The insidious quality of quiet gaslighting
October 14, 2024
Photo by Nathan Goller-Deitsch on Unsplash
No aspect of this post is created using any type of AI. All mistakes are mine, a real human.
THINKING ABOUT:
The term gaslighting is thrown around frequently, but many people don’t know that the term comes from the 1944 movie Gaslight starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. She’s a rich orphan who meets him in Italy. They return to her aunt’s empty home in London as a newly married couple. He’s a scammer whose goal is to drive her mad so he can take her money. He creeps around the attic making noises and slowly lowers the level of the gas lamps in the house, all the while minimizing any concerns she brings up, acting as if she is completely crazy. And the audience gets swept up in his lies while also knowing exactly what he’s doing.
I’ve been thinking about gaslighting for nearly a decade now, both as I navigate my family experience of being gaslit and as we as a country have as well. We’ve been told so many lies none of us can keep track any longer. It was bad enough when it was just one politician doing it, but now it’s an entire political party telling us that up is down, someone is controlling the weather, and no that isn’t racist—you must be crazy.
For me it’s especially hard because my family was so benign to outsiders. Five kids born into the post-war Baby Boom (the youngest just barely Gen X). Stay-at-home mom who made apple pie. A faithful dog. No yelling or spanking. Clothes were clean, we had three meals a day, and always arrived at church or school on time. We might as well have had a white picket fence.
But under the surface: childhood sexual abuse. For me, both my sisters, and my older brother. When I read memoirs published by non-celebrities, they usually have a truly dramatic story. Someone raised without schooling or much contact with the outside world. Someone raised by parents who both likely had mental illness. Someone with a horribly abusive stepfather you can’t wait for them to escape from.
And those stories are truly horrific, so horrific that it’s easy to diminish my own experience because it wasn’t DRAMATIC. But living in a household where the bad things only happened at night and in the daylight everything was “normal” causes you to question your own sanity. It’s why it’s more insidious and harder to combat. And why I haven’t slept well since 2015, when Gaslight 2.0 began.
WATCHING:
You can find Gaslight on most streaming channels for a small fee. It brought Ingrid Bergman her first of three Oscars, and it’s as chilling now as it was when it came out.
READING:
I just finished The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards by Jessica Waite, a book with one of the best titles in recent memory. Waite tells the story of her amazing husband Sean’s sudden death, of his unraveling prior to dying due to undiagnosed mental illness (likely bipolar disorder), and of all the terrible secrets she learned after his death that made grieving him so much harder. A memoir that’s as tautly written as a best-selling novel, I couldn’t put this book down.
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