You’re not imagining it — “gaslighting” is everywhere. The term, once clinical, has become a buzzword applied to bad bosses, exes and politicians. During a recent Jimmy Kimmel Live! episode, Kimmel accused President Trump of “gaslighting” Americans after Trump insisted that higher oil prices benefit the U.S. because it’s a major producer. Merriam-Webster even named “gaslighting” its 2022 Word of the Year.
But as the word spreads, its meaning can be diluted. Therapists and scholars warn the term is often misused in everyday arguments. Psychoanalyst Robin Stern, author of The Gaslight Effect, emphasizes: “Gaslighting is not a disagreement. It’s a deliberate effort to undermine my reality, or if I’m doing the gaslighting, for me to undermine your reality.”
What gaslighting is and isn’t
Sociologist Paige Sweet describes gaslighting as “crazy-making”: trying to make someone feel or seem crazy to themselves or others. It’s more than lying. Kate Abramson, author of On Gaslighting, notes that liars may or may not be gaslighting; ordinary lying aims to persuade, while gaslighting aims to erode the person’s ability to trust their own perception and judgment. When gaslighting works, victims begin to blame themselves or doubt what they witnessed, losing confidence as a witness to the world.
The origin story: play and film
The verb traces back to Patrick Hamilton’s 1930s play Gas Light and—more famously—to the 1944 film adaptation starring Ingrid Bergman. In the film, a man married to a niece of his murdered victim manipulates the home environment (including dimming gas lights) and insists his wife is forgetful and delusional. Over time she doubts her own sanity. Anthropologist Anthony Wallace used “gaslight” in a 1961 text to describe this tactic, and the term later entered therapeutic language to name abuse strategies used by domestic abusers.
The film’s gaslights also hold a hopeful clue: the inconsistencies in the household (like the dimming lights tied to activity in other rooms) are evidence that helps the victim, with outside confirmation, piece reality back together. Crime fiction scholar Rosemary Johnson highlights that the victim’s observation of those details ultimately enables her to reclaim the truth.
Fiction versus reality
Unlike the overt, cinematic villainy in the film, real-life gaslighting can be subtle. Sweet explains it feeds on the target’s uncertainty about what is happening. Gaslighters aren’t always purely malicious; often they use manipulation defensively to gain power in a situation. Socialization plays a role: Stern says women are more likely to be victims because they’re often encouraged to be agreeable and to take others’ perspectives, which can lead them to doubt their own.
Why the word matters — and why precision matters
Naming the experience is powerful. Learning the term can be a “light bulb moment” that helps victims identify and begin to heal from something confusing and hard to articulate. Stern says awareness allows people to talk about the behavior and start reclaiming their reality. Recovery isn’t instant: successful gaslighting erodes trust—trust in others and in oneself—and those skills need to be rebuilt gradually.
Experts caution about overuse. If everything is labeled gaslighting, the real harm gets minimized and people who experience it may not be taken seriously. Yet minimizing it is also dangerous: Stern calls it potentially “soul-destroying” when someone repeatedly accommodates another’s reality and loses pieces of themselves.
In short, gaslighting is intentional reality-undermining that goes beyond lying. Calling it accurately helps victims recognize abuse and begin recovery; careless use risks trivializing a serious form of psychological harm.