On creating the wrong perception.
My blogging hiatus at Wheat and Tares came about when I was trying to write on being heard and avoiding the perception that the speaker was mentally ill. I eventually gave up on the project, because I couldn’t wrap it into a post. Well, I think I found a way to hit the points. You are going to see people who are having hard times, and the tension will be between having compassion for them and turning the problems they have into reasons to criticize or devalue them.
Some people come across as afflicted by one of the following (or other problems), some more sympathetic than others:
Narcissism or inflated self importance. (you know the guy — the one in the group who always gets up, makes a long statement about how much he knows, then asks a question that isn’t a question and that has nothing to do with what the speaker just said). They also tend to insist they are always right, more special, beautiful and right than anyone else and they often act like charismatic bullies.- Borderline personality disorder. (you know the guy — always histrionic and always demanding attention and over-inflating the evidence. Al Gore was able to single handedly derail much of the climate change discussion by exaggeration and over predicting which led to people rejecting him).
- False expertise. (you know the guy, he starts claiming that his constitutional right to free speech has been curtailed if you won’t give him a forum).
- Sub-culture issues. You may have dealt with various geek, Deaf or other sub-cultures that have approaches that do not fit in with your own. We have had blog posts on the impact of different culture groups and expectations and how they affect communication and what matters to people.
Autism spectrum issues. (In an Asperger’s group if a speaker says something will take two minutes and it takes 90 seconds or 180 seconds, there will be someone who gets up and calls him a liar.You also get people who will literally fart in your direction and then say it is ok because they don’t like you or who react very badly to figures of speech. I’ve been dealing with friends whose children are having some of those issues and grateful for the creation of safe places for those kids).But it has made me very aware that sometimes the kids have a real complaint that people are missing because they just write it off as being part of the spectrum.
Gaslighting
The problem with telling people how to avoid the various things that derail them, is it is also a guide for how to gaslight someone. Gaslighting has two forms. In the one you cause someone to think that they are crazy. More and more it has come to mean that you are giving other people reasons to think someone is crazy or just not worth listening to. You can probably see the spectrum from “hey, give him a break, he is having a hard time” to “hey, just ignore him, he is just having a hard time.”
In the classic form, Gaslighting or gas-lighting is a form of mental abuse in which a victim is manipulated into doubting his or her own memory, perception and sanity.
It is also when legitimate issues or concerns are just recast as mental illness or inappropriate behavior (that second use I started out with). “She’s not really mad about our taking the young women’s budget and giving it to the boy scouts, it is just that time of the month” is a crude example.
The term comes from a movie and it calls out a very common behavior. There are people who routinely gaslight others and articles on how to identify and escape them. You probably have seen people being affected by both forms.
And Compassion
I first encountered the problem of the two coming together when I confronted a radio talk show host over a situation involving a single mother who had just lost her child. She was not part of the discussion (and probably never knew it took place) and neither was his audience (which is probably what made the discussion go as well as it did).
She was reacting normally. Others were exploiting her for a political agenda. But she had a legitimate complaint and was acting normally. I was offended because I was in the category of parents who had buried children and was just annoyed at the way things were going.
He backed off with an apology to me. As it worked out, I realized that I had narrowly avoided causing him to gaslight her (just because her son had died did not mean she did not have a legitimate concern). But it would have been very easy for that to have happened — for him to just say “hey, just ignore her, grief has driven her mad.”
The Issue
The issue that comes up is how do we act so as to show compassion towards those who come across as different from us without also gaslighting them or causing others to devalue what they have to say.
You may be dealing with someone who is deaf with a touch of Asperger’s. They are ultra concrete, can’t hear anyone’s position but their own and are (to a hearing person) bombastic. How would you accommodate them, explain to others that they need accommodation, yet not come across as just writing them off. Or you may have someone who has violated the honor code at BYU but wants to escape the consequences of getting caught. But, they’ve also been the victim of a horrific crime. How do you address that the need to help a victim outweighs the issue of letting them avoid punishment otherwise?
