The One Who Manipulates the Gaslight

September 2018

The One Who Manipulates the Gaslight  by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.Couns., PhD

     I recently watched the 1944 remake of the mystery-thriller Gaslight about a man who tries to send his wife mad by constantly distorting her reality and suggesting that her experiences are false. Things go missing: a picture on the wall comes and goes, a cameo brooch goes missing, there are bumps and bangs, and the gaslight flickers apparently without reason. Her husband controls her, while apparently loving her, in order to keep her “safe”. As the film rolls on we see this abusive, self-centred shifty narcissist take things, hide them, cut her off from family, undermine her, while threatening her with the visitation of doctors to have her diagnosed insane, in order to find and steal some rare rubies. But, like the flickering gaslight, this woman has some awareness that something is out of kilter, but what?

     Gaslighting is a popular term of a co-dependent dysfunctional relationship, not a diagnostic one. It is a relationship that may occur in partnerships, cults, even countries, where the gaslighter attempts to control the sense of reality of the other person, or people.

     Quite a lot has now been identified regarding the cues to look for in a gaslighting scenario and how it feels to  be gaslighted, but little is known about those who gaslight. This is what I intend to explore here. In the next month’s article, I’ll explore the gaslighters strategies for keeping the gaslighted under thumb.

     The gaslighted is anxious regarding the shifting realities, she doesn’t know if she’s loved or not because her abuser turns assurances on an off (I’m using “she” even though anyone can be the victim), she feels unsafe, yet told things to the contrary. She may experience digestive problems (something in the relationship  cannot be swallowed), her skin becomes itchy and dry almost like a protective layer to the turmoil of un-understood occurrences, she cramps up, she can’t sleep, etc.

     We all need safety and security, and somewhere we can be accepted as we are. The gaslighter disrupts all this. Why, though, does he do it?  The more insecure the gaslighted becomes, the more she clings to him, and that is his gain. He likes it that his partner needs him because he needs her to need him to feel validated. In this most vulnerable place, he (this is not gender specific) plays with her neediness: treating her occasionally with mildness and even superficial kindness or remorse, to give the gaslighted false hope. In these circumstances, the victim might think: “Maybe he’s really not that bad,” “Maybe things are going to get better,” or “Maybe I’ll stay, things are looking up,” but the gaslighted should not believe any of it.

     Gaslighters have an insatiable need to control others because of a deep-seated anxiety of abandonment. Maybe one of his parents used their child as a weapon against the other parent, all the while saying something like, “If you love me, you’ll hate your other father/mother,” where love is endlessly conditional. For an protected child growing up, there are few options but to go along with this.

     Things are 100% right or 100% wrong, for authoritarian gaslighters. They seek to control, dominate, and take advantage of another individual, or a group, or even an entire society. By maintaining and intensifying an incessant stream of lies and coercions, the gaslighter keeps the gaslighted in a constant state of insecurity, doubt, and fear. The gaslighter can then exploit their victims at will, for the augmentation of their power and personal esteem.

   All gaslighters think they are not the problem and everyone else is. Gaslighters are practically impossible to get into therapy. If they do attend, it is to tell the therapist that their partner is the problem and if the therapist insists, then, apparently, the therapist is incompetent. In other words, they have no capacity for self-reflection, and if that relationship finishes, the gaslighter will move on to someone new. For the gaslighted, their only real option is to be free and find their own feet in the world and for potential partners to be vigilant about what’s happening from the start.

I am Elizabeth of Estonia

February 2014

      Snow drifted up, sideways, down, through bare birch branches, drifted to ground, thickening there. An explosion of seagulls burst upwards,  a fountain of birds: an indelible evocative sight, numinous really.

     This is the landscape of the park opposite the Soviet built flats in which my aunt and uncle live in Tallinn, Estonia. This could have been the landscape of my mother’s early life. This could have been the landscape … but for the location. My mother was born in Pskov in Russia, of Estonian father and Russian mother. She was schooled in St Petersberg, Russia and then Tartu, not Tallinn, and then only a short time. My mother  and her brother came to Australia on a ship in the mid-1920s. They were immigrants, boat people.

     It was Australia Day recently: when Australians celebrate with the welcoming of new Australians and the drinking of beer and explosions of fireworks. My heart was heavy and the Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie refrain just left me cold. I had only been back a week from Estonia, this land of my mother’s.  The memories and rememberings somehow didn’t sit well in barbecues, and so I stayed at home.

     Re-membering, note the way I write it, is the putting together of things half imagined, half  recalled. Re-membering joins the dots. The story, my story, is situated and relational. This story is situated in place and it is relational to circumstance, place, time, people and the teller herself. This story of my mother, and thus me – to a degree – starts in 1909 with her birth into a disputed land. Of interest to everyone, wedged between the Baltic Sea to the north and west, Latvia to the South and Russia to the East, Finland, across the bay, and Sweden, over the Baltic to the North-West; sometimes claimed by Germans, sometimes Finns, the Russians, the Swedes; Estonia, of interest because of her precious port in  the capital, Tallinn. This port is remarkable. It doesn’t freeze over, because of warm currents. It opens frozen northern Europe to the world. So this little country, with its rich cultural history, its opera, ballet, and theatre companies, its artistic and musical history, its unique language (related not to Russian, but to Finnish and Hungarian), is attractive to larger countries that want to expand their borders. In 1909, Estonia was annexed by Russia. She gained a short lived independence in 1918, but soon she was gobbled again, this time into the Soviet regime, gaining independence again in 1989. Now she is dirt poor and propped up by the economy of Sweden (a dominance of another kind). She is poor but not down and out, despite a minuscule population of only 1.42 million people and a workforce that moves beyond her boundaries into Scandinavia.

