A Dangerous Inheritance : On Familial Gaslighting
Content Note : Self-harm, violence, mental illness mentions
Gaslighting as a term originates from a play by the same name which was later adapted into a film by George Cukor. The plot centers a married couple where the husband manipulates his wife and others in their vicinity to believe that she is going insane. His use of furtive tactics to question the reality of what she sees with her own eyes is aimed at making her feel she is delusional and is losing her memory. On an eerie note, gas-lighting in the film refers very specifically to the husband dimming the gas lights in their attic while searching for the jewelry of a woman he has murdered. The wife notices that something nefarious is afoot and brings it up with him but he forces her to believe that she is purely imagining a change in the level of illumination and it is not a fact. This is a far better definition of gaslighting than most clinical textbooks.
In psychiatric facilities, this phenomenon was observed between patients/clients and staff. In a form of abusive transference, the victims were made to doubt their thoughts, emotions and experiences by the perpetrators. In recent years, people have started to recognize how gaslighting is a particularly insidious form of emotional abuse in intimate parternships and in a lot of cases, leaves terrible imprints of trauma on a survivor’s memory.
Apart from my clinical experience, I am also a survivor who has dealt with gaslighting from a particularly dehumanizing phase of intimate partner violence with a deeply abusive ex-partner. I have researched and written about the emergent trauma associated with it extensively and while I find it relieving to see an increment in conversations about the subject, I find it equally important to acknowledge that its execrable reach stretches above and beyond romantic or intimate relationships. A lot of time, we either ignore or skim over those occurrences because pop psychology leans towards a particular kind of “trauma porn” that is means for titillation not in-depth conversation.
After a recent lunch with a friend — who also happens to be a practicing therapist — where we discussed specific trajectories for mental health conditions and illnesses in our respective consultations, I ended up with a statistical analysis of the number of people who were currently in therapy with me and had acutely strained relationships with their parents. The pie-chart I made had all but a thin sliver of non-parent issues or those cases that were not capsized by poor parenting. A significant percentage was straddling the aftermaths of prolonged parental and familial problems which often spilled over into the darkened vortex of emotional abuse in general and gaslighting in particular. There isn’t enough discussion about familial gaslighting. Particularly in collectivistic cultures where you can’t escape the “family” structure because it often serves a primer for every other socio-cultural ecosystem — from workplace to educational spaces.
AJ is a quiet, contemplative man and has been seeking therapeutic counsel for social anxiety and panic disorder for roughly 6 months now. He is measured in his speech and even more so in his silences. He and I have a shared love for American Gods and lemon tea. Early on, during one of our sessions, he leaned in and joked how he had to ensure he was a “good patient” for each of our sessions so that he didn’t waste my time.
“I just want change my track record of disappointing people in my life. I don’t want to repeat that here. I feel like I am so useless most of the times.”
It is not unusual for clients to seek validation and acceptance from their therapist. It is also pretty common to see forms of projective identification — a term borrowed from Kleinian psychoanalysis where the therapist often morphs into a figure or a fantasy whose imprimatur seems vital to the client. In some cases, these instances often indicate unfinished business with significant others — parents, partners, mentors, anyone whose approval was desired but denied repeatedly. When these experiences occur early in life and don’t find suitable channels for recognition and reframing, they tend to stipple our emotional pathways with the shadows of their own patterned eaves.
In one of our sessions, AJ asked me if I believed there to be a difference between being “perfect” and being “complete”. I was stumped for a moment because this is a dichotomy I too have wrestled with on and off. He then proceeded to describe a childhood incident which jutted stark in his memory. He came home after winning a quiz at school where he answered a tie-breaker: What is the currency of Japan? At this point, AJ makes a joke about his “yen” for trivia, a rare deviation from his usually primed demeanor and we both managed tiny chuckles. He was 11 then and incredibly proud of knowing this tidbit. When he got home, filled with all the celebratory huzzah, he eagerly squealed the exciting news and in response his father looked up from the TV and told him to do something less “useless” with his time than wasting it on quizzes. The look on his face as he narrates this scene to me, ad verbatim, is one of defeat mixed with confusion.
“How should an 11 years old be more useful?”, he asks me.
