6 ms·

>Estranged parents often tell me that their adult child is rewriting the history of their childhood, accusing them of things they didn’t do, and/or failing to a

• throwaway98797 5y ago
  The younger generation get social value by being the saddest person in the room. Sometimes, their stories are rightfully so and deserve our help. other times they reframe their lives negatively just to win the social game of their generation. Once they reframe they start to believe thier own narrative creating a vicious cycle. The older generation, has their own problems in arrogance and ignorance, but they cant even fathom a society of young people who would compete on suffering. The disconnect will grow.
  • tclancy 5y ago
    >The younger generation get social value by being the saddest person in the room. This is pretty much classic generation gapping, blaming the other side for not understanding How Things Are. I would suggest some of what this is is a change in power dynamics. It used to be society's expectations were such that you didn't talk about your shitty parents or complain about your lot in life. That led to a lot of sadness, it just wasn't visible. Now people are more comfortable talking about these things and it makes you feel icky.
    • epsteindidntk 5y ago
      ok, billie eilish.
    • vangelis 5y ago
      The younger generation had significantly less tetraethyllead exposure. I wonder if that had any impact.
      • tclancy 5y ago
        Ha, yes. With all of the unrest in the US, I've found myself wishing the "other side" would at least reintroduce leaded gas so we'd raise kids unafraid to throw bricks again.
      • notabee 5y ago
        Yes. https://www.pnas.org/content/118/29/e2020104118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/29/e2020104118
  • malfist 5y ago
    You paint with a very broad brush.
    • throwaway98797 5y ago
      That’s true, the article in question does the same. Nuance gets lost anytime generalizations are applied. This is the way of the world. See media labeling of Gen Z or Baby Boomers. The variation in sample greater than the variety across labels.
  • wing-_-nuts 5y ago
    >The younger generation get social value by being the saddest person in the room. I don't think that's fair. I don't think those people are doing it to seek attention. What I do see is people get stuck in a spiral of rumination. It's important to understand how your past impacts who you are today, and your base temperament. If you understand that, you can work around your weaknesses. From there, you grow.
• vinhboy 5y ago
  I first learned the definition of "gaslight" like 10 years ago from a Project Manager friend who said I was "gaslighting" her because I secretly fixed a bug she complained about and pretended it was never a bug to begin with. I didn't know the meaning of the word so I looked it up. It's related to the plot of a movie I believe. It's a great word to describe the situation we were in. Nowadays people use "gaslight" to mean something different and it annoys me. But what do I know, I am not a linguist.
• Trasmatta 5y ago
  Gaslighting seems to have entirely lost its original definition. I now see it being used to describe almost any kind of disagreement or abuse. It's unfortunate, because it does disservice to actual victims of gaslighting.
• TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
  Is it really a shift in definition? Your new definition of > failed to fully empathize with me and agree with my take on the situation sounds like a disagreement over whether a fact is true.
  • everdrive 5y ago
    The difference would be the good faith of the argument. It's not gaslighting if someone believes I have my facts wrong, or my take on the situation is wrong. It WOULD be gaslighting if someone thought my take on the situation was correct, but claimed that I was wrong in order to sew doubt in me.
    • TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
      Well, isn't there some boundary at which a belief is completely unreasonable?
      • everdrive 5y ago
        In the original definition, a "gaslighter" would have to know and agree on the same facts as the victim, and then intentionally lie about them to sew doubt in the victim's mind. In your scenario, the "jerk" (for lack of a better term here, since he is not a classical gaslighter) honestly believes that the victim is incorrect, and is arguing from good faith. Good faith arguments can certainly be wrong, and can certainly be awful. [edit] I suppose I take such a hard line on this because it's childish to think that people will always empathize with you, and agree with your take on things. Quite often, the opposite will happen. This is a regular occurrence, and does not constitute abuse. Sometimes when no one agrees with you, it means you're in the wrong and you need to rethink your take on the situation. Other times, an individual can be in the right while others are wrong. This sort of conflict will be a normal part of someone's life. Further, some situations do not have a strictly "wrong" or "right," and simply constitute competing values and perspectives.
