There are no mods. Why do you keep saying there are? 
Sure there are- they are the opponents of the Rockers. 
I was actually gaslighted (in the modern sense of doubting your own reality) for years by my now-ex. True gaslighting would be pretty hard to pull off on the Dope; there are too many dissenting voices, and the relationships between posters aren’t personal enough, regardless of how contentious they may be.
Gaslighting also doesn’t consist of a single remark. It’s a process in which the gaslighter gradually substitutes a reality of their creation for your own. It consists of multiple remarks over a significant period of time. My therapist described my experience as “looking into a funhouse mirror” my ex had created. I think that’s a pretty accurate metaphor for gaslighting. The damage is substantial, and it takes time to recuperate from it.
I really wish people wouldn’t use it to mean a remark that made them feel they were unintelligent, acting in bad faith, disrespected, or cast in a bad light.
I think for the SDMB it is using the term “gaslighting” as another way to call someone a liar. You are correct that it really is not possible to actually gaslight someone here. To do so would require everyone to be in on it and that is super-unlikely to happen. Bordering on impossible I would think.
Yeah. That’s why “accusations of gaslighting” is a bigger concern than the actual thing.
Yeah.
I think some people may confuse actual gaslighting with saying “In my experience that just doesn’t happen!” Which can very well be true, even if in the other person’s experience it really does happen. We’ve got people on these boards who are leading very different lives from each other.
And sometimes people leave off the “in my experience” part, and just say ‘that almost never happens’ to somebody who said ‘this happens all the time’.
And occasionally, of course, the person who thinks it happens extremely commonly is wrong about that, and whatever it is they’re talking about is overall quite rare, even if they personally do seem to keep running into it. (Or vice versa; someone may genuinely think it almost never happens when it’s actually quite common.) Sometimes these things can be settled as a matter of factual statistics; sometimes, depending on the subject, it’s difficult to do so.
I really do feel as though the definition is entirely backwards here. Gaslighting itself is the accusation of lying. Telling someone that what they expereinced is not what they expereinced is calling someone a liar.
However, for some reason, if it is couched in passive aggressive terms, and instead of saying, “You are lying about that”, saying “What you said didn’t happen” it becomes acceptable.
Now, I’ll admit that I sometimes miss some levels of social nuance, but I find that to make things more hostile, not less. When people are told what they really think, what they really feel, what they really experienced, they are being called liars, but for some reason, are not allowed to call that out.
It’s absolutely not. I’m not calling you a liar here; I’m just saying you’re mistaken.
That’s how it works, in an honest disagreement between two people showing good faith.
Here’s an example, divorced from the current thread:
A couple years back, I was at a state educator union conference, and there was some proposal about supporting trans students. Another teacher sitting next to me leaned over and said something like, “At such-and-such high school, there are litterboxes in the bathrooms for students who identify as cats.” She said it authoritatively, and when I first pressed her, she cited her sources (which were, I think, a teacher at that high school).
I categorically shut her down on this telling her, “What you said didn’t happen.” I wasn’t accusing her of being a liar, because she genuinely believed this pernicious nonsense. I wasn’t trying to convince her that she had imagined her direct experience. Instead, I was telling her that her reliance on specific evidence was faulty, that the chances she was describing an accurate phenomenon were vanishingly small.
I wasn’t gaslighting her. I wasn’t accusing her of lying. I was accusing her of relying on hateful right-wing rumors that were started by liars.
Gaslighting someone rarely consists of accusing someone of lying. It usually consists of accusing them of an overactive imagination. But a key element is that the gaslighter knows that the person is correct. If I deny someone’s claim, and I genuinely believe they’re wrong, there’s no way I’m gaslighting them.
In fact, you were explaining that she had been gaslight.
No I wasn’t. She wasn’t being gaslit at all. That’s not what that term means.
The quintessential “gaslighting” comes from the play: a husband turns down the gaslights in the home to make it progressively dimmer, then denies that there’s any dimming going on when his wife complains about the darkness. Because she’s convinced that her internal reality does not match the external reality, she concludes the problem is with her: in this case, she concludes that she’s going blind. (edit: I just read a synopsis, and he’s not deliberately dimming the gaslights, but he is denying that they’re dimming).
The elements of gaslighting are:
- The gaslighter and the victim share a view of reality.
- The gaslighter denies the view of reality and insists it’s all in the victim’s head.
- The gaslighter intends for the victim to question their ability to understand reality, undermining their confidence.
If any of those elements are missing, it’s not gaslighting. In the “kitty litter” example, elements 2 and 3 are missing.
“Gaslighting” and “lying” are not synonyms, any more than “animals” and “king cobras” are synonyms.
Yeah, if you’re using the classic definition of the word and not the current accusatory, ‘snarl word’, definition.
In my experience, accusing someone of ‘gaslighting’ on message board and the like translates to ‘I can’t argue against your point with evidence so I’ll just accuse you of making shit up by claiming that you are trying to gaslight me!’.
Correct. Either the snarl word or the classic definition is a serious thing to level at someone, though, and I don’t appreciate either of them, in the active or the passive voice.
