7 Gaslighting Phrases Malignant Narcissists, Sociopaths

and Psychopaths Use To Silence You, Translated

psychcentral.com/blog/recovering-narcissist/2019/03/7-gaslighting-phrases-malignant-narcissists-sociopaths-and-
psychopaths-use-translated

Gaslighting is an insidious erosion of your sense of reality; it creates a mental fog of epic
proportions in the twisted “funhouse” of smoke, mirrors, and distortions that is an abusive
relationship. When a malignant narcissist gaslights you, they engage in crazymaking
discussions and character assassinations where they challenge and invalidate your thoughts,
emotions, perceptions, and sanity. Gaslighting enables narcissists, sociopaths, and
psychopaths to exhaust you to the point where you are unable to fight back. Rather than
finding ways to healthily detach from this toxic person, you are sabotaged in your efforts to
find a sense of certainty and validation in what youve experienced.

The term “gaslighting” originated in Patrick Hamiltons 1938 play, Gas Light, where a
manipulative husband drove his wife to insanity by causing her to question what she
experienced. It was further popularized in the 1944 film adaptation, Gaslight, a psychological
thriller about a man named Gregory Anton who murders a famous opera singer. He later
marries her niece, Paula to convince her she is going crazy to the point of being
institutionalized, with the agenda of stealing the rest of her family jewels. According to Dr.
George Simon, victims of chronic gaslighting can suffer from a wide array of side effects,
including flashbacks, heightened anxiety, intrusive thoughts, a low sense of self-worth, and
mental confusion. In cases of severe manipulation and abuse, gaslighting can even lead to
suicidal ideation, self-harm, and self-sabotage.

Gaslighting can take many forms from questioning the status of your mental health to
outright challenging your lived experiences. The most dangerous culprits of gaslighting?
Malignant narcissists, who, by default, use gaslighting as a strategy to undermine the
perception of their victims in order to evade accountability for their abuse. These
perpetrators can use gaslighting callously and sadistically because they lack the remorse,
empathy, or conscience to have any limits when they terrorize you or covertly provoke you.
Gaslighting by a malignant narcissist is covert murder with clean hands, allowing the
perpetrator to get away with their mistreatment while depicting the victims as the abusers.

I’ve spoken to thousands of survivors of malignant narcissists who have shared their stories
of gaslighting, and below I include the most commonly used phrases malignant narcissists,
sociopaths,and psychopaths employ to terrorize and deplete you, translated into what they
really mean.

These phrases, when chronically used in the context of an abusive relationship, serve to
demean, belittle and distort the reality of abuse victims.

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1. You’re crazy/you have mental health issues/you need help.
Translation:You’re not the pathological one here. You’rejust catching onto who I really am
behind the mask and attempting to hold me accountable for my questionable behavior. I’d
rather you question your own sanity so you believe that the problem is really you, rather than
my own deceptiveness and manipulation. So long as you believe you’re the one who needs
help, I’ll never have to take responsibility for changing my own disordered ways of thinking
and behaving.

Malignant narcissists play the smirking doctors to their victims, treating them like unruly
patients. Diagnosing their victims with mental health issues for having emotions is a way to
pathologize their victims and undermine their credibility; this is even more effective when
abusers are able to provoke reactions in their victims to convince society that they are the
ones with mental health problems. According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline,
some abusers will even actively drive their victims to the edge to concoct proof of their
instability. The Hotline estimates that around 89% of their callers have experienced some
form of mental health coercion and that 43% had experienced a substance abuse coercion
from an abuser.

Most survivors who reported their abusive partners had actively contributed to mental health
difficulties or their use of substances also said their partners threatened to use the difficulties or
substance use against them with important authorities, such as legal or child custody
professionals, to prevent them from obtaining custody or other things that they wanted or
needed.The National Center on Domestic Violence and the Domestic Violence Hotline

2. You’re just insecure and jealous.

Translation:I enjoy planting seeds of insecurity and doubt in your mind about your
attractiveness, competence, and personality. If you dare to question my numerous flirtations,
affairs, and inappropriate interactions, I’ll be sure to put you back in your place in fear of
losing me. The problem, as I’ll convince you, isn’t my deceptive behavior. It’syour inability to
remain confident while I perpetually put you down, compare you in demeaning ways to
others, and eventually cast you aside for the next best thing.

