“GASLIGHTING” is everywhere. A friend disagrees with your recollection of an argument: gaslighting. Your partner tells you that you are overreacting: gaslighting. A colleague says that your account of an incident is inaccurate: gaslighting. Someone tells you that the problem may actually be you: definitely gaslighting. The word has become so readily available in contemporary discourse that almost any challenge to our own interpretation of events can be given this increasingly fashionable label.
But are we really being gaslighted every time somebody tells us that our version of reality is wrong? Or are we sometimes simply hearing a truth that we do not want to hear?
I ask this as a linguist because “gaslighting” presents an interesting case of what happens when a useful word becomes too successful. The term ultimately derives from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play “Gas Light,” in which a husband deliberately manipulates his wife into doubting her own perceptions and sanity. The important element is not disagreement. It is sustained manipulation: Somebody attempts to make another person distrust their own capacity to determine what is real.
Today, however, gaslighting is frequently used much more broadly. It can mean lying, denying, disagreeing, contradicting, dismissing, invalidating, criticizing or simply remembering something differently. Linguistically, we might understand this as “semantic broadening”: the range of situations to which a word can refer expands. Semantic broadening is perfectly normal. Meanings change because speakers change them. The question is not whether we can stop that process, but whether something important is lost when a word becomes so broad that it begins swallowing up distinctions we still need to make.
And we certainly need to distinguish gaslighting from disagreement. If I say, “You promised me you would do this,” and you reply, “No, I didn’t,” one of us may be wrong. You may be lying. I may be misremembering. We may genuinely remember the conversation differently. Your contradiction of my recollection does not, by itself, establish that you are trying to manipulate my grasp of reality.
The same is true of the now dreaded sentence, “You’re overreacting.” It can certainly be dismissive. In some contexts, repeatedly telling someone that they are irrational, emotional or overly sensitive may contribute to a larger pattern of gaslighting. But there is another possibility that contemporary discussions sometimes seem reluctant to entertain: a person may, in fact, be overreacting. Human beings are not always perfectly proportionate in our responses to things.
This is where the language of gaslighting becomes especially interesting. The accusation “You’re gaslighting me” does not merely describe what another person is supposedly doing. It also performs an action. In pragmatics, we recognize that utterances do things: we promise, accuse, apologize, warn, command and declare through language. Calling someone a gaslighter therefore changes the interaction. What had been a disagreement about what happened can suddenly become a disagreement about whether one of the participants is psychologically manipulating the other.
Consider the exchange: “You have been very difficult to work with lately.” “Stop gaslighting me.” The second statement may be entirely justified. Perhaps the first speaker has indeed been systematically distorting events. But the label itself cannot establish this. There is another possibility: The criticism is substantially correct, and “gaslighting” has become a convenient linguistic shield against hearing it.
This is the thin line that concerns me. There is a difference between somebody trying to make you doubt reality and somebody telling you that your understanding of reality may be wrong. The first is manipulation. The second is a normal — and sometimes necessary — part of human interaction.
The distinction becomes clearer if we think about “epistemic stance,” or how speakers position themselves in relation to knowledge. We constantly negotiate what we know and how confidently we know it through expressions such as “I think,” “I remember,” “perhaps,” “I’m sure” and “I know.” Different people can also have different degrees of access to particular kinds of knowledge. I have considerable authority to tell you whether your words hurt me, because the feeling is mine. I have considerably less authority to tell you exactly what you intended when you said them, because the intention is yours.
This distinction is easily blurred. “I felt humiliated when you said that” is a report about my experience. “You deliberately humiliated me when you said that” is a claim about your intention. You can accept the first while disputing the second. Saying “I’m sorry you felt humiliated, but humiliating you was not my intention” is not automatically gaslighting. It may simply be disagreement over the interpretation of an event.
Likewise, feelings are real, but our explanations for those feelings are not necessarily infallible. Feeling ignored does not necessarily prove that somebody intentionally ignored us. Feeling insulted does not necessarily prove that somebody intended an insult. Feeling that we remember something clearly does not guarantee that our memory is accurate. To distinguish experience from interpretation is not to belittle experience. It is to recognize that human communication is messy and human perception is imperfect.
Ironically, the overuse of gaslighting can sometimes make this messiness harder to negotiate. If questioning my interpretation becomes evidence that you are gaslighting me, then my interpretation becomes practically unfalsifiable. If you agree with me, I am right; if you disagree with me, your disagreement proves that you are manipulating me. The word then stops facilitating understanding and starts closing down conversation.
This is why the semantics of fashionable psychological vocabulary matters. “Trauma,” “triggered,” “toxic,” “narcissist” and “gaslighting” have all traveled far beyond specialist discourse and become part of ordinary conversation. This popularization can be enormously useful because language gives people ways to articulate experiences they previously struggled to name. But popularization can also produce what we might call “semantic inflation”: increasingly serious words are recruited for increasingly ordinary experiences until their rhetorical force exceeds their descriptive precision.
There is nothing glamorous about saying, “We disagree.” There is considerably more rhetorical power in saying, “You are gaslighting me.” Similarly, “You were selfish” is an accusation about behavior; “You are a narcissist” sounds like an explanation of an entire personality. Stronger labels can feel more satisfying because they organize complicated interpersonal conflicts into recognizable categories. They can tell us not merely that someone did something wrong, but what kind of person they are.
Yet language should help us make distinctions, not erase them. We already have words for “lying,” “denying,” “disagreeing,” “misremembering,” “criticizing,” “insulting,” “dismissing” and “manipulating.” They do not all mean the same thing, and none needs to be renamed “gaslighting” simply because the interaction made us uncomfortable.
Indeed, preserving the narrower meaning of gaslighting makes the term more useful, not less. Genuine gaslighting can be profoundly destructive because it involves systematically weakening another person’s confidence in their perceptions, memories and judgments. Calling every disagreement gaslighting risks trivializing precisely the behavior the word allows us to identify.
Perhaps, then, the most important linguistic question to ask when we feel “gaslighted” is not simply whether somebody has contradicted us. We should ask what that contradiction is doing. Is there a sustained pattern of manipulating facts, denying demonstrable events and making us distrust our own ability to know what happened? Or has somebody merely challenged our interpretation, pointed out an inconsistency, remembered something differently or said something about ourselves that we would rather not accept?
There is no fashionable psychological term for that second experience. Perhaps there does not need to be one. Sometimes another person is wrong about us. Sometimes they are manipulative. Sometimes they are gaslighting us. But sometimes they are simply telling us the truth.
And the truth, unlike gaslighting, does not cease to be true simply because we do not want to hear it.
Ariane Macalinga Borlongan is a public intellectual, language scholar and migrant advocate. He is one of the leading researchers on English in the Philippines and one of the pioneers of migration linguistics. He is the youngest to earn a doctorate in linguistics, at age 23, from De La Salle University, and has had several teaching and research positions in Germany, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Poland and Singapore. He is currently associate professor of sociolinguistics at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
