America Has a Gaslighting Problem

This video is going to be a little bit different than the typical videos that I make on this series. For years I’ve been making videos about Solution Focused Brief Therapy in the hopes that people would watch these videos and get better at doing Solution Focused work. Today I was sitting down and thinking, and I always have some ideas in my head about what I want to say each week. Today I was sitting and thinking, “What can I say? What can I say? What can I say?” And everything I thought to say seemed inappropriate given what’s going on in the world right now.

I was talking to a colleague of mine, and for whatever reason, the topic of gaslighting came up. Gaslighting, you guys know, it’s something that typically is associated with people who struggle with narcissism. Beyond lying, they give you a false reality. Like, the thing you just saw with your own eyes, they try to make you feel like you didn’t just see it.

We were talking about the consequences of gaslighting, and how it makes you question everything around you, makes you feel a little bit crazy. It makes you not believe in your own ability to perceive reality.

Then later that day, a woman got killed. A woman by the name of Renee Good was murdered in Minneapolis. I saw the video before I saw any political commentary about it whatsoever. I saw the video, which, by the way, I never want to watch. I am someone who tries to avoid watching people’s deaths. I experience it as traumatic. I do not enjoy it, and I try to avoid it. But these days it’s hard to miss. Like, you’re just scrolling on Instagram, and then, bam, I see this video.

To me it was like, “Oh, my God, I just watched a woman murdered, right in my face. And the murder happened minutes ago. And now I’m already watching this thing.” And then subsequent to that, the Trump administration and some people associated with the Trump administration, start saying things that are inherently not true. “This woman is a terrorist. She tried to run the officer over with her car, and the officer shot her because he had no other choice.” That are completely not supported by what you see in that video, and completely not supported by what you heard in the video. There’s some audio in the video that disproves all of that.

I started reflecting back on the conversation I had with my colleague about gaslighting, and I thought, “If we’re not careful, we’re going to experience the societal implications of gaslighting.” I think we already are. But, “If we’re not careful, it’s going to become irreversible.”

So as a psychotherapist, I think it’s my job, my responsibility, part of my duty, even though I suspect I’m going to get a lot of negative comments about this video, and people are going to get mad at me, I actually do not care. I think it’s our job as professionals with knowledge in this space to start saying, “This is gaslighting, and these are the consequences of being gaslit.”

We have to promote these ideas. It’s our duty, it’s our responsibility. We cannot do this. I don’t care what your political affiliations are. You can be as far right as you want, you can be as far left as you want, but you can still be a human, and you can still hold people accountable for the decisions that they make, and the actions that they take. And if they take actions and decisions that are unlawful and take somebody’s life, then we can hold them accountable because that matches the reality with which we saw. And the more we try to paint a different reality from what we’re actually seeing, then the more damage we are doing to society itself.

This is not a call for people to be less conservative, or less left wing. I don’t care about that stuff. Well, actually I do, but it’s a personal decision and I acknowledge that. But more than anything else, we have to be able to say, what I saw in this moment does not match what you are saying happened in that moment. There is video evidence, and I don’t care who is saying one thing. I need you guys to start recognizing this is what is happening. There’s a video to show it. And it is dangerous to start disavowing information simply because we don’t want to accept it.

It is dangerous to start allowing yourself to be gaslit, simply because you are supporter of the person doing the gaslighting. If we don’t get a hold of this, it’s going to become irreversible.

So what I’m asking you to do is live up to the calling in our field and start saying what it actually is, and start using the terms of our field. We spent years studying this stuff. We know what it is.

Start being honest, and loud, and telling people this is what we’re seeing, before there’s really nothing left to defend.

I know this is a little bit of a departure, but I think it’s important. I think it’s really important that we start having conversations, and we start being leaders in these conversations, that help heal a wounded society, and help heal a damaged country.