        • derbOac 5y ago
• UncleMeat 5y ago
  I think it is easy to look at this and say "wow, look at these dumb young people". But when I look around at people I know who are in this spot, the responses from parents has been truly awful. I know people whose parents have physically beaten them yet the parents still insist they were loving and cannot understand why their child broke the relationship. I know people whose parents raised them to be racist and are now shocked that their kid is cutting them off after finding an interracial relationship that their parents think is wrong. A parent who says "I just loved you the whole time" when they actually traumatized their child is gaslighting in the traditional sense.
  • elmomle 5y ago
    Agreed. When you are trying to communicate in an empathic/emotional way and the other party does not understand how to do this and defends themselves in an intellectual/unemotional way, your emotional need is profoundly unmet. This falls short of intentional gaslighting, but to critique the party seeking empathy as childish misses the point.
  • pjc50 5y ago
    Indeed. Everyone I know who is estranged from their parents is because they "came out" and the parents failed to cope.
  • silicon2401 5y ago
    It's an example of a human universal that humans believe what's convenient for them. It's convenient to be a terrible person and still believe you were a great and loving parent. Not so convenient to realize you made mistakes and weren't perfect.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• imbnwa 5y ago
  If you could demonstrate with evidence the intent and factual occurrence of a harm, it wouldn't be gaslighting, it would just be factual lying. No one has ever confused those two things. People use the term gaslighting primarily in contexts where the truth is a matter of perspective and 'objectivity' is irresolvable but the claimant has subjective confidence the alleged did indeed exact the harm. It isn't surprising older folk have a hard time treating with a grey notion like that, but that's just another sign of the seachange. See Judge Joe Brown's take on Bill Cosby's release versus that of mainstream Black media.
• dahfizz 5y ago
  Using zeitgeist terms like "gaslight" and "toxic" immediately makes me take someone less seriously. They are words for social media virtue signaling and nothing more.
  • bigbillheck 5y ago
    As if"virtue signaling" isn't at least as bad a tell.
    • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      What other word can be used to describe that behavior? If there was one that carried the same "doesn't really care just wants to be seen saying a particular thing" connotation without triggering half the left people would instantly adopt it because there are tons of instances where you see that kind of behavior and want to call it out. Grandstanding is also close but carries the wrong connotations of wanting to influence opinions whereas "virtue singling" is toward your own tribe. Bike shedding is also close but implies actually caring about the outcome or wanting to contribute to the discussion in a non bad faith way.
      • Apocryphon 5y ago
        There are plenty of specific phrasing that can be applicable. "Feigning outrage." "Speaking in bad faith." "Muttering meaningless shibboleths." Virtue signaling itself has become a virtue signal, an empty jargon that denotes the user as a particular tribe.
• parrellel 5y ago
  I mean, there's probably a lot of actual classical gaslighting going on to. My interactions with my mother definitely fall into the old film definition of the thing. "I never chased you around the apartment with a knife! It was brainwashing!"
• steve_adams_86 5y ago
  I’ve noticed a trend amongst other 30-somethings I know to adopt this sort of pop psychology which encourages people to look very, very closely at their childhoods. It’s a great idea to understand your upbringing, but it’s not a trivial effort to do it properly. I don’t think it’s always a great idea for 2 reasons. One, it’s known that our memories change over time. Traumatic memories can become better than they should (it wasn’t that bad, right?), while frustrating memories can become worse than they should (every reiteration of the memory solidifies just how frustrating it was!). In general, this kind of reflection, unless we have external sources to affirm our recollections (siblings or a parent/adult we trust), seems like it could easily become counter productive. Two, without understanding ourselves reasonably well in our present state, seeking out past events to construct an explanation of who we are can lead to some very bad science in which we attempt to explain things we poorly understand in ways that don’t make sense. I’ve had several conversations with friends over the last 5 years or so in which they elaborated on weird stuff their parents did. In some cases it’s simply to acknowledge their influences and why they might be the way they are. In others, perhaps most, they appear to be looking for excuses and ways to apply blame externally. This is obviously anecdotal. Maybe I hang out with weird people. In any case I’ve always strongly encouraged people to navigate this kind of thing with a therapist or other family if possible. Doing this in a vacuum is very risky. It seems to lead to exactly what you’re outlining here. Children resenting parents for things that they believe negatively affected them, which the parents don’t even remember - or remember differently. Of course they remember them differently though. They remember them from different frames of reference, different stages of mental development, and for different reasons!
