You’re not imagining it. The word “gaslighting” is everywhere. During a recent episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host said President Trump was “gaslighting” Americans by arguing that rising fuel prices somehow benefit them. The remark highlighted how the term has moved from clinical use into everyday speech — and how its meaning can blur as it’s applied to bad bosses, exes, and political leaders alike.
Gaslighting describes a destructive form of psychological manipulation. Psychoanalyst Robin Stern, author of The Gaslight Effect, warns that people often misuse the term in ordinary disagreements. “Gaslighting is not a disagreement,” she says. “It’s a deliberate effort to undermine my reality, or for me to undermine your reality.”
Sociologist Paige Sweet, who studies gaslighting in intimate relationships, describes it as “crazy-making”: someone tries to make you seem or feel crazy, to yourself or to others. It’s like witnessing something and then being told that what you saw never happened. Lying can be part of gaslighting, but not all lying is gaslighting. Kate Abramson, author of On Gaslighting, notes that ordinary liars simply try to get you to believe something; gaslighting aims to erode your capacity to trust your own perceptions and judgments.
When gaslighting succeeds, victims begin to believe the problem is their fault or that they’re mistaken for noticing what is happening. That self-doubt — mistrusting yourself as a witness to the world — is central to the harm gaslighting causes.
The term’s origin traces back to Patrick Hamilton’s 1930s play Gas Light and, more famously, the 1944 film Gaslight starring Ingrid Bergman. In the movie, the villain Gregory marries Paula and manipulates her — moving household items and insisting she is forgetful — to make her doubt her sanity while he searches her home for hidden jewels. The film’s plot dramatized the tactic and later furnished the verb “to gaslight” in scholarly and clinical contexts.
Anthropologist Anthony Wallace used the term in a 1961 text to describe the manipulation tactic. Over time it entered therapy discourse to name tactics used by domestic abusers to control victims.
Despite the grim origins, the story also contains a hopeful element. In the film, the dimming of gas lights becomes a clue: Paula notices the lights dim after her husband leaves because he is lighting other fixtures while searching the house. She needs confirmation from an outside party — a police inspector — to reconnect those observations and reclaim her sense of reality. That rescue moment helps explain why having a word for the experience can be liberating for real victims.
In real life, gaslighting often is subtler than the film’s overt villainy. It feeds on uncertainty, making people unsure of what is happening to them. Gaslighters may not always act from pure malice; sometimes the behavior is a defense mechanism used to gain power in a relationship. Research suggests women are more likely to be victims, in part because socialization encourages agreeableness and seeking therapy, which can both make someone more vulnerable to being led to doubt their perceptions.
Naming the experience matters. Learning the term can be a turning point for people who feel confused and unable to describe what is happening to them. Recognizing and labeling gaslighting is a step toward healing: it allows victims to talk about the behavior and begin to rebuild trust in themselves and others. But recovery is gradual. Stern emphasizes that successful gaslighting damages the ability to trust, which must be rebuilt over time.
Experts urge precision in how we use the word. If everything is called gaslighting, its seriousness can be diluted and those who genuinely experience it may not be taken seriously. At the same time, minimizing the term is unhelpful for people living through it. “When you begin, over time, to accommodate to somebody else’s reality and you’re giving up pieces of yourself along the way, it can be what many people say is soul-destroying,” Stern says. Using the term carefully preserves its power to name a real and often devastating form of abuse — and to point toward the possibility of reclaiming one’s reality.