You can tell someone is gaslighting you if they consistently deny your reality, making you doubt your memory, feelings, or sanity through tactics like lying, minimizing your reactions, shifting blame, and twisting situations, often leaving you feeling confused, isolated, and unsure of yourself. Key signs include them saying things like "You're crazy," "You're overreacting," or "That never happened," even when you have proof.
Signs of gaslighting include the manipulator denying events, twisting facts, making you doubt your memory and sanity, calling you "crazy" or "too sensitive," trivializing your feelings, isolating you from support systems, and making you constantly apologize. The victim often feels confused, anxious, guilty, and dependent on the abuser for validation, losing confidence in themselves.
If someone uses any of these nine phrases, they may be gaslighting you:
The 7 key signs of emotional abuse often revolve around Control, Isolation, Verbal Attacks, Gaslighting, Blame-Shifting, Intimidation/Fear, and Invalidation, where the abuser manipulates, belittles, and controls you to undermine your self-worth and reality, making you feel constantly fearful, worthless, and dependent.
Gaslighters argue by denying reality, twisting facts, minimizing your feelings, and blaming you to make you doubt your sanity, memory, and perception, often using phrases like "You're crazy," "That never happened," or "You're overreacting" to shift blame and maintain control, creating a confusing cycle of self-doubt for the victim. They avoid accountability by projecting their flaws onto you or claiming they were "just joking".
While gaslighting is a common term used to describe harmful manipulation, it shouldn't be confused with conflict. Although gaslighting is an insidious tactic and form of manipulation, too often, people consider aggressive behaviors, like addressing conflict directly, as gaslighting.
Here are five shifts to alter the dynamic between you and your gaslighter:
Narcissistic abuse typically involves a pattern of showering you with excessive affection and then attempting to tear down your self-esteem. Constant criticism and belittling. To devalue you, the abuser might unfairly nitpick your every action, insult you, or minimize your accomplishments. Shifting blame.
Emotional abuse refers to a situation when a person willfully causes or permits a child to suffer, inflicts unjustifiable physical pain or mental suffering on a child, or willfully causes or permits the child to be placed in a situation in which their health is endangered while under their custody.
Recognizing Emotional Abuse
A gaslighting apology is manipulative and avoids real accountability, often starting with "I'm sorry you feel that way," adding "but," blaming the victim ("you're too sensitive"), or using conditional phrases like, "I'm sorry, if I offended you" to shift blame and make the other person question their own reality, instead of acknowledging the wrong done. A healthy apology takes ownership (e.g., "I'm sorry I did X and it made you feel Y"), validates the other's feelings, and outlines steps to change.
They turn the story around to make it seem like you are at fault, deflecting attention and blame away from them to make you feel guilty. This type of emotional manipulation is called gaslighting. Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse where a person makes you doubt yourself or question your account of an incident.
Gaslighting occurs in intimate relationships when a partner repeatedly undermines and distorts their partner's reality by denying facts, the situation around them, or their partner's feelings and needs.
However, a person who is trying to gaslight you might: Dismiss and minimize your feelings and tell you that you're overreacting, too sensitive, or crazy. Retell events or situations in a way that makes you question your sanity. Insist that they are right and deny that something happened in the way that you remember it.
Victim blaming can have debilitating psychological effects on a person struggling to recover from abuse. It worsens anxiety symptoms, increases feelings of shame, and leaves a person disconnected from themselves and others. Being on the receiving end of blame is exasperating, exhausting, and painful.
If you've been the victim of abuse, it's likely that the police will arrange for someone to talk to you in a safe and private way. Their first priority will be to check you're OK and find out if you need any emergency medical assistance.
In univariate analyses, all 5 forms of childhood trauma in this study (ie, witnessing violence, physical neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse) demonstrated statistically significant relationships with the number of different aggressive behaviors reported in adulthood.
Signs of an Emotionally Abusive Relationship
Narcissistic traits often peak in late adolescence and early adulthood (around ages 14-23), particularly with grandiosity and entitlement, as individuals seek identity and status, but then tend to decline as people mature and face life's realities, though some individuals with NPD may see intensification in these years before a potential mellowing in middle age.
'Highly narcissistic' people love to say these 7 phrases—here's how to respond: Harvard-trained psychologist
Four Ds of Narcissism: Deny, Dismiss, Devalue & Divorce. As we discussed in an earlier blog post, there's nothing easy about being married to a narcissist.
What causes a person to gaslight? People who gaslight others may have developed their abusive and controlling behaviors as a response to childhood trauma, or as the result of narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, or another psychological condition.
Surround yourself with supportive people, engage in activities that make you feel good, and continue to prioritize your mental health. With time and effort, you can overcome the effects of gaslighting and lead a fulfilling, empowered life.