It happens when someone personally connected to you displays controlling and manipulative behaviour to make you feel controlled, dependent, isolated, or scared. Gaslighting is a form of coercive control used to distort victims' sense of reality and lower their self-esteem.
Gaslighting is a big part of coercive control, when the abuser tries to make you doubt your reality or tries to convince you abuse isn't happening or isn't nearly as bad as you believe it to be.
There are four primary types of gaslighting behaviors: the straight-up lie, reality manipulation, scapegoating and coercion. Last week we looked at the straight-up lie and reality manipulation. This week we are going to focus on scapegoating and coercion.
Types of coercive control
Controlling behaviours may include: Isolating you from your family or friends. Controlling what you eat, wear, or do. Controlling who you are allowed to see or spend time with.
10 Signs & Red Flags You're Being Gaslighted. If you recognize these signs in your relationships, you may be the victim of gaslighting; they include denial, minimization, blame-shifting, isolation, withholding, causing confusion or doubt, criticism, projection, narcissism, and love bombing.
“Gaslighters have two signature moves,” she wrote. “They lie with the intent of creating a false reality, and they cut off their victims socially.” They spread gossip, they take credit for other people's work, and they undercut others in furtherance of their own position.
Narcissistic gaslighting examples of this tactic include suggesting you're “confused,” “mixed up” or “misremembering.” Alternatively, they may take the opposite approach, saying something like, “I have no memory of that” or, “I don't know what you're talking about.”
This is because for narcissists, control is the equivalent to power. Coercive control is a course of conduct so the behaviours are likely to continue over a period of time.
Coercive control is a strategic form of ongoing psychological and emotional abuse that is based on control, manipulation, and oppression. Coercive control is often associated with narcissism-fueled abuse.
Typically, someone denying your feelings, an objective reality you clearly recall, or reality that is unambiguous (e.g., whether they hit you or not) may be gaslighting, while differences in subtler details of memories might simply be attributable to differences in recollection.
Gaslighting is the use of a patterned, repetitive set of manipulation tactics that makes someone question reality. It's often used by people with narcissistic personality disorder, abusive individuals, cult leaders, criminals, and dictators.
Gaslighting is a form of psychological and emotional abuse where victims are made to question themselves and their grasp of reality. Different types of gaslighting include reality manipulation or questioning, outright lies, trivializing, scapegoating, and coercion.
repeatedly putting them down such as telling them they are worthless. enforcing rules and activity which humiliate, degrade or dehumanise the victim. forcing the victim to take part in criminal activity such as shoplifting, neglect or abuse of children to encourage self-blame and prevent disclosure to authorities.
Taking control over aspects of your everyday life, such as where you can go, who you can see, what you can wear and when you can sleep. Depriving you access to support services, such as medical services. Repeatedly putting you down, such as saying you're worthless. Humiliating, degrading or dehumanising you.
A person exerting coercive control may try to limit your freedom and independence. For example, not allowing you to go to work or school, restricting your access to transportation, stalking your every move when you're out, taking your phone and changing passwords, etc.
Coercive tactics, or coercive psychological systems, are defined on their website as unethical mind control such as brainwashing, thought reform, destructive persuasion and coercive persuasion.
A recent study by the Crime Survey for England and Wales has shown that women are much more likely than men to be victims of abuse including degradation and threatening behaviour, which are stark markers of coercive control.
These abusers may not understand that what they are doing is wrong. But, if you have told someone repeatedly that they are hurting you, and they don't stop… then they are acting intentionally. They fit into the majority of abusers who know exactly what they are doing.
Coercive control is abusive as it is manipulative, threatening, seeks to dominate others and subjugate them to one's own will. It results in its victims 'walking on eggshells' around the perpetrator. The narcissist wishes to control others as part of their disorder.
Instead, the opposite of that statement about gaslighting is to deliberately and systematically [feed someone] true information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves.