The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulations Other People Use to Control Your Life

1. You constantly second-guess yourself.

2. You wonder, “Am I being too sensitive?” a dozen times a day.

3. You wonder frequently if you are a “good enough” girlfriend/wife/employee/friend/daughter.

4. You have trouble making simple decisions.

5. You think twice before bringing up innocent topics of conversation.

6. You frequently make excuses for your partners behavior to friends and family.

7. Before your partner comes home from work, you run through a checklist in your head to anticipate anything you might have done wrong that day.

8. You buy clothes for yourself, furnishings for your apartment, or other personal purchases thinking about what your partner would like instead of what would make you feel great.

9. You actually start to enjoy the constant criticism, because you think, “What doesnt kill me will make me stronger.”

10. You start speaking to your husband through his secretary so you dont have to tell him things youre afraid might upset him.

11. You start lying to avoid the put-downs and reality twists.

12. You feel as though you cant do anything right.

13. You frequently wonder if youre good enough for your lover.

14. Your kids start trying to protect you from being humiliated by your partner.

15. You feel hopeless and joyless.

Your husband crosses the line in his flirtations with another woman at a dinner party. When you confront him, he asks you to stop being insecure and controlling. After a long argument, you apologize for giving him a hard time.

Your boss backed you on a project when you met privately in his office, and you went full steam ahead. But at a large gathering of staff—including yours—he suddenly changes his tune and publicly criticizes your poor judgment. When you tell him your concerns for how this will affect your authority, he tells you that the project was ill-conceived and youll have to be more careful in the future. You begin to question your competence.

Your mother belittles your clothes, your job, your friends, and your boyfriend. But instead of fighting back as your friends encourage you to do, you tell them that your mother is often right and that a mature person should be able to take a little criticism.

If you think things like this cant happen to you, think again. Gaslighting is when someone wants you to do what you know you shouldnt and to believe the unbelieveable. It can happen to you and it probably already has.

How do we know? If you consider answering “yes” to even one of the following questions, youve probably been gaslighted:

Does your opinion of yourself change according to approval or disapproval from your spouse?

When your boss praises you, do you feel as if you could conquer the world?

Do you dread having small things go wrong at home—buying the wrong brand of toothpaste, not having dinner ready on time, a mistaken appointment written on the calendar?

Gaslighting is an insidious form of emotional abuse and manipulation that is difficult to recognize and even harder to break free from. Thats because it plays into one of our worst fears—of being abandoned—and many of our deepest needs: to be understood, appreciated, and loved. In this groundbreaking guide, the prominent therapist Dr. Robin Stern shows how the Gaslight Effect works and tells you how to:

Turn up your Gaslight Radar, so you know when a relationship is headed for trouble

Determine whether you are enabling a gaslighter

Recognize the Three Stages of Gaslighting: Disbelief, Defense, and Depression

Refuse to be gaslighted by using the Five Rules for Turning Off the Gas

Develop your own “Gaslight Barometer” so you can decide which relationships can be saved—and which you have to walk away from

Learn how to Gasproof Your Life so that youll never again choose another gaslighting relationship

·An award-winning journalist suddenly finds that nothing she does can please her new boss. Soon, he’s telling her that she’s incompetent—and she’s beginning to believe him.

·A mother belittles her daughter’s clothes, job, boyfriend—but her adoring daughter tells friends that it’s “for her own good.”

Why are so many otherwise confident, successful women locked into relationships where they give up their power, their sense of reality, their very sense of themselves? The answer is the Gaslight Effect—a set of subtle and not-so-subtle manipulations used by boyfriends, spouses, bosses, friends, and family to make us think we’re wrong and they’re right.

In this groundbreaking guide, prominent psychoanalyst Dr. Robin Stern shows how the Gaslight Effect works, what you can do to overcome it, and how to decide whether your gaslighting relationship can be saved. A lively prescriptive book filled with stories, lists of symptoms, and intriguing quizzes, The Gaslight Effect is the first book to fully explore this insidious form of abuse—and the first to tell readers how to free themselves.