Lori Falce: Do we really understand gaslighting?

Dec. 9—Gaslighting is Merriam-­Webster's word of the year.

When I heard this, it set my teeth on edge. I certainly understood the reasoning. The dictionary's website saw a 1,740% increase in people checking out the definition in 2022 alone, but its use has exploded over the past four years.

"Gaslighting" is everywhere, but people are often using it without actually knowing — or more likely understanding — the meaning.

Merriam-Webster's definition is "psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one's emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator."

If that seems like a lot of heavy lifting for one word, you're not wrong. It's easier if you realize that it has nothing to do with either gas or lights, except as they factor into the 1944 movie "Gaslight," in which would-be jewel thief Charles Boyer tried to convince Ingrid Bergman she was insane. "Gaslighting" is really the plot of an old-school psychological thriller boiled down into one word.

And that's my problem. The expression is being diluted. It is thrown around in political conversations. It is tossed like a bomb into debates about important issues such as racism, sexism, rape, abortion and crime.

Is gaslighting possible in these situations? Absolutely. But if your co-worker disagrees with you over whether the #MeToo movement has actually damaged opportunities for women, that's not gaslighting. Neither is a dustup with your spouse over who was supposed to buy whose mother's birthday present. Neither is the vast majority of instances where the word is used.

"Gaslighting" has become the Karen of verbs. It makes itself the victim. It demands to speak to the manager. It rejects the reality of the situation and substitutes its own interpretation, and if you dare to point that out, well, that's just proof that gaslighting has occurred.

This is unfair to a word built on the scope and terror of a film noir.

Real gaslighting is the scores of domestic violence cases in which a victim has been convinced she is too stupid, too crazy, too incompetent to take care of herself or her children by herself and needs to stay in a marriage despite black eyes and broken arms. Real gaslighting is grooming a child for abuse while making him believe it's his fault.

Real gaslighting is happening on social media every day. It happens in partisan corners where we only listen to the echoes of selfish manipulators and our own beliefs brainwashing us into looking at a blue sky and seeing rain.

When we overuse a word like this, making it trendy by either deliberate or ignorant misunderstanding, we diminish the impact of real gaslighting. It's the same way overusing the word discrimination to mean "any time I didn't get something someone else did" makes real discrimination seem like less of a problem, because, hey, aren't we all victims of that? No. No, we're not.

And if we can't see the difference between what's real and what's not, well, maybe we're just gaslighting ourselves.

Lori Falce is a Tribune-Review community engagement editor. You can contact Lori at lfalce@triblive.com.