People who like to practice their pursuasion skills/“recreational gaslighting”

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I have two ex-friends who did this. An example:

We were drinking in a bar. I mentioned that I was going to a wedding the next day. He asked me whether I had ordered flowers. Puzzled, I said no.

“You have to bring flowers to a wedding”.

I replied that I had been to many weddings, and never brought flowers. A gift, yes, always. But flowers, never.

He wouldn’t let up. “EVERYONE knows you have to bring flowers to a wedding!”

I asked him if he could give me a cite (SDMB conditioning at work). He would counter that wasn’t necessary, because “EVERYONE knows that you HAVE to bring flowers to a wedding!”

It went on and on, but you get the picture.

This guy used to be in sales, and I wonder if he was just practicing his skills, sort of like I (a retired engineer/math guy) find patterns in license plate numbers when I’m sitting in traffic. The creepy part is that he gets mad and refuses to consider my suggestion that he’s doing that.

It seems a little like gaslighting, in that if I had accepted his claim, he would have succeeded in getting me to question my reality. But AIUI gaslighters are usually trying to gain something tangible (control, exoneration, etc.). All this guy would have gained would have been the satisfaction of convincing me of an obvious falsehood.

He didn’t do this very often. If he had, I wouldn’t have wanted to be friends with him. It just seemed to come over him on occasion. Maybe, stress?

Thoughts?

2

When I was about twelve, my older step-sister brought her four-year-old son to our house for a day. I had my college-aged brother’s Psychology book that had some interesting experiments…

We were in the kid’s room, bored, when I held up an old tennis ball and asked him if he knew what it is. “No”, he said, so looking around the room I saw the back of a paperback novel with a blurb about its awards. Aha! I thought. I told the kid the ball is a “Pulitzer”. I used that term several times, as in “Throw the Pulitzer to me”. Then he went home.

The next time he visited was perhaps two years later. I found the tennis ball, held it up, and asked him what it is. “A Pulitzer!”, he says.

At that moment I realized that stuff like that was dangerous, and vowed not to do experiments like that again. I just hope that the kid didn’t get laughed at when he asked one of his friends to throw that Pulitzer.

3

I always tried to talk people into 2 topping pizzas in college but I never got any traction. Like I’m gonna eat a whole pizza, ok. It was always one topping or cheese. 2 toppings is good though. New York City is 1000 miles away, nobody will ever know.

4

I find gaslighters usually can’t cope with their tactics being turned on them or their questions being scrutinized. Just ask him when’s the last time he brought flowers to a wedding.

5

Did he ever succeed? Did he then just say “haha just taking the piss. I had you! Flowers to a wedding. LOL”. Or just leave it, having knowingly incepted some manner of complete BS on you.

Not that someone who does the the former would be someone I’d want to hang out with, it would be a little less bizarre.

6

No, he never did. And I don’t hang out with him anymore. Let him pay for his therapy.

7

Bwaa? Is an aversion to two-topping pizzas a thing? I never heard of that.

8

I have a few friends in the legal profession and from time-to-time they seem to love engaging in vigorous debate over the most inane things. A lot of times I don’t even think they believe their own position, they just enjoy the process.

9

Is he a narcissist who just didn’t want to back down from a clearly incorrect assertion?

10

Not usually. He just seems to get into these moods once in a while.

11

Yeah, I’ve known lawyers like that. The ability to argue any side of an issue–whether or not they actually believe it–seems to be a necessary skill.

This guy isn’t a lawyer, he teaches English in community colleges. And as I said above, he used to be a salesman.

12

How far into this process was he/were the two of you?

13

“It’s a tough racket.”

14

I haven’t been drinking in a bar for a long time, but in ordinary circumstances I would have just shrugged and said something like “Well, I guess I’ll just be wrong then” and changed the subject. I just don’t see the point in arguing about stupid things.

15

Some people gaslight for the fuck of it, no need to ‘profit’ them other than to give them the jollies frisson. My ex, that cratered my skull into a wall used to try to gaslight me, but I did things like actually carry a dayrunner and keep a diary of dates, places and people … at one point he tried to gaslight me/guilt me about “not being in the office when he dropped by to take me to lunch” on a day that I was not only in office, had an appontment when he “claimed” to have seen me having lunch at Waterside [riverside shopping mall in downtown Norfolk Va] which would have been a trick since I only got half an hour for lunch, and the employment agency I was working for was in Virginia Beach .. the receptionist hadn’t left her desk even to go pee even confirmed nobody stopped by to see me male or female …

16

I do like to practice my powers of persuasion, but I don’t gaslight. I prefer to think of it as ‘conversational jousting’. (I used to call it ‘oral jousting’, but realized that suggests something completely different.) I contend that sometimes there is fun to be had in speculation, with verbal thrust and parry coming fast and quick. Then again, it comes to be me naturally: I majored in Rhetoric, with a concentration in Persuasive Communication. My wife hates it.

17

Blow holes in the dingbattiness.

Lawrence, were you thinking of a wake or funeral visitation? Housewarming? Junior prom? Second date?

Where do you even put your flowers when you get there? Choir loft? The coat check? The gift envelope cage? Is that why there were petals in the chocolate fountain at Lindsay’s wedding?

Dismiss the dingbattiness:

I’m boycotting imported flowers.
Flowers are bad luck at weddings.
Tina’s allergic.
I’m using the hotel shuttle, valet, etc.
They said no flowers.

Absorb the db:
“Yea, red roses, because of the love.”

I’m usually nervous that a pizza is getting too heavy. One meat and two veg, max. A common Chicago pizza is SMOG - sausage (raw Ital), mushroom, onion, green pepper. It can be pulled off but often runs too raw (g.pepps, esp) or too wet or too chunky and just too busy. I mean, I’ll still gleefully scarf 140% of a reasonable share of the busy wet pizza but it’s gilding the lilies.

18

Bob, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard an adult say this month. Where do you get such ignorant ideas from? Have you always had this problem of spewing nonsense, or did it start recently?

19

You can also one-up the dingbattiness.

“Oh, sure, I know about the flower rule. A bunch of friends and I always go in together, right, we pool our money, and we buy a bouquet the size of a Volkswagen Van. No, not a Volkswagen Van full of flowers, I mean, just, like, an actual bouquet that’s the size of a Volkswagen Van. We have this one florist we like to use. They’ll do special orders. We’ll tell them, this time, we want only red and white flowers, because the bride is from Greenland…”

20

Naw, keep it restricted to the dingbat idea. Don’t give any opportunities to change the subject. We like him,
just not when he gets -like this- so give him a reason to think twice next time. Return fire as needed, ideally around others aware of Lawrence’s Insistences, who can join the reinforcement teasing. He’ll remember.

“Yea, I gotta stop for charcoal and kosher salt on the way home. Do we bring flowers to Menard’s, Lawrence?”