The Social Issue You Need To Know About!

Verb (used with object) ~ [gas-lai-ting] 

Manipulating someone psychologically into doubting their own sanity.

Use: The term takes its name from the 1944 hit film Gaslight (right), about a woman whose husband cons her into thinking she’s losing the plot. Two women tell Hoe I Yune how reel life became their realities, when their own husbands started gaslighting them. 

 Looking back, teaching assistant Emily* wondered if she had ignored the red flags. Right before the wedding, her then-fiance played an audio clip of her in conversation with a man, and accused her of being unfaithful. He claimed to have received the clip in his inbox. "What were you thinking? Do you love someone else?" he asked her. She was confused. The words were definitely hers, but the other voice sounded strange. It didn't match up — she could not recall having had such a conversation with anyone else. Yet her fiance insisted she had.

Could he have secretly recorded separate conversations, spliced them apart, and stitched them together to set her up? Emily wondered. It sounded ludicrous, and hardly fitted in with the caring and considerate man she thought him to be. Bewildered, she pressed him about who had sent the clip, but he was evasive, telling her that he didn't want to drag out the issue any further. "Maybe I was blindly in love, but I couldn't believe he would fabricate a clip or have bad intentions," she said. So she cast her doubts aside, and assured him that there was no one else in the picture.

She even stopped seeing her male friends in an effort to placate him. It was only years later, after they had separated, that her ex-husband finally admitted that he had indeed fabricated the clip. He tried to justify this by saying he had done so because he needed proof that she loved him.

Emily had been gaslighted. "I thought he loved me so much, and was merely being overprotective. So it was okay to sacrifice a few things for a happy relationship," she says.