Have You Ever Been A Victim of Gaslighting?

Gaslighting is a form of intimidation or psychological abuse in which false information is presented to the victim, making them doubt their own memory and perception. The classic example of gaslighting is to change things in a person's environment without their knowledge, and to explain that they "must be imagining things" when they challenge these changes. Popular usage of the term can be traced to at least the late 1970s.

The term derives from the 1938 stage play Gas Light, in which a wife's concerns about the dimming of her house's gas lights are dismissed by her husband as the work of her imagination, when he has actually caused the lights to dim. His action is part of a wider pattern of deception in which the husband manipulates small elements of his wife's environment, and insists that she is mistaken or misremembering, hoping to drive her to insanity.

I was a victim of gaslighting back in the year 1989 when I worked at the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld. On a day in February 1989 a stack of documents on my desk had been tampered with in order to provoke a paranoid response from me. At that time I worked on a document production task supervised by Constance Brown. The day after the incident I chatted with Constance Brown, who stated spontaneously and not in reference to anything I had said, that she sometimes thought there were "ghosts" in the building who tampered with things; I registered Brown's comments as a prompt that was calculated to trigger paranoid speculation from me about the previous day's incident concerning the out-of-place documents in my office. During my tenure Brown prepared four written performance evaluations that summarized her work experience with me from May 1988 to May 1990, a two-year period; Brown's written evaluations were, without exception, exemplary. Despite her written depictions of me as a superior employee, there is no evidence that Brown supported my request to firm managers for a job promotion in October 1991, which triggered my job termination, or that she disputed the reported statements of coworkers--offered to firm management immediately prior to the decision to terminate—that I was paranoid, hypersensitive to criticism, or that I had a violent temperament.