I’d love your thoughts and ideas on how to make both work, how to both expand compassion and understanding without making it into a tool to devalue others. How do we listen to people, have compassion and understanding for how they are different from us and why, yet not use that to dismiss what they are saying — or are there times that is legitimate?
What do you think.
[Revised, with help from comments, and with my thanks].
Wheat & Tares 
I liked your reference to ‘How to listen to God’. That’s the first thing I would do – especially the four Gospels. When Jesus came to the crippled old man trying to get to the pool to get cured. My first thing would probably have been, “If you had any brains you would have seen that you had no chance with this crowd even if it really worked”. Jesus didn’t do that. I don’t remember what He did but it would have been better than that. Listen to God and learn from Him and then you tell us the answers you are looking for.
When you buy into someone’s projection it is called Projective Identification. Projective identification is required for Gas Lighting to be effective. In other words these attempts are totally ineffective without the receiver’s mentally unhealthy cooperation.
“…I realized that I had narrowly avoided causing him to gaslight her…” Indicates that a minor psychological drama played out with you being the hero. You apparently perceive that you were a rescuer, the talk show host (perhaps unwittingly) a persecutor and the single mother (you apparently identified with) a victim. See Karman Drama Triangle
I stepped on my tongue recently while being introduced to a bunch of teenage boys in a South African orphanage. One boy was obviously down syndrome, head back swinging it from side to side while looking at the ceiling. “What’s his name?” I asked. “Why don’t you ask him, he can speak” came the answer! Oops! It’s a mistake to assume others need rescuing without actually knowing it. It reinforces their dependency and it reinforces our own mistaken need to feel needed.
Howard. I didn’t assume she needed rescuing at all. There was never going to be any interaction between the two. I was just grossly offended.
Good point though. White Knighting is another category.
It’s good to have a clear view of where our perimeters begin and end so that our boundaries are not confused with or overlaping onto others. LDS Mormonism tends to turn blame inward to an unhealthy degree.
If we know that we are dealing with someone who has abnormal perceptions active reflective listening helps. But if someone becomes offended by what is said it isn’t necessarily the speaker’s fault. Offense especially in our politically correct world today is often used as a table turning manipulation.
I’m having a hard time grasping this post. And it all started with the Narcissist card. The Narcissist recruits sidekicks who they (antecedent?) use to alienate children? What? Random throw-away art, I guess.
And then what exactly happened in the anecdote with the talk-show host?
And the way Gas Lighting was used here doesn’t seem the same as in the article it linked to.
I’m just confused. It does seem like there’s a really good discussion to be had here, but I’m having trouble connecting the dots.
On the host I almost gave him a reason to write the lady off rather than have compassion. Which got me thinking about this. (Note, she never listened to him and was never aware. Nor were those who listened to his program. As a parent who has buried children I was just really annoyed, and not interested in becoming a part of any narrative).
The bottom line is that sometimes reasons for compassion can also be turned into reasons for disregarding and the issue is about having compassion without writing people off.
The graphic is from children bullying each other. You are right it loses something.
Gaslighting is generally used as a term for making someone dismiss themselves as crazy. I should have developed the secondary use where it is used to describe enlisting or causing third parties to write someone off.
You are right that is not clear enough.
But when you hear someone raise an issue as a reason to disregard rather than as a reason to engage ….
Which brings me back to the issue of how to talk about the issues that cause conflicts and communication problems without those efforts leading to people being ignored rather than shown compassion.
A compasionate situation presented authentically invites compassion. A compasionate situation presented inauthentically invites confusion.
These are all very interesting ideas. I think the temptation to gaslight someone is highest when their stated experience conflicts with your understanding of the world. For missionaries, you have certain expectations about what investigators should feel or experience when reading scriptures, praying, and hearing lessons. And so you might try to force people into describing those feelings that fit a conversion narrative even if that’s not really what the person is feeling.
It’s probably good advice to avoid diagnosing mental illness in other people. I try to give room for people to voice their personal experiences even when they conflict with my understanding of the world. Active listening and open-ended questions help. I’m a conflict avoider, so I try to be agreeable and accommodating anyways.
