* . *
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
Sunday, August 3, 2025
Earth-News
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    Go-to entertainment: why gaming was made for the toilet – The Guardian

    Why Gaming Is the Ultimate Way to Pass Time in the Bathroom

    Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra takes the Lollapalooza stage – Yahoo Home

    Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra takes the Lollapalooza stage – Yahoo Home

    Sens. Blackburn, Warnock introduce CREATE Act to provide tax relief to music creators – Yahoo Home

    Sens. Blackburn and Warnock Launch CREATE Act to Deliver Tax Relief for Music Creators

    That’s (Political) Entertainment: When Theatre Meets Politics

    Future Script: How Generative AI Is Changing Collective Bargaining in the Entertainment Industry – Jackson Lewis

    Future Script: How Generative AI Is Transforming Collective Bargaining in Entertainment

    The SBA’s live-entertainment bailout was supposed to end two years ago. We still don’t know how $1.5 billion was spent. – Yahoo Home

    $1.5 Billion Live-Entertainment Bailout: Two Years Later, Where Did the Money Go?

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    Microsoft Seeks to Extend Access to OpenAI Technology – PYMNTS.com

    Microsoft Aims to Broaden Access to OpenAI Technology

    Livonia police use grappler technology to stop drunk driver – ClickOnDetroit | WDIV Local 4

    Livonia Police Deploy Grappler Technology to Safely Stop Drunk Driver

    Emory orthopaedic surgeons use robotic technology to transform knee replacement surgery – Emory News Center

    How Robotic Technology is Revolutionizing Knee Replacement Surgery

    Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp (CTSH) Q2 2025 Earnings Call Highlights: Strong Revenue … – Yahoo.co

    Cognizant Q2 2025 Earnings: Impressive Revenue Growth and Key Takeaways

    Revving Up The U.S. Technology Engine – Forbes

    Revving Up The U.S. Technology Engine – Forbes

    More than just a hockey player – Rochester Institute of Technology Athletics

    Beyond the Ice: The Inspiring Journey of a Remarkable Athlete from Rochester Institute of Technology

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    Go-to entertainment: why gaming was made for the toilet – The Guardian

    Why Gaming Is the Ultimate Way to Pass Time in the Bathroom

    Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra takes the Lollapalooza stage – Yahoo Home

    Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra takes the Lollapalooza stage – Yahoo Home

    Sens. Blackburn, Warnock introduce CREATE Act to provide tax relief to music creators – Yahoo Home

    Sens. Blackburn and Warnock Launch CREATE Act to Deliver Tax Relief for Music Creators

    That’s (Political) Entertainment: When Theatre Meets Politics

    Future Script: How Generative AI Is Changing Collective Bargaining in the Entertainment Industry – Jackson Lewis

    Future Script: How Generative AI Is Transforming Collective Bargaining in Entertainment

    The SBA’s live-entertainment bailout was supposed to end two years ago. We still don’t know how $1.5 billion was spent. – Yahoo Home

    $1.5 Billion Live-Entertainment Bailout: Two Years Later, Where Did the Money Go?

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    Microsoft Seeks to Extend Access to OpenAI Technology – PYMNTS.com

    Microsoft Aims to Broaden Access to OpenAI Technology

    Livonia police use grappler technology to stop drunk driver – ClickOnDetroit | WDIV Local 4

    Livonia Police Deploy Grappler Technology to Safely Stop Drunk Driver

    Emory orthopaedic surgeons use robotic technology to transform knee replacement surgery – Emory News Center

    How Robotic Technology is Revolutionizing Knee Replacement Surgery

    Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp (CTSH) Q2 2025 Earnings Call Highlights: Strong Revenue … – Yahoo.co

    Cognizant Q2 2025 Earnings: Impressive Revenue Growth and Key Takeaways

    Revving Up The U.S. Technology Engine – Forbes

    Revving Up The U.S. Technology Engine – Forbes

    More than just a hockey player – Rochester Institute of Technology Athletics

    Beyond the Ice: The Inspiring Journey of a Remarkable Athlete from Rochester Institute of Technology

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
Earth-News
No Result
View All Result
Home News

So You Think You’ve Been Gaslit

April 2, 2024
in News
So You Think You’ve Been Gaslit
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

When Leah started dating her first serious boyfriend, as a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Ohio State, she had very little sense that sex was supposed to feel good. (Leah is not her real name.) In the small town in central Ohio where she grew up, sex ed was basically like the version she remembered from the movie “Mean Girls”: “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.”