  • 0xB31B1B 5y ago
    I don't think this is what is going on in the article and in these cases of estrangement though. In my experience with myself and my friends estrangement isn't the result of someone who is 35 looking back and misremembering a slight in their childhood, its the result of a long and ongoing issue with a family member that degrades the relationship over time and that impacts them in the current moment today. I am estranged from my father and I want to have a relationship with him BUT I know that if I reopen ties with him, he will emotionally abuse me in the present day.
• 0xB31B1B 5y ago
  The children who are estranged from their parents are experiencing the traditional gaslighting, and not the more recent thing you bring up. I am estranged from my father for a number of reasons, but mainly because my parents divorced when I was young and my father spend the next 15 years trying to destroy my relationship with my mother through basically any means at his disposal. It came to a head when my father called me late one night while I was in college, and he told me "We did it, we won, we beat her". I was very confused and asked him to elaborate, and he told me that he sued my mom in court for child support that she paid while he was paying for my college attendance. He told me that he loved me more than my mom and that he was paying for college because he loved me and that my mom wasn't paying because she didn't love me. He had previously used money as a weapon in my relationships before and we had discussed and agreed that he cannot talk about finances like this with a 19 year old who is (1) needs financial support to make it through adolescence and early adulthood and (2) wants to maintain relationships with both parents. It was impossible for him to get over the anger and resentment he had for my mom and to keep that out of our relationship, so I cut ties with him. Having talked with him about this a lot before cutting ties, he would consistently gaslight me about how (1) my mom never cared about me (2) his remarried family were the only family that cared about me and (3) that everything he did, he did for love of me and not out of spite for my mother and (4) that he never did any of the stuff I specifically asked him not to do to help me maintain my familial relationships.
  • alisonkisk 5y ago
    Not every form of abuse or deceipt or misbehavior is gaslighting.
  • anthonygd 5y ago
    > The children who are estranged from their parents are experiencing the traditional gaslighting, and not the more recent thing you bring up. And sometimes, the parent is experiencing gaslighting. We all have problems and the difference between parent and child fades with time (most of us live both roles). Without an objective record of fact and an independent analysis, it very well could be either party or more probably both that are guilty of gaslighting. Nothing is wrong with being estranged though unless you want there to be.
• pseudalopex 5y ago
  Psychologists talked about unintentional gaslighting at least 40 years ago. "The motiva­tion may be conscious, although it is usually unconscious; and almost invariably the conscious motives are rationalizations and/or distortions of deeper, more complex, and less acceptable motives."[1] [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21674086.1981.11926942 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21674086.1981.11...
  • 77pt77 5y ago
    That abstract is nothing but Freudian psychoanalytical lingo.
