What is Gaslighting?
“Gaslighting” is a pattern of emotional abuse. The woman is controlled into doubting their judgment, memory, or perception. This makes the person feel confused, depressed, or even anxious.
This term comes from the classic Hollywood movie “Gaslight,” The protagonist manipulates his partner into believing that she is crazy to steal her hidden fortune.
By hiding objects, making his wife think it was her fault, although she does not remember. He also dims the gaslight (there was no electricity). He makes her think that the fire is still glowing at the same force as always.
Of course, that makes the wife experiment; she’s becoming crazy; she does not want to leave the house, is anxious, and cries continuously. Her husband warns her that he will leave her relationship and threatens to send her to a mental institute for medication or confinement, Of course, the husband knows what he is doing and would almost get the job from him if it weren’t for an investigator to decipher the situation and expose the thief.
Gaslighting has both short and long-term effects. In the short term, it can be used as an alibi to avoid taking responsibility and passing the blame for something to the victim. For a long time, as we will see, it is common for the gaslighting victim to assume that the manipulative person must always be trusted and lose their autonomy and ability to make decisions freely.
Thus, we are talking about a relatively subtle type of abuse, since at all times it is about maintaining the appearance that if the interests and ideas of the victim are not taken into account, it is for their good, since the latter would not be able to understand what is going on around him.
During the 1960s, the term gaslighting began to be used to define the behavior of repetitive and intentional manipulation aimed at modifying the victim’s perception of reality, confusing them, and causing them to doubt their mental health.
In its milder forms, gaslighting looks to generate a subtle but unequal dynamic in a relationship. The victim is at worst; pathological gaslighting constitutes a severe form of mental control and psychological abuse. Gaslighting can occur in every aspect of interactions, like society, workplace, or interpersonal relationships.
Gaslighting effects, what you can achieve
These are the potential effects of a gaslighting-based manipulation, if successful.
● Doubts about one’s memory
Trying to make the victim have a fragmented vision full of gaps about a chain of events does not demand responsibility. For this reason, through gaslighting, the person can be induced to modify his memories of her or even to believe that certain things that he remembers did not happen beyond her imagination.
● Doubts about one’s ability to perceive stimuli
The same thing that applies to memory can happen with the perception of the present. The person who manipulates the other tries to make her doubt what she has just seen, heard, etc.
● Doubts about one’s intelligence
Insinuating that the victim has very little intelligence, the latter does not credibility her ideas or beliefs.
● Wear of self-esteem
As a consequence of the above, the victim adopts a submissive role and is afraid to continue committing what appears to be mistaken; these bad experiences damage her self-esteem.
● Doubts about one’s mental health
The victim may believe that she suffers from psychological or psychiatric disorders behind the unreliability of her beliefs, emotional reactions to what she perceives, etc.
● Delegation of decision-making to the other person
The victim assumes that the person who resorts to gaslighting to manipulate her is the one who has a criterion that can be trusted since she is good at detecting mistakes that one makes.
You can find three principal stages of gaslighting in a relationship: idealization, devaluation, and discarding.
Idealization stage
The victim loses his mind for whom he makes gaslight because he projects himself as the perfect partner.
At the beginning of the relationship is critical to be able to develop this phenomenon with your partner. It is imperative that you use your best qualities, pull off your best tricks, and, in essence, be the best possible version of yourself to your partner.
This stage lays the foundation in the woman’s mind to know what a relationship should be like with you. Suppose you take her to the moon and back, all in harmony, without fights or problems. In that case, she will convince herself that you are an excellent person, allowing the following steps to unfold in such a way that she feels like the one she is doing. Things are wrong, and for this reason, the quality of the relationship is plummeting.
Devaluation stage
The victim goes from being perfect and being praised for everything to being incapable of doing something right. Still, after having tested the ideal, she is desperate to fix things.
This tactic so successful and easy to pull off is how it plays on the inherent need we humans have to seek acceptance, caring, and understanding.
Your partner knew from the beginning of the relationship something that borders on the level of perfection. She got used to you watching for her, encouraging her, supporting her, and generally treating her like a queen. So what happens if, because of her mistakes, things go wrong? She will be so guilty that she will do anything to repair it, to make up for it.
This is part of the dirty game.
If you are willing to do whatever it takes to have her at your feet when and however you want, you have to take advantage of this process in which her self-esteem will be systematically destroyed. How? She makes her see that the things you do not like about her or that you cannot control her are getting between the two. Even more so, they are hurting you since you only want the best for her and that they can be as everything was in A beginning.
This process becomes permanent.