Manufacturing love triangles and harems are a narcissist’s forte. Robert Greene, author of
The Art of Seduction, speaks about creating ”an aura of desirability” which stirs a frenzied
sense of competition among potential suitors. In abuse survivor communities, this tactic is
also known as triangulation. It grants malignant narcissists a depraved sense of power over
their victims. They actively provoke jealousy in their intimate partners in order to control
them and paint them as unhinged when they finally react. When a victim calls out a
narcissist’s infidelity in any way, it is common for them to label the victims insecure,
controlling, and jealous to avoid suspicion and to continue to reap the benefits of multiple
sources of attention, praise, and ego strokes.

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Remember: to someone who has something to hide, everything feels like an interrogation.
Narcissists will often lash out in narcissistic rage, stonewalling, and excessive defensiveness
when confronted with evidence of their betrayals.

3. You’re too sensitive/you’re overreacting.

Translation:It’s not that you’re too sensitive, but rather that I am insensitive, callous, and
unempathic. I do not care about your emotions unless they serve me in some way. Your
negative reactions provide me stimulation and pleasure, so please, do keep going. I enjoy
putting you down for having legitimate reactions to my abuse.

According to Dr. Robin Stern, one of the effects of gaslighting include asking yourself Am I
too sensitive? a dozen times a day. Claiming that victims are overreacting or oversensitive to
emotional abuse is a popular way for malignant narcissists to override your certainty about
the severity of the abuse you experienced.

Whether or not someone is a sensitive person is irrelevant when it comes to cases of

psychological or physical violence. Abuse affects anyone and everyone of varying sensitivity
levels, and its impact should not be taken lightly. A mark of a healthy partner is that they give
you the space to feel your emotions and provide emotional validation, even if they do not
agree with you. A malignant narcissist will excessively focus on your so-called sensitivity and
consistently claim that you are overreacting rather than own their horrific actions when
called out, regardless of how “sensitive” you may be.

4. It was just a joke. You have no sense of humor.

Translation: I love disguising my abusive behavior as just jokes. I like calling you names,
putting you down, and then claiming you’re the one who lacks the sense of humor to
appreciate my depraved “wit.” Making you feel defective allows me to say and do whatever I
wish, all with a smile and a derisive laugh.

Disguising cruel remarks, off-color comments, and put-downs as “just jokes” is a popular
verbal abuse tactic, according to Patricia Evans, author of The Verbally Abusive
Relationship. This malicious tactic is very different from playful teasing which takes a certain
amount of rapport, trust, and mutual enjoyment. When malignant narcissists dole out these
unsettling “jokes,” they can engage in acts of name-calling, taunting, belittling and contempt
while evading the responsibility of issuing an apology or owning their vicious verbal assaults.
You are then gaslighted into believing that it is your inability to appreciate the “humor”
behind their cruelty, rather than the reality of its abusive intentions.

“Just jokes” are also used to test boundaries early on in an abusive relationship; what you
may have rationalized as a tone-deaf or off-color comment in the beginning can escalate into
psychological violence quite quickly in the hands of a narcissist. If you find that you have a
partner who laughs at you more than they laugh with you, run. It will not get better.

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5. You need to let it go. Why are you bringing this up?
Translation: I haven’t given you enough time to even process the last heinous incident of
abuse, but you need to let it go already so I can move forward with exploiting you without
facing any consequences for my behavior. Let me love-bomb you into thinking that things
will be different this time around. Don’t bring up my past patterns of abusive behavior,
because you’ll then recognize that this is a cycle that will just continue.

In any abuse cycle, it’s common for an abuser to engage in a hot-and-cold cycle where they
periodically throw in crumbs of affection to keep you hooked and to renew hope for a return
to the honeymoon phase. This is a manipulation tactic known as intermittent reinforcement,
and it’s common for an abuser to terrorize you, only to return the next day and act like
nothing has happened. When you do recall any abusive incidents, an abuser will tell you to
“let it go” so they can sustain the cycle.

This form of abuse amnesia adds onto your addictive bond to the abuser, also known as
“trauma bonding.” According to Dr. Logan (2018), Trauma bonding is evidenced in any
relationship which the connection defies logic and is very hard to break. The components
necessary for a trauma bond to form are a power differential, intermittent good/bad
treatment, and high arousal and bonding periods.

6. You’re the problem here, not me.

Translation: I am the problem here, but I’ll be damned if I let you know it! I’d rather
subject you to personal attacks as you bend over backwards trying to hit constantly moving
goalposts and arbitrary expectations of the way I think you should feel and behave. As you
spend most of your time trying to fix your fabricated flaws while always coming up short of
what I deem “worthy,” I can just sit back, relax, and continue to mistreat you the way I feel
entitled to. You won’t have any energy left to call me out.

