What Is Gaslighting? Signs You’re Experiencing It (and What to Do)
You explain yourself clearly.
You stay calm. You choose your words carefully. You think you’re having a reasonable conversation.
And somehow, by the end of it, you’re the one apologising.
Or you walk away wondering did that actually happen the way I thought it did? Am I being too sensitive? Is this my fault?
If you’ve ever felt that way repeatedly, with the same person there’s a word for what you’re experiencing. And the word is gaslighting.
It’s a term that gets used a lot these days, sometimes loosely. So in this post I want to be really clear about what gaslighting actually is, how to recognise it in your own life, why it affects you the way it does, and what you can do about it.
Because understanding it is the first step to getting your footing back.
So what exactly is gaslighting?
The term comes from a 1944 film called Gaslight, in which a husband deliberately manipulates his wife into believing she’s losing her mind among other things, dimming the gas lights in the house and then denying that the light has changed at all. It’s become shorthand for a very specific kind of psychological manipulation.
Gaslighting is when someone consistently causes you to question your own memory, perception, or sense of reality. It’s not a single argument or a misunderstanding. It’s a pattern. And what makes it so damaging is that it works from the inside out it doesn’t just hurt you, it makes you doubt the very faculties you’d normally use to protect yourself.
I want to be clear about something here. Gaslighting isn’t always conscious or calculated. Sometimes the person doing it doesn’t even realise they’re doing it. That doesn’t make the impact any less real for the person on the receiving end. Whether it’s deliberate or not, the effect is the same: you stop trusting yourself.
And that, over time, is genuinely serious.
The signs of gaslighting and why they’re easy to miss
This is the part I really want you to read carefully, because gaslighting is easy to miss especially when it’s coming from someone you care about, work closely with, or have known for a long time.
Here are the most common signs I see in the people I work with:
You constantly second-guess yourself:
You used to trust your instincts. You used to know what you thought and felt. But lately you find yourself endlessly reviewing conversations, second-guessing your memory, and wondering if you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. This isn’t just low confidence. It’s a specific pattern that tends to emerge after prolonged exposure to someone who regularly tells you that you’re wrong about what you experienced.
Your feelings are always being minimised or dismissed
You try to raise something that’s bothering you and the response is: “You’re too sensitive.” Or: “You’re overreacting.” Or: “That never happened.” Or and this one is particularly effective “I was only joking, why do you always take things so seriously?”
Over time, having your feelings consistently dismissed does something very specific: it teaches you to stop trusting them. And when you can’t trust your own feelings, you become dependent on the other person’s version of reality. Which is exactly where a gaslighter, conscious or not, needs you to be.
You apologise constantly, even when you’ve done nothing wrong
This one surprises people when I point it out. They’ve become so accustomed to being made to feel at fault that apologising has become the default. It’s easier than the argument. It ends the tension faster. But underneath it, there’s a growing sense that something isn’t right, that you’re carrying responsibility for things that aren’t yours to carry.
You feel confused and disoriented after conversations with this person
Not upset in a clear way. Not angry. Just... foggy. Like you can’t quite get your bearings. This is one of the most telling signs. Healthy conversations, even difficult ones, leave you with some clarity, even if that clarity is uncomfortable. Gaslighting does the opposite. You leave more confused than when you arrived.
You’ve started to believe you’re the problem
Maybe you’re too emotional. Maybe you do remember things wrong. Maybe you are difficult to deal with. If you’ve started having these thoughts about yourself with regularity, pay attention. Because in my experience, the people who genuinely wonder if they’re the problem are very rarely the problem. It’s the ones who never wonder that tend to be causing the most damage.
Where gaslighting happens it’s not just in relationships
People often associate gaslighting exclusively with romantic relationships, and it absolutely does happen there. But in my coaching work in Ireland, I see it in a much wider range of situations than most people expect.
It happens in workplaces. A manager who denies having given you certain instructions. A colleague who consistently undermines your contributions in meetings and then acts baffled when you raise it. A boss whose expectations shift constantly but who insists you’re the one who got it wrong.
It happens in families. The parent who rewrites the history of your childhood. The sibling who insists events that clearly happened never did. The family member who uses emotional blackmail “after everything I’ve done for you” to keep you in line and then denies any wrongdoing when it’s raised.
It happens in friendships. The friend who makes you feel small and then tells you you’re imagining it. The person who shares things you told them in confidence, denies it, and makes you feel paranoid for thinking they would do such a thing.
Wherever it happens, the dynamic is the same: one person’s reality is consistently prioritised over the other’s. And the person on the receiving end slowly starts to lose faith in their own.
