By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

This essay is Part 5 of How Narcissism Works, a five-part series by Jill Szoo Wilson.

Gaslighting changes the story of what happened and the target’s relationship with her own mind. Over time, it can teach a person to distrust the judgment she would ordinarily use to find her way back to the truth.

Two days after Lena left, Daniel sent her a message about the doorway. He remembered standing beside it because she was too upset to drive, his voice quiet while she shouted. The words You’re staying had become an expression of concern, and Lena’s fear had become another example of what Daniel called her tendency to panic when she was tired.

Lena read the message at her friend’s dining room table. She could still feel the brass handle against her palm and Daniel’s body between her and the hall. She remembered asking him to move, then asking again. She read his message once more.

Daniel’s account had the calm shape of a memory. It included the late hour and Lena’s exhaustion, details she knew were true. He sounded so certain that she began checking her own recollection for places where fear might have filled in the scene.

She opened a notebook and wrote: He stood in front of the door. I asked him twice to move. He said, “You’re staying.” The sentence looked smaller on paper than it had felt in the room.

Gaslighting begins its deepest work at exactly that point. The argument moves away from what happened and settles inside one person’s ability to know what happened. Daniel has placed Lena’s reliability inside the dispute, giving her a reason to distrust the mind remembering it.

The Light That Gave It a Name

The word comes from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light, later adapted into the 1944 film starring Ingrid Bergman. In Hamilton’s story, a husband secretly enters the apartment above his home and turns on the gaslights while searching for hidden jewels. The added demand on the gas supply causes the lights downstairs to dim.

His wife, Bella, notices the change. She also hears footsteps overhead. Her husband insists that both experiences belong to her imagination, and his confidence gradually becomes more persuasive than her own eyes.

It is a terrific theatrical device because the audience can see the lights change. Bella can see them too. The suspense comes from watching a visible fact lose its authority inside the person who witnessed it.

The word now appears in conversations about everything from politics to a misplaced set of keys. Its clinical usefulness depends on keeping the pattern clear. People remember arguments differently, and ordinary conflict leaves room for separate recollections. Gaslighting develops when repeated denial turns the target’s reliability into the real subject of the dispute.

A lie conceals a fact. With gaslighting, the target’s ability to know facts becomes the object of pressure. Her memory is treated as defective, and her feelings become evidence of instability. The gaslighter’s certainty gradually assumes the role of official interpreter.

Sociologist Paige Sweet describes gaslighting as a form of psychological abuse that creates a surreal interpersonal environment. The target begins to feel or appear irrational while the person shaping the story gains credibility and control (Sweet, 2019).

Recent relationship research supports this distinction. Tair Tager-Shafrir and her colleagues developed an eleven-item measure of gaslighting exposure that included repeated denial, minimization, attacks on a partner’s competence, and pressure that made the partner question her view of reality. Across Israeli and American samples, greater exposure was associated with more depression and lower relationship quality beyond other forms of intimate partner violence (Tager-Shafrir et al., 2024).

A Memory on Trial

The doorway gave Lena a dramatic example. Smaller ones had been collecting for months.

Daniel once told her that a work dinner had always been scheduled for Thursday. Lena remembered Friday. He opened his calendar and sighed before saying they had discussed it twice. She decided she must have missed something and began writing their plans on the kitchen calendar in ink.

Weeks later, Daniel mentioned that Elise had called one of his articles brilliant. During the argument that followed, he said he had barely spoken about Elise and accused Lena of hearing another woman’s name whenever she felt insecure. Lena remembered the compliment clearly, though she had already learned that certainty could make the evening longer.

Daniel drew support from the ordinary failures of a human mind. Lena had misplaced her keys in January and confused the dates of two appointments in March. Those harmless mistakes became character witnesses for every memory that inconvenienced him.

By spring, Lena often began difficult conversations with a disclaimer: “Maybe I’m remembering this wrong.” The sentence sounded fair-minded. It also placed Daniel in the position of deciding how much confidence her memory deserved.

He only needed to win enough disputes for doubt to arrive before the next one. Lena began approaching her own experience as a hostile witness, searching for the flaw Daniel would eventually find.

Klein and his colleagues offer a helpful explanation for why this works so powerfully in close relationships. Partners help shape and verify one another’s understanding of the world. That privileged position gives a close partner unusual influence over what feels real (Klein et al., 2026).

A stranger can dispute Lena’s memory and leave very little behind. Daniel shares her home and knows the private places where her confidence thins. His intimacy gives his certainty weight.

The Story Daniel Needs

Gaslighting appears across many abusive dynamics. Narcissistic personality organization supplies one particular route into it because the person’s self-image depends heavily on controlling what an experience means.

The blocked doorway placed Daniel beside a version of himself he could scarcely tolerate. A loving and reasonable man allows his partner to leave an argument. Daniel’s behavior carried another meaning, one that brought control and fear into the same room.