I don’t know. I don’t think I want 11 years old kids to prioritize being “useful”. I want them surrounded with other adjectives and adverbs like “inquisitive”, “lively”, “sincere” but I have sat in the same clinic and watched people’s self-worth go up in smoke like lightning crashing into someone’s sleepy chimney, when they start speaking of their childhoods. Someone tries to mellow their sobbing hiccups about hiding their drawing book in a hole they dug out in the backyard because art was considered a waste of time. Another remembers being exposed to the most deleterious details of their parents’ divorce because each one wanted the child to take their side even if it meant forgetting to pick the same child up from school and using that as a blaming gambit for the other. Someone else cries through episodes of body dysphoria as they rattle slight after slight where body-shaming and colorism dressed in casual remarks by their own family members slowly eroded their ability to look at themselves in a mirror without being swept away in overwhelming judgment. Each person also relates other stories from their adulthoods where they went through periods of abuse and alienation because whenever they hit a rough spot, these triggers would come alive in the most vicious way possible and they believed that they didn’t deserve much or anything at all.
I remember writing my therapy notes while constantly replaying Judith Lewis Herman’s oracular precision in my head — “After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.” (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror)
These stories aren’t islets swimming lazily in their own singular consciousness, they are a collective, thunderous torrent that gushes forth with the experiences of so many children, adolescents and even adults whose families and parents drilled a chasm of self-doubt so steep that in a lot of cases, they have spent a large part of their lives trying to climb out from the pits of this syncope with little to no help.
What does familial gaslighting mean in the truest sense? It is difficult to pin it down and isolate the demarcations to a few microscopic details. It sits at the cusp of manifold co-morbidities. Parents trying to control the lives of their children often end up camouflaging co-dependency as care or concern. Parents displaying passive-aggressive and avoidant tendencies with their children from an early age. Parents making children think they need to jump through fiery hoops just to get bare minimum acknowledgement and appreciation. Children aren’t means to satisfying a parent’s own half-accomplished or suppressed life goals, nor are they vehicles for someone else’s vicarious living. This idea of a “mini-me” might seem cute at first but it can have perplexing aftereffects when you force your child to become another version of you without realizing that every child should have the freedom to choose a life that best suits their own emotional and mental capacities as well as is reflective of their own rich interior environments. Children aren’t crutches, nor are they prizes. They can be your pride and joy but they also need ample space to find their own mooring as and direction so they can discover who they are, separate from you.
Parents in certain cultures end up being upheld as an all-encompassing authority or even representative of divinity and questioning them is seen as a sign of disrespect and betrayal. Sometimes the incessant references to how challenging it was to raise a child can unfortunately become a plot device of sorts to steer the narrative of their lives in a direction more preferable to the parent. A friend of mine remarks how every time she starts dating someone new, her mother withdraws into a prickly shell only to come out once in a while with passive aggressive insults about her selfishness and about how hard the pregnancy was for her and how she was advised to abort the baby but she persevered only to see her own daughter disregard her in favour of “timepass boys”. This friend is in her late 30s and works herself to the bone taking care of her family. Her mother’s statements spiral her depression to such an extent that she has contemplated suicide on certain unbearable days.
It doesn’t need to get to this stage. It doesn’t have to be a conflict zone for affection and affliction. Parenting is hard in our socio-political climate. No one is knocking off the challenges and sacrifices it demands from those who embark on this journey. Parents have to deal with ongoing demands of raising children which can be taxing and exhausting on several fronts. There are financial, physical and psychological securities that are always at stake when it comes to raising children. A lot of parents are also carrying their own stigmas, unprocessed indignations from inter-generational traumas and bullying they experienced from their parents/family. The normalization of familial abuse as tradition or morality is what keeps it going and makes it a chronic social illness. When new parents need help, they get echo chambers instead of guided interventions or trained professionals to aid their journey. Parenting is also a skill and needs to be acquired with a little bit of help in addition to humility while making room for some failures and some stepping stones. Parents need to recognize the thresholds that are not only cognitively discernible but also necessary for a compatible and two-way relationship between their kids and them. Every time you sneak in a pejorative and demean a child’s intelligence, body, social skills, you are dropping an invisible but incredibly poisonous seed for future self-sabotage and destruction. From lisps to self-harm, a lot of what strikes long-term indentations can be traced back to feeling reduced and dismissed in parental and early caregiving relationships.