With her college boyfriend, the sex was rough from the beginning. There was lots of choking and hitting; he would toss her around the bed “like a rag doll,” she told me, and then assure her, “This is how everyone has sex.” Because Leah had absorbed an understanding of sex in which the woman was supposed to be largely passive, she told herself that her role was to be “strong enough” to endure everything that felt painful and scary. When she was with other people, she found herself explaining away bruises and other marks on her body as the results of accidents. Once, she said to her boyfriend, “I guess you like it rough,” and he said, “No, all women like it like this.” And she thought, “O.K., then I guess I don’t know shit about myself.”

Her boyfriend was popular on campus. “If you brought up his name,” she told me, “people would say, ‘Oh, my God, I love that guy.’ ” This unanimous social endorsement made it harder for her to doubt anything he said. But, in private, she saw glimpses of a darker side—stray comments barbed with cruelty, a certain cunning. He never drank, and, though in public he cited vague life-style reasons, in private he told her that he loved being fully in control around other people as they unravelled, grew messy, came undone. Girls, especially.

Sometimes, when they were having sex, Leah would get a strong gut feeling that what was happening wasn’t right. In these moments, she would feel overwhelmed by a self-protective impulse that drove her out of bed, naked and crying, to shut herself in the bathroom. What she remembers most clearly is not the fleeing, however, but the return: walking back to bed, still naked, and embarrassed about having “made a scene.” When she got back, her boyfriend would tell her, “You have to get it together. Maybe you should see someone.”

A few months after they broke up—not because of the sex but for “stupid normal relationship reasons”—Leah found herself chatting with a girl who was sitting next to her in a science lecture. It emerged that this girl had gone to the same high school as her ex, and when Leah asked if she knew him the girl looked horrified. “That guy’s a psycho,” she said. Leah had never heard anyone speak about him like this. The girl said that, in high school, he’d had a reputation for sexual assault. Some of what she described sounded eerily familiar. “The idea that he would want to have power over a girl while she was asleep was as easy for me to believe as the idea that he needed air to breathe,” she said. “It reminded me of every sexual experience I had with him, where he had all of the power and I was only a vessel to accept it.”

Leah went back to her dorm room and lay in bed for almost two days straight. She kept revisiting memories from the relationship, understanding them in a new way. Evidently, what she’d understood as “normal” sex had been something more aggressive. And her ex’s attempts to convince her otherwise—implying that she was crazy for having any problem with it—were a kind of controlling behavior so fundamental that she did not have a name for it. Now, six years later, as a social worker at a university, she calls it “gaslighting.”

These days, it seems as if everyone’s talking about gaslighting. In 2022, it was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year, on the basis of a seventeen-hundred-and-forty-per-cent increase in searches for the term. In the past decade, the word and the concept have come to saturate the public sphere. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Teen Vogue ran a viral op-ed with the title “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America.” Its author, Lauren Duca, wrote, “He lied to us over and over again, then took all accusations of his falsehoods and spun them into evidence of bias.” In 2020, the album “Gaslighter,” by the Chicks (formerly known as the Dixie Chicks), débuted at No. 1 on the Billboard country chart, offering an indignant anthem on behalf of the gaslit: “Gaslighter, denier . . . you know exactly what you did on my boat.” (What happened on the boat is revealed a few songs later: “And you can tell the girl who left her tights on my boat / That she can have you now.”) The TV series “Gaslit” (2022) follows a socialite, played by Julia Roberts, who becomes a whistle-blower in the Watergate scandal, having previously been manipulated into thinking she had seen no wrongdoing. The Harvard Business Review has been publishing a steady stream of articles with titles like “What Should I Do if My Boss Is Gaslighting Me?”