“how to talk about the issues that cause conflicts and communication problems without those efforts leading to people being ignored rather than shown compassion.”
I don’t think this has an easy answer. I read an article not too long ago about dealing with anger. One of the suggestions was to look at the situation in a different light. If someone behaved irrationally and was incredibly rude (as you saw it), to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’d been having a bad day. In that light, you’d have more compassion and be less offended about the unpleasant exchange. I think most of us recognize that this can often happen – we are frustrated about something out of our control, so we unintentionally lash out on minor things within our control. In an effort to have compassion, though, we may disregard a legitimate grievance.
I’ve often been put in a mediation situation between two family members. These are two strong, intelligent women who’ve disliked each other for decades. In an effort to be charitable, both have at various points sought to explain what they perceive as offensive, irrational behavior as clearly the result of stress in the offending individual’s life. Woman A has concluded that Woman B must have been dealing with bad medical information (maybe a cancer diagnosis!), typical hormonal cycles, menopause, personality disorder, and a host of other ailments. Woman B has blamed Woman A’s offensive behavior on childhood trauma, mental illness, grief, dementia, etc. Each woman sees herself in the right and intelligent enough to compassionately recognize the other woman’s ridiculous behavior as the result of unfortunate circumstances beyond her control. Neither woman recognizes the differences of opinion originating from legitimate concerns.
I keep finding myself being much more patient with people I know. Which is making me rethink some.
Then I had it pointed out to me how deaf culture comes across to the hearing world.
Still processing.
Mary Ann I appreciate your thoughts.
When we look deeper (psychologically) we see that issues don’t cause conflicts at all, rather people’s psychological defenses cause conflicts. In fact psychological defense and psychological dysfunction are very nearly synonymous. When people have difficulty talking out issues what we see is a clash of defenses each triggering the other. Sorting this out is pretty complex but can be done fairly easily in a clinical setting but it’s awkward to do it in the course of short normal conversation. That’s why I suggested active reflective listening which helps but this isn’t a complete solution.
A good therapist assumes the patient is rational, when the patient gives what appears to be an irrational response an attempt is made to reverse engineer what the patient’s internal logic must be to produce this irrational appearing response. But the next step requires considerable knowledge of psychology, that is figuring out what gave rise to this unusual internal logic. All of this must be accomplished while remaining neutral and un-triggered. The process exceeds most people’s knowledge, ability or interest.
I disagree. As a therapist, I don’t assume my patients are rational. I assume that their behavior is always an expression of their lived experience. My patient with psychosis or borderline personality (also a little different from the description in the OP, I think) can be very irrational in their thinking or actions. When a patient told me he had lied about ongoing self-harm and suicidal thoughts, it wasn’t logical. But it matched the anxiety and shame he had been feeling.
I strongly agree that really listening with no assumptions or agenda is necessary to avoid gaslighting.
I assume that their behavior is always an expression of their lived experience. Sure and their defenses and resulting responses are a result of that lived experience so the lived experience can be estimated by reverse engineering the logic of those responses.
I strongly agree that really listening with no assumptions or agenda is necessary to avoid gas lighting. I didn’t make this argument.
Someone can attempt to gaslight you but it requires your cooperation and buy-in for it to occur so I don’t believe I’m easily gaslighted and I don’t attempt to gaslight others so I don’t believe I cause someone to be gaslighted.
Many people are just not aware of their defenses or how those defenses can cloud or redefine their perception of what the other person is saying or attempting to say so this is where I see emptying oneself and active listening being very helpful in facilitating a conversation.
I think this is the second post of yours I’ve read on this subject Stephen, and I’m still not sure what is meant by gas-lighting. Count me confused.
These are the threads I’m understanding this time around (thank you Mary Ann #9)-
Person A has a complaint. Person B does not recognise any legitimacy of the complaint itself, but assumes person A must be complaining for some other perhaps irrational reason, otherwise they would agree with person B. Person B feels good about themselves for *recognising* their assumed reason and *empathy* for person A, but never feels the need to address the original complaint.