A lot of grown-ups are still trapped in repeat-and-repress cycles which end up destabilizing other significant relationships in their lives. Those stinging moments from our past and sometimes our present continuous, are often put away in a box but we carry that increasingly bulky box around with us. When certain stressors hammer open the lock, all those fears, put-downs, repudiations, denials, bitterness come out as fresh today as they were then. It is the trickle of lemon juice on a seemingly dormant but still raw wound. We also end up choosing partners/spouses from a place of fear (of loneliness, social desirability, familial expectations). We then might enter into new relationship by prefacing it with what we can “do” v/s who we “are”. And then we constantly value our worth against performing labour alone. This is a toxic cycle because it can either lead to internalization of harm or externalization. Neither of which helps us feel better or reconcile the pain we are holding onto with dear life.
We may not be children anymore but that doesn’t mean parts of us aren’t still trying to survive our childhoods. In psychoanalysis the term “repetition compulsion” represents something similar. It ascribes some of the iterative actions we perform to early life traumatic experiences stating that we often reenact or repeat those experienes in hopes of gaining power or mastery over the original situation. It is almost a desire to acclimatize oneself with pain by continuously searching for dire situations which will lead to more pain.
Acknowledge that familial gaslighting which might have been a part of your growing up process doesn’t instantly make the rest of your relationship with your parent or other people in your life a truncated, spiritless exchange, neither does it indicate a failure on your part as a child then, and as an adult now. Very few of us can claim an unsullied, sparkling love for our parents on the regular and that is ok too. The universal model for ideal parenthood is a myth. It is important to find a voice through all the pain you might have absorbed and allowed power over your life because you assumed this was the norm for every parent-child relationship. Do not compare yourself with others who had seemingly “better” parents. It is a bottomless cave and you will keep falling in without the possibility of a tether. Remember that if you have struggled with finding acceptance in your family and with your parents, you deserve tenderness not rebuke and that your ache is valid, as is your love. You can still care about difficult parents while you develop strong boundaries around your own mental and emotional wellness. You may not have had a lot of power to walk away from or reject familial abuse/harm but as you get older and if you are able to find the support system to help you leave it behind, do not feel guilty about taking the first step out that door. You are allowed to make a new family and you are allowed to prioritize your peace before someone else’s need to turn you into a possession.
Parents, please learn how to not anoint your own anger like a family heirloom. Please introspect how much of your own trauma is being passed on to your child without your daily awareness. Take a moment or more to assess how you speak to your children when they are at their weakest because those words will more often than not become their compass for many years to come. Your conversations with your children should be fewer lectures and more dialogues. Learn to trust your child because that is how they learn to trust themselves. Have a sense of curiosity about their lives as opposed to imposing your ideas, beliefs and value systems without their consent, particularly when they are adults themselves. When children are on their own and feel mentally unstable, they address themselves in the voices of the adults they hear around them. As adults, this continues and the lumbering ghost of a critic can dissuade us from trusting the homes we make of our own bodies. There are a lot of ways to educate yourself and to seek help if you are not entirely sure about how to build a resonant relationship with your child. You don’t have to be perfect, but being open to admitting your mistakes and using them as teaching moments for yourself can help shape a loving togetherness instead of a sparring march for control that leads to nothing but a pyrrhic victory.
Scherezade Siobhan is a psychologist, writer and a community catalyst who founded and runs The Talking Compass — a therapeutic space dedicated to providing mental counseling services and decolonizing mental health care. She is an award-winning author and poet whose work is published or forthocming in Medium, Berfrois, Feministing, The London Magazine, The Quint, Vice, Jubilat, DATABLEED, Winter Tangerine, Cordite among others. She is the author of “Bone Tongue” (Thought Catalog Books, 2015), “Father, Husband” (Salopress, 2016) and “The Bluest Kali” (Lithic Press, 2018). Find her @zaharaesque on twitter/IG/Facebook. Send her chocolate and puppies — nihilistwaffles@gmail.com.