The popularity of the term testifies to a widespread hunger to name a certain kind of harm. But what are the implications of diagnosing it everywhere? When I put out a call on X (formerly known as Twitter) for experiences of gaslighting, I immediately received a flood of responses, Leah’s among them. The stories offered proof of the term’s broad resonance, but they also suggested the ways in which it has effectively become an umbrella that shelters a wide variety of experiences under the same name. Webster’s dictionary defines the term as “psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator.” Leah’s own experience of gaslighting offers a quintessential example—coercive, long-term, and carried out by an intimate partner—but as a clinician she has witnessed the rise of the phrase with both relief and skepticism. Her current job gives her the chance to offer college students the language and the knowledge that she didn’t have at their age. “I love consent education,” she told me. “I wish someone had told me it was O.K. to say no.” But she also sees the word “gaslighting” as being used so broadly that it has begun to lose its meaning. “It’s not just disagreement,” she said. It’s something much more invasive: the gaslighter “scoops out what you know to be true and replaces it with something else.”

The term “gaslighting” comes from the title of George Cukor’s film “Gaslight,” from 1944, a noirish drama that tracks the psychological trickery of a man, Gregory, who spends every night searching for a set of lost jewels in the attic of a town house he shares with his wife, Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman. (The jewels are her inheritance, and we come to understand that he has married her in order to steal them.) Based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play of the same name, the film is set in London in the eighteen-eighties, which gives rise to its crucial dramatic trick: during his nighttime rummaging, Gregory turns on the gas lamps in the attic, causing all the other lamps in the house to flicker. But, when Paula wonders why they are flickering, he convinces her that she must have imagined it. Filmed in black-and-white, with interior shots full of shadows and exterior shots full of swirling London fog, the film offers a clever inversion of the primal trope of light as a symbol of knowledge. Here, light becomes an agent of confusion and deception, an emblem of Gregory’s manipulation.

Gregory gradually makes Paula doubt herself in every way imaginable. He convinces her that she has stolen his watch and hidden one of their paintings, and that she is too fragile and unwell to appear in public. When Paula reads a novel by the fire, she can’t even focus on the words; all she can hear is Gregory’s voice inside her head. The house in which she is now confined becomes a physical manifestation of the claustrophobia of gaslighting and the ways in which it can feel like being trapped inside another person’s narrative—dimly aware of a world outside but lacking any idea of how to reach it.

“Run it by the legal department—but don’t let them see you.”

Cartoon by Kaamran Hafeez and Al Batt

The first recorded use of “gaslight” as a verb is from 1961, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and its first mention in clinical literature came in the British medical journal The Lancet, in a 1969 article titled “The Gas-Light Phenomenon.” Written by two British doctors, the article summarizes the plot of the original play and then examines three real-life cases in which something similar occurred. Two of the cases feature devious wives, flipping the gender dynamic usually assumed today; in one, a woman tried to convince her husband that he was insane, so that he would be committed to a mental hospital and she could divorce him without penalty. The article is ultimately less concerned with gaslighting itself than with safeguards around admitting patients to mental hospitals. The actual psychology of gaslighting emerged as an object of study a decade later. The authors of a 1981 article in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly interpreted it as a version of a phenomenon known as “projective identification,” in which a person projects onto someone else some part of himself that he finds intolerable. Gaslighting involves a “special kind of ‘transfer,’ ” they write, in which the victimizer, “disavowing his or her own mental disturbance, tries to make the victim feel he or she is going crazy, and the victim more or less complies.”