• dkarl 5y ago
  I disagree. I don't like the way the power of the word has been eroded either, but gaslighting in the original sense does happen, and I think parents are frequent offenders, because they become accustomed to the power they have over their kids' perception of reality. The most extreme example I know of: a woman I know was sexually abused by a teenage neighbor when she was very young. When her parents found out, they told him he wasn't supposed to do that, and when they caught him again, they uninvited him from their house for a few years, then welcomed him back, and scolded her for being "rude" and "dramatic" when she cried and didn't want to be in the same room as him. Now, before you get suspicious, that previous sentence was her parents' version of the story, which she accepted for years. So this guy was in and out of her house almost her whole childhood, treated as part of the family. Her mother even showed her the "very nice" note he sent declining their invitation to the party they were throwing for her college graduation. When they got on Facebook, they immediately friended him, so he got all the family news they posted, including when and where she moved, the new jobs she got, etc. They called her paranoid and self-centered when she asked them to stop sharing all the latest about his life with her and vice-versa. The family narrative growing up was that all of that was perfectly healthy and normal, and she had difficulties with it because she was a difficult, dramatic, and irrational person, the kid with all the problems who spoiled things for her otherwise perfect family. So that's already gaslighting on an emotional level, but if you want it at the factual level, they covered that, too. As she started talking to her parents about it as an adult, it dawned on them that what they did looked bad by "present-day standards," and they started changing their story about what happened. In their version now, they banned him from the house after the first offense and didn't allow him back until she moved out for college. They never scolded her for being "rude" when she was scared of him; they were sympathetic. Her mother even tried to say she arranged counseling for her, and then backed down and said, "Well, people didn't get counseling back then [the 1980s] but we did the equivalent," by which they meant talking to the priest at her school about her "emotional problems." That's pretty legit gaslighting when you're in your thirties and suddenly your parents change the story they tell about how they handled your molestation, after sticking to the previous story for a quarter century. Not only that, the ease and lack of conscience with which her parents changed their story made my friend wonder how much of the version she grew up with and took for granted was fictionalized. She doesn't really remember how many times the abuse happened, what period of time it spanned, who put a stop to it, or how or when her parents found out. She has a few fragmented memories of certain times and circumstances that she mostly trusts, and the rest was secondhand via her parents. I could tell you other stories about parents misremembering things to their own advantage, probably unwittingly in most cases. I remember my sister screaming and crying and slamming doors about our parents not letting her go to a certain camp one summer that she had been to the previous summer. My mother's memory is that it was my sister's decision and she didn't want to go the second year. I don't think my mother is consciously lying. People's memories change over time, usually in ways that protect and flatter them.
• mrow84 5y ago
  From the perspective of a child who believes something happened, mightn’t a parent “not acknowledging the harm they caused or are still causing” seems very much like “intentionally sowing doubt about a true fact”? Characterising that point of view as merely “Someone has failed to fully empathize with me and agree with my take on the situation” seems ungenerous, and also to implicitly doubt their understanding of what happened, without a particular reason to favour either the child’s or parent’s interpretation. The problem is that everyone operates on their own understanding, by definition, so wouldn’t it be better to, rather than say “this isn’t gaslighting”, instead note that it being gaslighting depends upon them being correct about what happened?
• notabee 5y ago
  *sowing Also, you're bringing up the textual source of the term, not its general connotation. The connotation is when an abuser, cheater, or otherwise harm causing individual decides to try to rewrite history or attack the competence of the individual bringing the grievance rather than address the grievance in good faith. There is a big difference between disagreeing on the facts of a situation and trying to invalidate someone's perception of the situation in a manipulative way to avoid blame. If your first instinct when someone says "you hurt me" is to argue why it's not your fault, you should probably talk to a therapist about that. That is how a lot of families work, and will even couch it in terms of "tough love" despite it being frankly abusive behavior. To use the word of the day, that's toxic.
  • samatman 5y ago
    I guess you've never had someone accusing you of hurting them when you didn't? The optimal move is to disengage rather than argue, but I assure you that mandating that people "own" whatever spurious accusation is thrown their way just opens up a rich avenue for passive-aggressive abuse. Your contrasting the textual source with the general connotation is exactly the concept drift referenced by the post you're replying to.
    • notabee 5y ago
      I have indeed been accused when I didn't agree with the objective harm caused. Thankfully, I typically didn't further escalate the situation and act like a jerk by denying their perception of the issue. Just because you don't immediately mount a fiery defense doesn't mean that you own their position, their feelings, or have to agree with them. This is emotional intelligence 101. Typically a quiet, non-escalated discussion can help both parties feel better, clear up misunderstandings, and if apologies are merited (even from the initial accuser) they can be had. But only if you don't get someone's hackles up in the first place, or deny their right to air a grievance. Again, the fact that you are already considering it a contest to be won or lost (or avoided immediately without discussion, which is a sure indicator to folks how much you don't care) probably says a lot about the lens you view the world through. Referencing the connotation means that there is a general accepted usage, which is not the hyperbolic "didn't absolutely agree with their grievance" that the original post I replied to was making. In general terms, I think it has come to include unconscious manipulation in addition to the previous, narrow definition of conscious, machiavellian attempts to dispute concrete facts.