When left unexamined, gaslighting can have a devastating and long-term impact on our emotional, psychological, and sometimes physical well-being. Most of us have been gaslighted at some point in our lives, making it important to learn how to spot the technique, shut it down, and minimize the psychological impact on our daily lives. But it’s likely there’s someone much closer to us doing the job. Maybe we’re all being gaslighted by the president or other political figures. If a wife tells her husband that he is shirking child care responsibilities and he responds by refusing to acknowledge that it’s even happening, he is gaslighting her. Targets of gaslighting are manipulated into turning against their cognition, their emotions, and who they fundamentally are as people. In the vernacular, the phrase “to gaslight” refers to the act of undermining another person’s reality by denying facts, the environment around them, or their feelings. Anderson Cooper’s nightly news roundup, Anderson Cooper 360, has a special series called “We’ll Leave the Gaslight On,” dedicated to the lies of politicians. It is now part of how we acquire information. The term has been everywhere since Donald Trump’s inauguration, so much so that the Oxford Dictionaries named it one of the most popular words of 2018: gaslighting. This article discussing the meaning and rise of the term was originally published in 2018 and last updated in 2019. Editor’s note, November 28, 2022: Merriam-Webster announced that “gaslighting” is its 2022 word of the year.
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