     I am always interested in clear boundaries and I now compare this with Estonia’s fight for independent and clear boundaries from others surrounding her. I feel keenly the pressing in of others desires and needs and I know – in my bones – the richness of my own space. As one of my friends describes me, I am Elizabeth of Estonia. I know  the sinews and bones, and the cries of the children, of an ancient land, as if they were my own. This  land, strewn with the moss and snow covered ice boulders of Finnish granite that twisted and turned and travelled across the frozen Baltic Sea, is unique. Granite is from the Finnish landscape; Estonia is all wetlands and sandstone – and so much of it unsettled countryside. I know  it in the very marrow of my bones, the presence of others and my own unique integrity. It is in this knowing  that the personal and the professional meld together, for this is my gift (received, lived, and given again).

     I am, via my mother, a new Australian.  Via her, I know what I give and receive and give again, in my life and my therapeutic work. This being in me, this land of my mother’s ancestry, is me being Australian and me being present for the presence of others and present for myself. I don’t think I am all that different from others who cross the oceans to this place.

     My story is like  snow flakes dropping, rising, drifting and bursts of birds in silent crofts of trees. My story is merely musing, really. A seeking for sense; a joining of the dots.

It’s not all in the mind

Sept 2013

     Here I am wondering how to write this article and wondering what and how it is I am able to wonder anything at all. I know I want to write about the mind and the body, somehow, but how do I proceed? In common language “the mind” is usually used to refer to the thinking-feeling “I”,  that which allows us to be aware of the world and our experiences, the agent of oneself that is apparently separable from the body.   I’m not satisfied with that, because it doesn’t actually say anything. It’s sort like saying, as I read recently, that experiences, including near death experiences, are just experiences. What are experiences? What is the mind? I’m particularly unsatisfied with the idea that the mind is separable from the body. Who has a mind without the agency to produce it? A human mind cannot be conflated to divine consciousness, even if we think of  the human mind as a part of divine consciousness.

I am also unable to concede the popular notion that everything is all in the mind, because this feels inherently unsatisfactory. It feels to me like I would have to agree that my mind “cooks up” all existence, and I cannot buy that. Fortunately, I’m in good company.

     In Buddhism, all phenomena (subjective and objective) are  said to be dependent upon causes and conditions where nothing arises uncaused.  Every cause has a previous cause, a previous context, and situation, so that every phenomenon arises from previous phenomenon. It is interesting that such a perspective sits well with modern Western psychological thought and that it contrasts with our earlier philosophic tradition. The latter had a far more mystical idea about the nature of mind, the psyche. The psyche was seen as a sort of conflation of the soul and thought that was  somehow independent of everything material,  a sort of spiritual ether. Contemporary psychology, and Buddhism, sees the mind as inherently relational, and thus not independent of anything, nor ethereal.

     The mind, seen relationally, arises in a dependent way upon both internal and external things. Pain, for example, is thus not all in the mind as much  mind itself is not a creation of itself. We are responsive, relational beings.  There really is an outside world, and there is a relationship we have with it. This relationship is incredibly complex and entwined. If this was not so, we would not be able to share our experiences with one another, nor with other sentient beings. I note here that there is certainly a school of Buddhist thought that declares the material world as nothing but a projection of our minds, but this is not shared by other schools of Buddhism. The Dalai Lama, for one, considers it more ‘coherent’ (in his words) that there is a reality that consists of both the subjective mind and objective objects in the material world.

     The relational dependence of the mind upon inner and outer realities is what Buddhists call the philosophy of ‘dependent origination’ in which there is a continuum and complexity of attributions. We are thus able to say, we are made of star dust; we are continuous in substance with the rain and the oceans; we join with our ancestors as we tread this earth – mystical phrases that house actualities. The basic elements that make the universe make our bodies and our brain, that give form and language to our minds (the archetypes of divine potters that contrive bodies and give them breath, has something essentially true to say here).

     Our intentions, our will, our activities in the world thus matters incredibly, for these have a real bearing on all else in our subjective and objective lives. This how, what, and whether: the how we live our lives, what thoughts we think, how we manifest those thoughts, whether we are generous towards others and ourselves, and so on, is where  psychotherapy and clinical hypnotherapy comes to their own. The changes and choices we make really do change our relationships with ourselves, one another and our physical environment, and the matter of our own brains (brain plasticity). The mind truly is a relational state of being. A change at the level of mind, changes fundamentally everything because the mind is not separate. Life really isn’t all in the mind, for the mind is merely an integral part of  it.