His internal system had already learned how to handle such injuries. Splitting moved cruelty into the devalued Lena. The story then reorganized itself around Daniel as the patient man protecting an unstable woman from driving while upset. Her departure became the frightening act.

Otto Kernberg describes narcissistic pathology as a structure in which grandiosity remains vulnerable to injury and important relationships become organized around idealization or devaluation (Kernberg, 2014). Carolyn Morf and Frederick Rhodewalt add that narcissistic self-regulation takes place through the social world, with other people repeatedly recruited to support a preferred sense of self (Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001).

Daniel’s revision protects his reputation and shields him from experiencing himself as the man who blocked the door. If Lena accepts his account, the threat recedes inside him. Her doubt becomes part of his relief.

Research has begun examining the connection more directly. Evita March and her colleagues found that grandiose and vulnerable narcissism were each associated with greater acceptance of gaslighting tactics. Vulnerable narcissism had a particularly strong relationship with acceptance among men, although other aversive traits carried more predictive weight when the researchers considered the traits together (March et al., 2025).

The study measured acceptance of gaslighting tactics, leaving observed behavior for future research. Its findings support an association between narcissistic vulnerability and a willingness to use these strategies. Clinical conclusions still require a much larger history.

Gaslighting names the relational behavior. Narcissistic personality organization helps explain why Daniel finds it useful: changing Lena’s account restores his innocence and returns him to the position of the person who understands the relationship best.

When Daniel Believes Himself

Conscious intent remains one of the more difficult questions in discussions of gaslighting. Narrow definitions place deliberate manipulation at the center. Relational research often studies the repeated behaviors and their effects, since another person’s private degree of intent can be difficult to measure.

Sam Vaknin draws a sharp distinction here. He reserves gaslighting for a person who knows the facts and deliberately replaces them. In his model, a narcissistic person may believe his own confabulation, pressing a self-protective reconstruction on the partner with complete sincerity (Vaknin, 2023).

That distinction helps explain why arguing with Daniel feels so strange. He may experience the revised doorway scene as a memory shaped by self-protection. His sincerity can coexist with an inaccurate account, and Lena still feels the pressure of being told that her fear proves she imagined the event.

Other moments may contain more conscious editing. Daniel can see a message he sent and continue denying its meaning. He may notice Lena’s confusion and use it to gain ground. Daily gaslighting can hold defensive conviction alongside purposeful manipulation, with the balance shifting from one encounter to the next.

Lena has limited access to Daniel’s intent. She can study the pattern instead. Each disagreement drains confidence from her judgment and transfers authority to his.

The Doorway Moves Inside Her

Gaslighting is dangerous because it attacks the faculty a person needs to recognize danger. A woman who begins doubting her memory may stay in a room that frightened her or return to a man whose conduct has already crossed a line.

Once she consults him about whether his behavior was dangerous, the source of danger has become the authority on her safety. Daniel eventually stepped away from the doorway, though his account of the night kept standing there between Lena and every decision she made afterward.

This is what gives gaslighting its power inside coercive relationships. The practice weakens the judgment a woman would ordinarily use to set a boundary or seek help. Daniel gains control through Lena’s growing hesitation.

His belief in his own account can make the practice even more dangerous. Conviction gives the false story emotional force. Lena faces a man who sounds sincere because his self-protective version has become the reality he needs her to share.

Women face an additional danger because culture already has language for discrediting them. A man’s calm tone can be mistaken for reason while a woman’s fear is used as proof that she is unreliable, allowing gaslighting to borrow an old prejudice and bring it home (Sweet, 2019).

Reality Gains a Chorus

Daniel’s version grows stronger when other people begin carrying it. Rachel had already heard that Lena packed a bag while Daniel tried to calm her. When Lena mentioned the blocked doorway, Rachel answered that her brother would never frighten a woman and reminded Lena that stress could distort anyone’s memory.

Rachel was home asleep during the argument. Her confidence came from Daniel, though it reached Lena with the force of an independent opinion.

This is where triangulation can become gaslighting by proxy. The third person delivers an alternate reality and appears to confirm it from the outside. Vaknin describes the result as a target becoming dependent on other people for reality testing because the surrounding voices seem objective (Vaknin, 2024).

Sweet’s work adds the social dimension. Gaslighting gains power through existing beliefs about who appears rational and whose testimony deserves suspicion. A calm man describing an emotional woman enters a culture that already knows how to reward his composure and treat her distress as evidence against her (Sweet, 2019).

The people around Daniel possess more confidence than information. Lena still feels their agreement as weight. If Rachel believes him, and relatives repeat the same account, his private reconstruction begins to look like public fact.

All the earlier mechanisms in this series are working together now. Daniel’s internal version of Lena supplies the character he describes. Splitting makes her cruel, and triangulation gives the claim a witness. A smear campaign distributes the verdict until gaslighting sends it home with Lena.