While “you are wrong” is not an accusation of lying, it is an unnecessary personalization of the discussion. It raises the heat of the conversation. It’s better to state the correction without making it a “you vs me” issue.
The typically response people object to isn’t, “you are wrong”, but, “that’s bullshit”. I suppose “that’s not true” would lower the temp a bit as compared to “that’s bullshit”, but they do mean the same thing.
Sort of. “Bullshit” is typically thought of as falsehoods created with reckless disregard for the truth. trump is the quintessential BSer; whether something is true or not simply does not matter to him. Hell, he may not even know the difference between the very ideas of “truth” and “untruth” in general.
Creating BS is by definition a bad-faith thing to do. Buying into and repeating BS is at best innocently ignorant and is more typically willfully ignorant, irresponsible, and often in bad faith as well.
Suggesting your counterparty is spewing BS is very different from suggesting they are mistaken.
I agree with that; but I’ve seen people take offense at it no matter how it’s phrased. Some people object to being told that they’re wrong no matter how gently it’s put.
Seconded.
If exactly that is what’s happening, yes. If you say ‘my arm hurts’ and I say ‘no it doesn’t’, that would be calling you a liar.
If you say ‘the teacher is trying to make my kids feel horribly guilty’ and I say ‘no, the teacher is trying to teach plain fact about American history’, that isn’t the same thing at all. Even if your kids really did come home from school saying ‘the teacher’s trying to make us feel guilty!’ (Unless of course the teacher really was trying to shame the specific kids in her class; which isn’t generally what’s going on.)
If you say ‘everybody who has arms is in significant pain all the time, it’s an essential characteristic of having arms’ and I say ‘no, most of those who have arms aren’t in pain’, then no matter how much your particular arms hurt I’m still the one who’s right – and I’m not denying that your arms hurt. Your insistence that my arms must also hurt, or even that almost everyone I interact with must have seriously painful arms, is the false accusation of lying.
If one person’s information about x leads them to say that y is an essential characteristic of x, and other people’s information about x leads them to say that no it isn’t – nobody is necessarily accusing anybody of lying, let alone trying to deny their specific experience. They’re each saying that the other is mistaken; which might be because they believed misinformation, or might be because they have incomplete information, or might be because they just plain misunderstood the information they have.
(I remember, years ago, reading something from someone who’d adopted a kitten. They chose the one they did because, when they picked up that kitten, it purred – curled up into a tight ball and purred.
They were then puzzled when the kitten, once in their house, took weeks to purr again, and started off clearly trying to avoid them.
They had misinterpreted the purr – because they had incomplete information, and didn’t know about the “nervous purr”. Some cats purr when they’re frightened. Their direct experience of the purr was accurate – except that it meant the reverse of what they thought it did.)
This is an all too accurate example because it’s very much in the eye of the beholder. The teacher may think they are teaching plain facts about American history, but actually be teaching a revisionist curriculum that, if not conciously designed to induce guilt, commonly does have that effect. Or they may really be teaching a normal curriculum and the children are just misinterpreting it. Schools can only cover a small part of history - it’s very easy to change the overall message by what you choose to include and omit, and whether you put things in the context of their time or not.
And each side may think their view is so obviously correct that the other must be acting in bad faith.
Are you using “revisionist” in a pejorative sense there? It reads like that to me.
But, let’s say that that was such a convenient counter example to my post that I think that you just made it up.
You are telling me that a teacher believed this stuff about litter boxes? Shouldn’t teachers know better than that? It does seem fairly farfetched that not only would someone who was in the teaching profession believe something so stupid, but would also randomly tell it to you, a random person at a conference.
Now, I’m not saying that I don’t believe you here, as I know that not all teachers are as well informed, but what if I didn’t? Would you accept that I think that your story is fabricated? Does this improve our discourse?
For instance, here. This is a story about a teacher that did something stupid. A poster does not believe that a teacher would do something like that, and claims that the story is fabricated. Is that the sort of discourse that you think should be acceptable?
If so, then great. But I do find it extremely tiresome, personally.
“I’m not saying you are lying, I’m saying you are making that up.”
I’m honestly not seeing the daylight here.
But what about when you have no reason to believe that they are wrong other than you want them to be?
And that is what I have seen here quite often. Someone says what they think, feel, or beleive, and they are told that that’s not what they think, feel, or believe.
And there are some bad teachers out there that do teach things in a rather hamfisted way that does shame the specific kids in the class. If someone says that is happening, and someone else says it is not, that is calling them a liar. As @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness points out, not all teachers are perfect.
And if a student says that the feel as though they were made to feel guilty, that feeling is real, no matter what the teacher did or said. Denying that feeling is also a matter of invalidating their own experience.
There may be things to address about why they feel that way, but telling that they don’t, or that they shouldn’t doesn’t address the very real fact that they do.
That’s rarely what I see, that’s usually on the other side of things, actually, when outgroups are broadbrushed (All people who voted for Trump did so because X type stuff), but I am talking about when someone invalidates reported experience of another poster.
And sometimes it’s because they are not wrong, and no matter how gently you tell them that they are wrong, they still aren’t.