There will always be something new for you that she does that is not good for your relationship. Eventually, this will (if you did the first phase properly) give you all control and power over the relationship and its lifetime if you did the first phase correctly. Once this phase is achieved, you can sit down to enjoy a relationship precisely the way you wanted it, or you can start looking for someone else. The method is developed to work so that once phase two with a partner is concluded, you can begin to find a new one. If everything were done correctly, they would not debate it.
Discard stage
The woman is dropped to move on to the next target: this often happens simultaneously with the idealization phase with the next victim.
Once you have achieved what is expected of a partner, you can consider getting rid of it. If the relationship has been in a way that suits you, you can start looking for a new one. The steps to follow are the same. Because you no longer have to put as much effort into your current relationship, you can use that extra energy to get and start laying the groundwork with a new girl.
Seven tricks that will let you dominate your Gaslighting techniques
Lying and exaggerating: Your task is to create a negative narrative about your victim (“there is something wrong and inappropriate in you”), based on widespread accusations and false assumptions, rather than real and independently verifiable actions, which puts the victim to the defensive.
“My girlfriend just thinks for her benefit, and she needs to know the truth.”
“Our dates and the way our relationship works is a waste of time and resources for me. How do you justify being a good girlfriend? “
You must seek confrontation with your partner. He must see himself in a position in which he has to defend himself, but since they are direct accusations to his person, he cannot help feeling some doubt and guilt.
Repetition: Like interpersonal warfare, attacks are constantly repeated to stay offensive, control the conversation, and dominate the relationship.
Keeping the foundations of the previous stage, accusations, and the search for guilt and doubt in your partner should become an everyday routine. Repetition will eventually make you start to see that there is something wrong with your relationship. If all the attacks are on her, you will conclude that it is your fault.
Escalate when challenged: When you are confronted about your lies, you must intensify the dispute by doubling and tripling her attacks, refuting substantive evidence with denial, guilt, and further false claims, sowing doubt and confusion.
“When I caught my boyfriend sexting with someone, he flatly said it didn’t happen, that I invented the whole thing. He called me a crazy bitch.”
The most effective way to train your partner not to defend himself or seek to undermine your efforts is to make an actual lawsuit every time he tries to give his point of view or wants to confront you. Eventually, he will understand that he has no choice but to accept his mistakes.
Talking about it with you will only generate a bigger lawsuit and more disappointment.
Wear away your couple.
By staying on the offensive, you seek to wear down your victim, who becomes discouraged eventually, resigned, pessimistic, fearful, weakened, and self-doubting. The victim begins to question her perception, identity, and reality.
From this point, you have managed to wear out your partner enough so that he begins to take for granted the things with which you attack him. He will no longer seek to get away, fight or correct you. Once the victim resigns to the reality of the relationship, she will try to do things to get through the day peacefully and without fighting.
Form codependent relationships.
The Oxford Dictionary defines codependency as “excessive emotional or psychological dependence on a partner.” In your ideal relationship, you need to cause constant insecurity and anxiety in your victim, thereby controlling her. You are now the person with the power to grant acceptance, approval, respect, safety, and protection. You can also use this power conceded to you to threaten about going away, leaving her alone. A codependent relationship is formed based on vulnerability, marginalization, and fear.
To achieve this successfully, you must seek to be present in every facet of your partner’s life. This generates a constant fear that if you miss or leave, she will stay in a world where everything is connected to you, making it almost impossible for me to imagine a life away from you.
Give false hope
As a manipulative tactic, you have to occasionally treat your partner with gentleness, restraint, and even simple kindness or remorse, to give the victim false hope. In these circumstances, your partner might think: “Maybe things are going to get better,” “Maybe he’s really not THAT bad,” or “Let’s give him a try.”
If she is not careful, she will never notice this temporary mildness as a calculated maneuver intended to instill complacency and lower her guard before the next act of gaslighting begins. With this tactic, you will also further reinforce a codependent relationship.
Dominate and control
In the final stage, the ultimate goal of your gaslighting techniques is to control, dominate, and take advantage of another woman, or a group, or even an entire society. By maintaining and intensifying a continuous stream of lies and coercion, you will keep your partners in a constant state of doubt, fear, and insecurity. You can exploit your victims at will to increase power and personal gain.
Gaslighting is a pretty powerful technique that can get you what you want out of a relationship. Although it is important to clarify that for it to work more effectively, it is important to look for partners who have deficiencies in self-esteem and security.
Thank you very much for reading my content read to the end. This is very supportive of me. I create entertainment content from various topics, I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did in doing it.