs so that survivors can support each other and not erase each other. I welcome more.
Do you love speculative fiction and social justice? I am working on a speculative fiction project that deals with the transformations our planet is undergoing, and the undoing of cultures of domination. Cipher is currently seeking collaborators, advisors, an agent, and a publisher. Learn more about Cipher here.
Acknowledgement: This piece and all of the knowledge that is growing around gaslighting and all forms of intimate partner violence has been generated together with the wonderful folks in my pod (thnx Leetal Cuperman & Lily Schwartzbaum and the rest of the pod! you guys saved my life), and the growing crew of people who have gotten in touch to talk about their own experiences, share resources, share insights, and generally think together. People of the internets who have been teaching me things include Eve Rickert of https://www.morethantwo.com/, Chach M. Heart of www.fiercewitches.com, Eva Blake of LiberatingDesire.com, Michon Neal at Medium.com/@neal_Michon, as well as the many others who are building this knowledge together, challenging each other, and working together to think through and name experiences that our culture systematically refuses to name.