She begins wondering whether several people could share the same mistaken view of her. The question hides its own answer: they share the view because Daniel gave it to them.

The Cost of Borrowed Reality

After leaving, Lena asked her friends to read simple messages before she sent them, wanting to know whether a boundary seemed unfair. Choosing a restaurant could end with her handing the menu to someone else.

Her mind had spent months cross-examining itself. Distance from Daniel changed the setting, though the courtroom remained open.

Philosopher Miranda Fricker uses the term epistemic injustice for a wrong done to someone in her capacity as a knower (Fricker, 2007). The phrase sounds as though it belongs in a university corridor. Lena encounters it while sitting at a dining room table, wondering whether her own hand remembers a doorknob correctly.

Vaknin gives the resulting injury a vivid description: “Someone changed the furniture within your mind” (Vaknin, 2025). Lena still owns the room. Familiar objects have been moved, and Daniel’s voice now sits beside memories that once belonged to her alone.

The injury reaches beyond memory. A person who doubts her evidence has trouble using it to make decisions. Lena can remember feeling afraid and still hesitate over the meaning of that fear because Daniel trained her to consult him before trusting it.

The newer psychological framework proposed by Klein and his colleagues describes this loss of agency as part of the gaslighting process. Close relationships usually help people build a shared sense of reality. In gaslighting, that ordinary human reliance is turned against the target until the partner who creates confusion also becomes the person expected to resolve it (Klein et al., 2026).

This helps explain why intelligence offers limited protection. Lena’s openness to correction once served her well. She listened when people saw something she had missed, and Daniel slowly turned that strength into an entrance.

Finding Her Way Back

One evening, Lena’s friend read the message and returned her phone. She asked Lena what she had wanted to say before she began imagining Daniel’s response.

Lena looked at the sentence again. “I remember what happened. This conversation is over.” She pressed send with her own thumb.

Recovery began through moments like that one. Her friend listened while Lena kept the record herself. The decisions remained in Lena’s hands, and a trustworthy witness helped her hear herself.

The notebook from the first morning became a fixed point. Lena added the time and the words she remembered. She saved Daniel’s messages beside her own account. Each version kept its date, and the latest account lost its power to swallow the rest.

Self-trust gives a person’s perceptions their proper place as evidence. New information may refine Lena’s judgment; another person’s certainty carries only the weight its evidence earns. Memory can hold blurred edges and still preserve the event at its center.

Lena could leave Rachel’s opinion and Daniel’s conviction where they belonged. She had been present in the kitchen, and her experience belonged in her own hands.

The series began with Daniel carrying an internal version of Lena that gradually became more important than the living woman. Over time, he tried to move that version into Lena’s mind as well. Gaslighting was the pressure that asked her to use his memory in place of her own.

Six months later, Lena reached for the brass handle on her own apartment door and felt the old scene rise. Daniel’s voice arrived faintly, followed by her own from that night: Move. Gaslighting had tried to make her own mind part of the lock. She turned the handle and trusted the woman who said it.

Daniel, Lena, Rachel, and Elise are fictional. They are continued from earlier pieces in this series.

If something in this series feels familiar in your own relationship, confidential support is available through the National Domestic Violence Hotline or by calling 800-799-SAFE (7233).

Previous: Smear Campaigns: When a Narcissist Tells Your Story for You

Return to the complete series: How Narcissism Works

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Sources and Further Reading

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.

Hamilton, P. (1938). Gas Light: A Victorian Thriller in Three Acts. Constable.

Kernberg, O. F. (2014). “An Overview of the Treatment of Severe Narcissistic Pathology.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 95(5), 865–888.

Klein, W., Wood, S., & Bartz, J. A. (2026). “A Theoretical Framework for Studying the Phenomenon of Gaslighting.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 30(2).

March, E., Kay, C. S., Dinić, B. M., Wagstaff, D., Grabovac, B., & Jonason, P. K. (2025). “‘It’s All in Your Head’: Personality Traits and Gaslighting Tactics in Intimate Relationships.” Journal of Family Violence, 40, 259–268.

Morf, C. C., & Rhodewalt, F. (2001). “Unraveling the Paradoxes of Narcissism: A Dynamic Self-Regulatory Processing Model.” Psychological Inquiry, 12(4), 177–196.

Sweet, P. L. (2019). “The Sociology of Gaslighting.” American Sociological Review, 84(5), 851–875.

Tager-Shafrir, T., Szepsenwol, O., Dvir, M., & Zamir, O. (2024). “The Gaslighting Relationship Exposure Inventory: Reliability and Validity in Two Cultures.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 41(10), 3123–3146.

Vaknin, S. (2023). “How 2 Types of Gaslighting Affect You.” Vaknin Talks.

Vaknin, S. (2024). “Gaslighting by Proxy.” Vaknin Talks.

Vaknin, S. (2025). “Gaslighting: Epistemic Injustice, Epistemic Injury.” Vaknin Talks.