Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

I think this could serve as a good description of what 'gaslighting' refers to:

> "Setting it up means: you need a good storyline, and you must use (fake) social proof provided by trusted others during conversation. The trusted others can be friends, parents, authority figures; the to-be-implanted memory can be a significant event - in the case below, a falsified criminal event."

One obvious defense againt this dark art is to simply not trust anyone, ever - but this approach has consequent repercussions, such as the inability to form normal social bonds with others (as all social relationships entail a certain degree of trust).

Possibly, a revival of 'memory palace' approaches, which involve deliberately training and improving one's memory, would result in built-in resistance to this kind of manipulation.

View on HN

It's very hard to develop a built-in resistance to this kind of manipulation, except for one very strong thing: people who are likely to gaslight you are likely to not respect your boundaries because gaslighting is a form of boundary violation.

The other one is to have a robust support network of the kind of people who respect your boundaries. Those behaviors are correlated with identifying when someone is trying to gaslight and warning you. This is particularly helpful when you are already vulnerable due to poor social intelligence, trauma from previous abuse, or otherwise in a vulnerable moment (tired, inebriated, angry or upset, etc).

If gas lighting is a form of boundary violation, and I’m stretching here, could it be classified as mind-rape?

No, there are plenty of ways to violate a boundary besides rape.

No; additionally, the conflation of rape with all boundary violation also makes it less likely for people who are victims to identify when they're being abused because abuse takes way more forms than sexual violence. Please consider the implications of such.

I wonder how vulnerable are people with photographic or otherwise eideitic memory. Perhaps even just very accurate as measured on a memory test.

It could be possible that you cannot really gaslight someone about a thing they remember to never have happened.

It's not about how well your memory works; it's about how you can be convinced not to believe yourself. This extends not just to what you remember but how you remember it. For example, saying something extremely insulting or demeaning and then acting extremely hurt when there's pushback and accusing the person pushing back of malice and harm. This strategy can often take someone offguard, especially if they genuinely care for and want the relationship to remain positive, being told that no, they are actually the party that is causing drama/hurting others can really fuck up the psyche even if they remember that they were the ones insulted, because the situation repositions that they are the ones at fault for feeling hurt and their hurt feelings are bad/should be suppressed to maintain the relationship.

No, you just need to require proof proportional to the severity of claims.

E.g. no point in distrusting Alex on his account of eating ramen for breakfast if it does not materially affect you.

Precisely this!

If you want to tell me that I forgot that I was arrested that night, the response is a very blunt "provide convincing proof that doesn't require me to trust you, or bug off".

Being vigilant for fakes is very time consuming too. Especially given some of the scam tricks, like "call the fraud and abuse hotline at 1-800..." -- except that number was provided by the scammer.

I would like to push back against accepting gaslighting if it doesn't appear to materially affect you at the time. You make yourself vulnerable to being gaslit about how materially affecting it can be to you. This is how abusers destroy the identity of their victims over time, through continually downplaying their harm and convincing the victim they are not being injured. This makes it extremely hard for someone to leave their abuser, because their psychological state has been warped that being abused is the norm and therefore there's nothing better than the abuse out there.

If Alex is willing to lie and also gaslight someone about breakfast, Alex isn't safe to be around. Especially for someone who has been previously abused.

I don't think anyone was suggesting you should still be fine with Alex if you caught him manipulating you, only that it's silly and pointless to be immediately distrusting and demand a bunch of evidence when someone makes a claim that doesn't matter. That is, be generally trusting of Alex (and everyone else) as long as the stakes are low.

That wasn't clear from your original post, sorry, it read more to me that there is a level of gaslighting that is generally acceptable. I think even if the stakes are low, someone who lies and gaslights over low stakes is no longer a low stakes scenario.

> If Alex is willing to lie and also gaslight someone about breakfast, Alex isn't safe to be around.

If a man lies and tells his wife she doesn't look fat in that outfit, is he unsafe to be around?

I know it's generational, but I really can't wait for reasonableness to be vogue again.

Lying and gaslighting are two different things. Gaslighting involves lying but is also about invalidating the victim's memory and feelings in an attempt to control them in some way. Telling a partner they look good is not generally gaslighting.

oh I'm sorry... if a man gaslights and tells his wife she doesn't look fat in that outfit...

Again, those are two different things.

Lying isn't the same thing. In that moment, the man is just being dishonest. Later, if the wife brings up the incident and the man claims it both never happened and she constantly makes shit up like this, then yes he is gaslighting and is deeply unsafe.

> One obvious defense againt this dark art is to simply not trust anyone, ever - but this approach has consequent repercussions

The other obvious giant gaping downside is that you lose access to all of the true information you will get from most people who are not, in fact, bad actors. It's like gouging out your own eyes to save yourself from optical illusions.

if you think about it in database terminology: would assigning a different value for the epistemic_status column cause the row to be deleted?

I think there's another defense, besides "trust no one". Two facets:

1) A lack of complete or blind trust in "authority" figures

2) An ability to gradually decrease trust/accommodation, and increase a tone that society would consider "impolite".

I've spoken several times at various things like school board meetings. Each time I've come with fire to spit, but when I approach the podium it dies down. What I say doesn't change, but my tone does. It's difficult to be impolite to people, but it's sometimes necessary. I think this is a skill we've let atrophy in the era of "be really nice to everyone".

If I were being told, "no this did happen, your parents said it did, keep trying to remember", when I was sure it didn't, my distrust and tone would gradually change. My parents aren't here. Objecting to what is being said demonstrates a lack of trust in the researcher being truthful, not my parents. (This would be significantly more difficult if my parents were present and acting though.)

It helps that I've read about the abuses of psychology -- with things like lie detector tests, and in the Soviet Union. My mistrust of "experts" is already quite low.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com