On its way from niche clinical concept to ubiquitous cultural diagnosis, gaslighting has, of course, passed through the realm of pop psychology. In the 2007 book “The Gaslight Effect,” the psychotherapist Robin Stern mines the metaphor to the fullest, advising her readers to “Turn Up Your Gaslight Radar,” “Develop Your Own ‘Gaslight Barometer,’ ” and “Gasproof Your Life.” Stern anchors the phenomenon in a relationship pattern that she noticed during her twenty years of therapeutic work: “Confident, high-achieving women were being caught in demoralizing, destructive, and bewildering relationships” that in each case caused the woman “to question her own sense of reality.” Stern offers a series of taxonomies for the stages (Disbelief, Defense, Depression) and the perpetrators (Glamour Gaslighters, Good-Guy Gaslighters, and Intimidators). She understands gaslighting as a dynamic that “plays on our worst fears, our most anxious thoughts, our deepest wishes to be understood, appreciated, and loved.”

>>> Read full article>>>
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source : The New Yorker – https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/08/so-you-think-youve-been-gaslit

Tags: newsthinkyou've
Previous Post

The Hottest Restaurant in France Is an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet

Next Post

The Brazilian Special-Forces Unit Fighting to Save the Amazon

U.S. POINTER Study shows lifestyle program improves cognition in older adults – University of California – Davis Health

Lifestyle Program Boosts Cognitive Health in Older Adults, New Study Finds

August 3, 2025
World Championships, Day Eight Finals: Kliment Kolesnikov Blazes to Title in 50 Backstroke; Tie for Silver – Swimming World

Kliment Kolesnikov Blazes to Victory in 50 Backstroke as Day Eight of World Championships Ends with a Silver Medal Tie

August 3, 2025
Bond investors warm to risk, with Fed staying put in ‘Goldilocks’ economy – Reuters

Bond Investors Take Bold Steps as Fed Maintains Steady Course in a ‘Goldilocks’ Economy

August 3, 2025
Go-to entertainment: why gaming was made for the toilet – The Guardian

Why Gaming Is the Ultimate Way to Pass Time in the Bathroom

August 3, 2025
Covenant Health offers immunizations, activities for kids at Back to School Bash – KCBD

Covenant Health’s Back to School Bash: A Fun-Filled Immunization and Activities Event for Kids

August 3, 2025
Trump tells Schumer to ‘go to hell’ as Senate heads home after failed attempt to strike deal on nominees – CNN

Trump tells Schumer to ‘go to hell’ as Senate heads home after failed attempt to strike deal on nominees – CNN

August 3, 2025
Microsoft Seeks to Extend Access to OpenAI Technology – PYMNTS.com

Microsoft Aims to Broaden Access to OpenAI Technology

August 3, 2025

Catamount Football ’25 – Fall Practice No. 4 – catamountsports.com

August 3, 2025
Endemism shapes viral ecology and evolution in globally distributed hydrothermal vent ecosystems – Nature

Endemism shapes viral ecology and evolution in globally distributed hydrothermal vent ecosystems – Nature

August 2, 2025
Scientists Finally Reveal the Hidden Trigger Behind Lightning Strikes

Scientists Finally Reveal the Hidden Trigger Behind Lightning Strikes

August 2, 2025

Categories

Archives

August 2025
MTWTFSS
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031
« Jul    
Earth-News.info

The Earth News is an independent English-language daily published Website from all around the World News

Browse by Category

  • Business (20,132)
  • Ecology (751)
  • Economy (777)
  • Entertainment (21,654)
  • General (16,260)
  • Health (9,814)
  • Lifestyle (785)
  • News (22,149)
  • People (776)
  • Politics (786)
  • Science (15,989)
  • Sports (21,272)
  • Technology (15,754)
  • World (758)

Recent News

U.S. POINTER Study shows lifestyle program improves cognition in older adults – University of California – Davis Health

Lifestyle Program Boosts Cognitive Health in Older Adults, New Study Finds

August 3, 2025
World Championships, Day Eight Finals: Kliment Kolesnikov Blazes to Title in 50 Backstroke; Tie for Silver – Swimming World

Kliment Kolesnikov Blazes to Victory in 50 Backstroke as Day Eight of World Championships Ends with a Silver Medal Tie

August 3, 2025
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

Go to mobile version