But then there’s also a person C observing the interaction between A and B, who can either recognise the legitimacy of the complaint, or fall into the *empathy trap* painted by person B – in which case person C is also gas-lighting person A?
Hedgehog — yes!
Person B has done the second definition or use of gaslighting.
Person C can, if they are not careful, treat the complaint as a symptom of issues Person A has, rather than a problem Person A is experiencing that is colored by their issues.
So that if they are not careful, sympathy with Person A’s issues instead of a tool for seeing the problem through Person A’s filters becomes just a way to see the problem as a reflection of the issues rather than a real problem.
And if you just write off the complaints as not a problem, just a reflection of Person A’s issues, then you have done second type or second order gaslighting.
So far so good, but I would seem to have missed something still. What is the first type of gas-lighting?
Where you make Person A conclude Person A is crazy.
So instead of getting people to write others off you get them to write themselves off.
Ah! Ok. Thanks for that Stephen.
My pleasure.
The Issue: “how do we act so as to show compassion towards those who come across as different from us without also gaslighting them or causing others to devalue what they have to say”
I feel like this begins with a faulty premise….. “how do we [ACT] so as to show compassion”…….. I don’t personally feel that it should be ACTING in the first place. True compassion should be authentic, and comes from within, and the appropriate actions will generally follow.
In fact, I often find with the church and members of, that it’s about outwardly acting a certain way, but nothing on the inside has changed. It’s not authentic empathy or compassion. Rather it’s acting like a ‘nice’ person, but not truly understanding another’s plight. When leaders say ‘we should love everyone, even if we don’t agree with their actions’, what it seems to translate as, is, ‘be kind individually, outwardly, while inwardly judging and condemning them.’
People will always fundamentally disagree, just like not everyone hits it off and will be friends. Everyone has a different personality, different needs to satisfy in their lives, and everyone comes from different backgrounds. I think the important part is to be respectful, and sometimes you just have to agree to disagree.
So, KT, in terms of the split between Taoism and Confucious you definitely go with the way over right living.
But I meant acts as in acting rather than reacting, being rather than not b
Taoism vs Confucianism. Great point!
But “true” compassion is simply the result of being authentic (unblocked) but becoming and being authentic is a very foreign concept to modern LDS Mormonism with it’s overly strong focus on obedience to bright line behavioral rules and activity worship. Authenticity simply cannot be understandably explained or achieved by using an LDS chapel frame of reference, that FoR must be transcended to appreciate it and then one is accused of introducing a competing religion rather than a natural extension of Mormonism. In other words LDS Mormonism = blocked. Unblocked = something the than Mormonism.
Unblocked = something other than Mormonism
The purpose of Christianity (including Mormonism) is to be unblocked, with an authentic self that has been molded to reflect God’s love. To be authentically like Christ. Sometimes we get distracted with what Elder Uchtdorf described as our Potemkin villages, but we shouldn’t forget that the heart of Christianity really is authenticity (and I’m sure all of us have met those special people who are very successful in keeping focus on that goal).
Indeed Mary Ann,
I would love to hear what you wrote coming directly from the GC pulpit but we do not. How many times do we hear obey? How many times is activity encourgaged? Authenticity is not an LDS focus, obedience is the focus.
To become authentic, unblocked we must give up our psychological defenses, there is absolutely NO president for this in LDS chapel Mormonism. What we hear over and over is OBEY but obedience is not authenticity.
Jesus said, If you love me, keep my commandments.
Jesus’ commandments are the beattitudes, nothing bright line or behavioral about them. He also said after you have mastered them sell what you have, give to the poor and follow him (not Monson, Oaks or your Bishop).
My question is, how to develop compassion for a gaslighter, so that you can stop hating the things they did, and to stop seeing them as a ‘bad’ person, and instead, just someone who gaslights who is no longer in your life. Kinda, because she’s my ex. who still gaslights the kids, one of whom has realized this, and the other one who has not. They are also alcoholics, the mother and the one still being lied to.