"You’re so sensitive. You’re so emotional. You’re defensive. You’re
overreacting. Calm down. Relax. Stop freaking out! You’re crazy! I was
just joking, don’t you have a sense of humor? You’re so dramatic. Just
get over it already!
Sound familiar?
If you’re a woman, it probably does.
Do you ever hear any of these comments from your spouse, partner,
boss, friends, colleagues, or relatives after you have expressed
frustration, sadness, or anger about something
they have done or said?
When someone says these things to you, it’s not an example of
inconsiderate behavior. When your spouse shows up half an hour late to
dinner without calling—that’s inconsiderate behavior. A remark intended
to shut you down like, “Calm down, you’re overreacting,” after you just
addressed someone else’s bad behavior, is emotional manipulation—pure
and simple.
And this is the sort of emotional manipulation that feeds an epidemic
in our country, an epidemic that defines women as crazy, irrational,
overly sensitive, unhinged. This epidemic helps fuel the idea that women
need only the slightest provocation to unleash their (crazy) emotions.
It’s patently false and unfair.
I think it’s time to separate inconsiderate behavior from emotional
manipulation and we need to use a word not found in our normal
vocabulary.
I want to introduce a helpful term to identify these reactions: gaslighting.
Gaslighting is a term, often used by mental health professionals (I
am not one), to describe manipulative behavior used to confuse people
into thinking their reactions are so far off base that they’re crazy.
The term comes from the 1944 MGM film,
Gaslight, starring
Ingrid Bergman. Bergman’s husband in the film, played by Charles Boyer,
wants to get his hands on her jewelry. He realizes he can accomplish
this by having her certified as insane and hauled off to a mental
institution. To pull of this task, he intentionally sets the gaslights
in their home to flicker off and on, and every time Bergman’s character
reacts to it, he tells her she’s just seeing things. In this setting, a
gaslighter is someone who presents false information to alter the
victim’s perception of him or herself.
Today, when the term is referenced, it’s usually because the
perpetrator says things like, “You’re so stupid” or “No one will ever
want you,” to the victim. This is an intentional, pre-meditated form of
gaslighting, much like the actions of Charles Boyer’s character in
Gaslight, where he strategically plots to confuse Ingrid Bergman’s character into believing herself unhinged.
The form of gaslighting I’m addressing is not always pre-mediated or
intentional, which makes it worse, because it means all of us,
especially women, have dealt with it at one time or another.
Those who engage in gaslighting create a reaction—whether it’s anger,
frustration, sadness—in the person they are dealing with. Then, when
that person reacts, the gaslighter makes them feel uncomfortable and
insecure by behaving as if their feelings aren’t rational or normal.
My friend Anna (all names changed to protect privacy) is married to a
man who feels it necessary to make random and unprompted comments about
her weight. Whenever she gets upset or frustrated with his insensitive
comments, he responds in the same, defeating way, “You’re so sensitive.
I’m just joking.”
My friend Abbie works for a man who finds a way, almost daily, to
unnecessarily to unnecessarily shoot down her performance and her work
product. Comments like, “Can’t you do something right?” or “Why did I
hire you?” are regular occurrences for her. Her boss has no problem
firing people (he does it regularly), so you wouldn’t know that based on
these comments, Abbie has worked for him for six years. But every time
she stands up for herself and says, “It doesn’t help me when you say
these things,” she gets the same reaction: “Relax; you’re overreacting.”
Abbie thinks her boss is just being a jerk in these moments, but the
truth is, he is making those comments to manipulate her into thinking
her reactions are out of whack. And it’s exactly that kind manipulation
that has left her feeling guilty about being sensitive, and as a result,
she has not left her job.
But gaslighting can be as simple as someone smiling and saying
something like, “You’re so sensitive,” to somebody else. Such a comment
may seem innocuous enough, but in that moment, the speaker is making a
judgment about how someone else should feel.
While dealing with gaslighting isn’t a universal truth for women, we
all certainly know plenty of women who encounter it at work, home, or in
personal relationships.
And the act of gaslighting does not simply affect women who are not
quite sure of themselves. Even vocal, confident, assertive women are
vulnerable to gaslighting.