Why it affects you so deeply
Here’s something I want to say directly, because I think it’s important: if gaslighting has had a significant effect on you, that is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign that it worked on a human being with a functioning psychology, because it is designed to.
We are wired for connection. We are wired to adjust our behaviour based on feedback from the people around us. When someone we trust repeatedly tells us that our perception is wrong, our brains, in an effort to maintain the relationship and restore harmony, start to accommodate that message.
It’s not gullibility. It’s not stupidity. It’s the social brain doing what it was built to do. The problem is when the feedback it’s responding to is false.
Over time, chronic gaslighting can lead to anxiety, a persistent sense of self-doubt, difficulty making decisions, and a deep disconnection from your own instincts. I’ve worked with very capable, intelligent, strong people who have been so thoroughly gaslit over years that they struggled to trust even the most basic judgements about their own lives.
Getting that trust back is absolutely possible. But it takes time, the right support, and first recognising what has been happening.
What to do if you think you’re being gaslit
I want to give you something practical here: Actual steps.
1. Start trusting your own record
Begin keeping a note — even informal, even just on your phone of conversations and events as they happen. Not to build a legal case, but to give yourself a reliable reference point. Gaslighting thrives in the gap between what happened and your later recall of it. Removing that gap takes away a lot of its power.
When you can look back and see, clearly, what was actually said or done, it becomes much harder for someone to convince you that you imagined it.
2. Stop explaining yourself so much
One of the patterns I notice in people who are being gaslit is over-explaining. They go into conversations trying to make the other person understand, justify, prove their case. And it never works. Because the goal of the gaslighter whether they know it or not is not understanding. It’s control.
You are not obligated to convince someone of your own experience. State what you observed. State how you feel. And hold your ground without needing their agreement to know that you’re right.
3. Talk to someone outside the situation
This is probably the most important step and the one people most often skip. Because gaslighting works by isolating your perception — it only has one reality to compare yours to. The moment you bring a trusted outside perspective into the picture, things often become much clearer very quickly.
That might be a close friend who you trust to be honest. A family member who isn’t caught in the same dynamic. Or a professional — a therapist or coach — who can help you see the pattern clearly and start to rebuild your sense of self from the ground up.
I’ve had people come to me describing situations they’d been making excuses for for years, and within a session or two of having it reflected back clearly, they said some version of the same thing: “I knew something was wrong. I just needed someone else to confirm I wasn’t making it up.”
You’re not making it up.
4. Give yourself permission to pull back
You do not have to maintain full openness and availability with someone who is consistently distorting your reality. Pulling back, emotionally, practically, in terms of how much access you give them, is not dramatic. It’s sensible. It’s self-protection.
I always say this carefully, because I know it’s not always simple — especially if it’s a manager, a parent, or someone you’re in a long-term relationship with. But you can begin small. Be more guarded with personal information. Shorten the time you spend in their orbit. Observe how you feel when there’s a little distance. Often, the relief you feel in those moments tells you everything you need to know.
5. Rebuild your relationship with your own instincts
Gaslighting damages your self-trust. The recovery from it involves deliberately rebuilding that trust, one small decision at a time. Start noticing when you have a feeling about something and it turns out to be right. Start making small decisions based on your own judgement and noticing the results. Start saying, quietly but firmly, “I know what I saw.”
This is slower work than it sounds. But it is some of the most important work a person can do. And it can absolutely be done.
A final word
If you’ve read this post and found yourself nodding along, if something in here has named something you’ve been living with but couldn’t quite articulate, I want you to know that is a really significant moment.
The fact that you can see it is the beginning.
So many people go through years, sometimes decades, without ever having what’s happening to them named clearly. They just carry the anxiety, the self-doubt, the constant fog, and assume it’s just who they are. It’s not who they are. It’s what’s been done to them. And there is a very real difference.
Understanding that difference, and getting the right support to rebuild from it, is exactly the kind of work I do. Whether that’s through one of my programmes, my masterclass on dealing with narcissists and bullies, or working with me directly — you don’t have to figure this out alone.
It’s ok not to be ok. But it’s also ok to get help.
Want support with this?
If you’ve been dealing with a narcissist, a bully, or someone who has consistently made you question yourself, my masterclass was built specifically for this. It walks you through what’s actually happening in these interactions, why it affects you the way it does, and how to start responding from a place of clarity and confidence rather than confusion.
→ How to Deal with Narcissists & Bullies — Mark’s Masterclass
Or if you’d prefer to explore working together directly, you can reach out through my contact page. I offer one-to-one coaching, executive coaching, and programmes designed for people who are ready to stop just surviving difficult peopl, and start actually thriving.
→ Work with Mark — Coaching & Contact
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Mark
