Few relationship accusations are as unsettling as hearing your partner say, “You’re gaslighting me.”
It can make an argument feel much bigger than you thought it was. While your partner is telling you that something about the way you disagree is affecting how much they trust their own mind, you may feel horrified by the idea while also being convinced they’ve misunderstood what happened. Although it may also leave you wondering whether there’s something about the way in which you defend your version of events that you just can’t see. You’d never considered that you could be gaslighting them.
Gaslighting as a term can make it more difficult to consider because it’s so frequently used nowadays. It can be applied when two people remember something differently or when someone feels dismissed. Neither experience tells us, by itself, that gaslighting is taking place.
Maybe the term itself matters less. Arguing over whether your partner has chosen the right word can pull attention away from what they’re trying to describe. Gaslighting involves a repeated pattern in which one person’s version of events holds authority while the other person starts to doubt their own experience. Your partner doesn’t have to end up believing your account, they may simply lose confidence in theirs.
What keeps happening between you when you disagree is more revealing than the label alone.
What happens when you remember things differently?
Imagine your partner tells you that a joke you made in front of friends humiliated them. You remember the evening differently and thought the joke was affectionate, so their reaction feels hard to understand. There’s nothing unusual about that kind of disagreement.
The problem more likely stems from what happens next. If arguments like this repeatedly turn into discussions about whether your partner is good at judging situations, old misunderstandings may be used as proof that they often take things the wrong way or blow them out of proportion. Gradually, less attention is paid to what upset them and the focus shifts to whether their judgement can be trusted. They may continue believing the joke was hurtful at the same time as doubting if their belief is reliable.
People often question themselves in relationships. What deserves attention is a recurring pattern where the same person ends up feeling less sure of their memory or understanding in disagreements, while the other person’s account remains comparatively secure.
Your partner has their own version of you
Being close to someone means being known by a mind you can’t fully control.
Jessica Benjamin’s idea of recognition asks us to accept that a partner has a mind of their own that can’t be controlled simply because it conflicts with ours (Benjamin, 1990). Your partner has their own experience of you, and it exists independently of the way you understand yourself or the relationship. This is often difficult when they see you in a way that feels unfamiliar.
You may have gone silent during an argument because you were trying not to lose your temper, which your partner may experience as frightening or punishing. In this situation, your knowledge of your intention is relevant, as is their experience of being with you at the time. Those accounts can remain in the conversation even when you disagree about what the silence meant.
Britton calls this mental room triangular space (Britton, 2004). It describes being able to think about what is happening between you while you’re still caught up in it. Your partner’s view can then be considered without having to immediately decide that either theirs or yours must disappear.
This can be tough when your partner describes you in a way that feels completely at odds with how you see yourself. Being told that you were controlling or cruel may make you want to prove they’ve got you wrong. Sometimes they have. However even then, the way you try to establish that can tell you something important about the relationship.
What might you be protecting?
A partner’s criticism may challenge something you value about the kind of person you believe yourself to be. This threatens more than your memory of what happened.
For example, someone who believes they’re thoughtful may find it hard to hear their behaviour has repeatedly felt dismissive. If the criticism feels unfair, defending yourself likely makes sense to you. At the same time, you may find yourself looking for reasons to give your partner’s judgement less credence.
Calling them ‘too sensitive’, for example, can make their hurt easier to dismiss. A history of “getting things wrong” can make their latest complaint far easier to doubt. They may genuinely be mistaken, but if you already doubt their judgement, you don’t have to think as deeply about what they’re saying.
This is often the difficult part of looking at your own behaviour. Your certainty in an argument may be protecting your memory of events, but it may also, and more importantly, be protecting how you need to see yourself.
Some gaslighting is deliberate and coercive, with one person knowingly distorting events to gain control. It’s also important to remember that it can happen in relationships where someone sincerely believes their own account and repeatedly treats disagreement as evidence that their partner’s judgement is poor. If you’re the one feeling accused of doing it, it may feel like correcting the record rather than undermining another person. Although the effect can still be that one person has much more freedom to define what happened.
