How Gaslighting Rewires the Brain
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He’d make things up that didn’t happen. Then he’d get angry when questioned, as if remembering was an attack on him.
Every time she brought up something he did wrong, suddenly the conversation became about her mental health, her past trauma, her inability to let things go.
She started writing everything down because she couldn’t trust her own memory anymore. When he found her journal, he said it proved she was paranoid.
These patterns, documented in groundbreaking research, reveal a form of psychological abuse – gaslighting. In 2023, Willis Klein, Sherry Li, and Suzanne Wood published the first major empirical study of gaslighting tactics after interviewing 65 survivors. Two years later, Klein, Wood, and Bartz’s research shed some light on just how powerful gaslighting is; gaslighting doesn’t just manipulate victims, over time, it literally rewires their brains. They referred to this process as “prediction error corruption.”
The Anatomy of a Gaslighter
When Klein’s team analyzed gaslighting survivors’ accounts, they noticed a specific pattern of “turning the tables”, where perpetrators redirected conversations about their own abusive behavior into attacks on their victims. This systematic transformation from accuser to accused happened so smoothly that victims often didn’t realize what happened until much later.
How those tables were turned depended on the gaslighter’s motive. Some partners used gaslighting as part of an overall pattern of coercive control. These individuals employed many strategies to dominate the relationship: setting arbitrary rules, verbal abuse, property damage, and threats. In these relationships, gaslighting was most often used to justify their behavior.
Others tended to use gaslighting to escape consequences for specific actions. These offenders were generally less controlling, but they responded to any call for accountability by attempting to distort the victim’s reality. I didn’t yell at you; you overreacted. I wasn’t flirting with the waitress; why are you so insecure? Their gaslighting routinely focused on reframing their misconduct as the victim’s misperception or overreaction.
Read more https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-equation/202510/how-gaslighting-rewires-the-brain
Content retrieved from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-equation/202510/how-gaslighting-rewires-the-brain.