Why?
Because women bare the brunt of our neurosis. It is much easier for
us to place our emotional burdens on the shoulders of our wives, our
female friends, our girlfriends, our female employees, our female
colleagues, than for us to impose them on the shoulders of men.
It’s a whole lot easier to emotionally manipulate someone who has
been conditioned by our society to accept it. We continue to burden
women because they don’t refuse our burdens as easily. It’s the ultimate
cowardice.
Whether gaslighting is conscious or not, it produces the same result: it renders some women emotionally mute.
These women aren’t able to clearly express to their spouses that what
is said or done to them is hurtful. They can’t tell their boss that his
behavior is disrespectful and prevents them from doing their best work.
They can’t tell their parents that, when they are being critical, they
are doing more harm than good.
When these women receive any sort of push back to their reactions, they often brush it off by saying, “Forget it, it’s okay.”
That “forget it” isn’t just about dismissing a thought, it is about self-dismissal. It’s heartbreaking.
No wonder some women are unconsciously passive aggressive when
expressing anger, sadness, or frustration. For years, they have been
subjected to so much gaslighting that they can no longer express
themselves in a way that feels authentic to them.
They say, “I’m sorry,” before giving their opinion. In an email or
text message, they place a smiley face next to a serious question or
concern, thereby reducing the impact of having to express their true
feelings.
You know how it looks: “You’re late :)”
These are the same women who stay in relationships they don’t belong
in, who don’t follow their dreams, who withdraw from the kind of life
they want to live.
Since I have embarked on this feminist self-exploration in my life
and in the lives of the women I know, this concept of women as “crazy”
has really emerged as a major issue in society at large and an equally
major frustration for the women in my life, in general.
From the way women are portrayed on reality shows, to how we
condition boys and girls to see women, we have come to accept the idea
that women are unbalanced, irrational individuals, especially in times
of anger and frustration.
Just the other day, on a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles, a
flight attendant who had come to recognize me from my many trips asked
me what I did for a living. When I told her that I write mainly about
women, she immediately laughed and asked, “Oh, about how crazy we are?”
Her gut reaction to my work made me really depressed. While she made
her response in jest, her question nonetheless makes visible a pattern
of sexist commentary that travels through all facets of society on how
men view women, which also greatly impacts how women may view
themselves.
As far as I am concerned, the epidemic of gaslighting is part of the
struggle against the obstacles of inequality that women constantly face.
Acts of gaslighting steal their most powerful tool:
their voice. This is something we do to women every day, in many different ways.
I don’t think this idea that women are “crazy,” is based in some sort
of massive conspiracy. Rather, I believe it’s connected to the slow and
steady drumbeat of women being undermined and dismissed, on a daily
basis. And gaslighting is one of many reasons why we are dealing with
this public construction of women as “crazy.”
I recognize that I’ve been guilty of gaslighting my women friends in
the past (but never my male friends—surprise, surprise). It’s shameful,
but I’m glad I realized that I did it on occasion and put a stop to it.
While I take total responsibility for my actions, I do believe that
I, along with many men, am a byproduct of our conditioning. It’s about
the general insight our conditioning gives us into admitting fault and
exposing any emotion.
When we are discouraged in our youth and early adulthood from
expressing emotion, it causes many of us to remain steadfast in our
refusal to express regret when we see someone in pain from our actions.
When I was writing this piece, I was reminded of one of my favorite
Gloria Steinem quotes, “The first problem for all of us, men and women,
is not to learn, but to unlearn.”
So for many of us, it’s first about
unlearning how to flicker those gaslights and
learning how to acknowledge and understand the feelings, opinions, and positions of the women in our lives.
But isn’t the issue of gaslighting ultimately about whether we are
conditioned to believe that women’s opinions don’t hold as much weight
as ours? That what women have to say, what they feel, isn’t quite as
legitimate?"
Source:
http://thecurrentconscience.com/blog/2011/09/12/a-message-to-women-from-a-man-you-are-not-%E2%80%9Ccrazy%E2%80%9D/
(Thanks,
Lindy!)