Looking beyond both versions of events
You don’t have to agree with everything your partner says to take their experience seriously.
Marcia Cavell argues that two people can understand the same situation differently, even though they’re both trying to make sense of the same event. Something happened, even if neither person has perfect recall of it (Cavell, 1998). Bear in mind, a partner may misremember part of an argument while accurately describing how it felt to them. You may remember the words correctly and still miss their effect. Neither may hold the full picture.
The difficulty stems from one person repeatedly beginning these conversations with greater credibility than the other. If your version is usually treated as the reliable one, it leaves your partner having to prove their memory deserves consideration before the disagreement can even be discussed.
Factual accuracy is only part of what someone may be talking about when they describe feeling gaslit. They may also be describing what happens to their confidence whenever their memory conflicts with yours.
How self-doubt grows
Repeatedly having your understanding questioned can change how confidently you use your own experience.
Bion (1959) described attacks on the mental links that allow experience to be thought about and given meaning. He was writing about far more disturbed states of mind, though the underlying idea helps explain why persistent doubt from someone close can make thinking more challenging.
A memory that has often been challenged may feel inadequate without supporting evidence. Someone who once trusted what they recalled may start rereading old messages before bringing something up because written words offer something concrete that is harder to argue away.
Checking messages doesn’t show that someone is being gaslit. In a relationship where a person already expects their judgement to be questioned, it can show how cautious they have grown about relying on themselves.
Repeated patterns also teach people what to expect from each other. Ogden describes how something created between two people can limit how freely each person thinks from their own position (Ogden, 2004). In a coercive relationship the responsibility for that pattern may be very unequal, but repetition can still influence what the more doubtful partner expects from the next disagreement. They may start second-guessing their memory before you challenge it because they already know how these conversations tend to go.
In Frankel’s account of trauma, a powerful other can come to have a profound influence over how someone understands what has happened to them. People may find themselves seeking reassurance from others about experiences they once felt able to judge for themselves (Frankel, 2002).
Gaslighting doesn’t always produce anything as extreme as this. Frankel’s work helps explain how another person’s view can eventually influence the way someone judges their own experience, even when that person is not there.
In other words, your partner may start doing some of the doubting for you.
What your partner may be trying to tell you
Your partner may indeed be using the word gaslighting inaccurately. Turning every disagreement into an accusation of abuse makes ordinary relationship conflict harder to think about clearly. But proving they’ve chosen the wrong word may still leave their experience untouched and can miss the point all together.
They’re trying to tell you that something about the way the two of you disagree affects how much they trust themselves. The next disagreement may tell you more about that than debating the definition ever could. What may be more useful is noticing whether the conversation stays with what happened or shifts towards a debate around if your partner is capable of judging it properly.
Your own certainty is part of the picture too. There may be very good reasons for it, although there may also be something about your partner’s version of you that’s difficult to bear. If their account has to lose credibility every time it threatens how you see yourself, that is worth thinking about. You don’t have to decide if you’re “a gaslighter” in order to take that possibility seriously.
The word may remain disputed between you. But the relationship still needs to find a way for two people to disagree without one person gradually losing confidence in their own mind.
References
Benjamin, J. (1990). An outline of intersubjectivity: The development of recognition. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 7(Suppl.), 33–46.
Bion, W. R. (1959). Attacks on linking. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 40, 308–315.
Britton, R. (2004). Subjectivity, objectivity, and triangular space. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 47–61.
Cavell, M. (1998). Triangulation, one’s own mind and objectivity. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79, 449–467.
Frankel, J. (2002). Exploring Ferenczi’s concept of identification with the aggressor: Its role in trauma, everyday life, and the therapeutic relationship. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12(1), 101–139.
Ogden, T. H. (2004). The analytic third: Implications for psychoanalytic theory and technique. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 167–195.