It’s common for abusive partners to engage in malignant projection – to even go as far as to
call their victims the narcissists and abusers, and to dump their own malignant qualities and
behaviors onto their victims. This is a way for them to gaslight their victims into believing
that they are the ones at fault and that their reactions to the abuse, rather than the abuse
itself, is the problem. According to Narcissistic Personality clinical expert Dr. Martinez-Lewi,
these projections tend to be psychologically abusive. As she writes, “The narcissist is never
wrong. He {or she} automatically blames others when anything goes awry. It is very stressful
to be the recipient of narcissistic projections. The sheer force of the narcissists accusations
and recriminations is stunning and disorienting.”

7. I never said or did that. You’re imagining things.

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Translation:Making you question what I did or said allows me to cast doubt on your
perceptions and memories of the abuse you’ve experienced. If I make you think that you’re
imagining things, you’ll start to wonder if you’re going crazy, rather than pinpointing the
evidence which proves I am an abuser.

In the movie Gaslight, Gregory causes his new wife to believe that her aunts house is haunted
so she can be institutionalized. He does everything from rearranging items in the house,
flickering gas lights on to making noises in the attic so she is no longer able to discern
whether or not what she’s seeing is real. He isolates her so that she is unable to gain
validation. After manufacturing these crazymaking scenarios, he then convinces her that
these events are all a figment of her imagination.

Many victims of chronic gaslighting struggle with the cognitive dissonance which occurs
when their abuser tells them that they never did or said something. Much like reasonable
doubt can sway a jury, even the hint that something may not have happened after all can be
powerful enough to override someone’s perceptions. Researchers Hasher, Goldstein and
Toppino (1997) call this the “illusory truth effect” – they discovered that when falsehoods are
repeated, they are more likely to be internalized as true simply due to the effects of repetition.
That is why continual denial and minimization can be so effective in convincing victims of
gaslighting that they are indeed imagining things or suffering from memory loss, rather than
standing firm in their beliefs and experiences.

The Big Picture

In order to resist the effects of gaslighting, you must get in touch with your own reality and
prevent yourself from getting entrapped into an endless loop of self-doubt. Learn to identify
the red flags of malignant narcissists and their manipulation tactics so you can get out of
disorienting, crazymaking conversations with malignant narcissists before they escalate into
wild accusations, projections, blameshifting and put-downs which will only exacerbate your
sense of confusion. Develop a sense of self-validation and self-trust so you can get in touch
with how you really feel about the way someone is treating you, rather than getting stuck
attempting to explain yourself to a manipulator with an agenda.

Getting space from your abuser is essential. Be sure to document events as they happened,
rather than how your abuser tells you they happened. Save text messages, voicemails, e-
mails, audio or video recordings (if permitted in your state laws) which can help you to
remember the facts in times of mental fog, rather than subscribing to the distortions and
delusions of the abuser.

Engage in extreme self-care by participating in mind-body healing modalities which target

the physical as well as psychological symptoms of the abuse. Recovery is important to achieve
mental clarity. Enlist the help of a third party, such as a trauma-informed therapist, and go

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through the incidents of abuse together to anchor yourself back to what you’ve experienced.
Malignant narcissists might attempt to rewrite your reality, but you don’t have to accept their
twisted narratives as truth.

References

Evans, P. (2010). The verbally abusive relationship: How to recognize it and how to
respond. Avon, MA: Adams Media.

Greene, R. (2004).The art of seduction. Gardners Books.

Hasher, L., Goldstein, D., & Toppino, T. (1977). Frequency and the conference of referential
validity.Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior,16(1), 107-112. doi:10.1016/s0022-
5371(77)80012-1

Martinez-Lewi, L. (2012, November 10). Narcissist’s Projections are Psychologically Abusive.

Retrieved March 19, 2019, from http://thenarcissistinyourlife.com/narcissists-projections-
are-psychologically-abusive/

Logan, M. H. (2018). Stockholm Syndrome: Held Hostage by the One You Love. Violence and
Gender,5(2), 67-69. doi:10.1089/vio.2017.0076

Simon, G. (2018, May 11). Overcoming Gaslighting Effects. Retrieved March 19, 2019, from
https://www.drgeorgesimon.com/overcoming-gaslighting-effects/

Stern, R., & Wolf, N. (2018). The gaslight effect: How to spot and survive the hidden
manipulation others use to control your life. New York: Harmony Books.

Warshaw, C., Lyon, E., Bland, P. J., Phillips, H., & Hooper, M. (2014). Mental Health and
Substance Use Coercion Surveys. Report from the National Center on Domestic Violence,
Trauma & Mental Health and the National Domestic Violence Hotline.National Center on
Domestic Violence, Trauma and Mental Health. Retrieved here. November 5, 2017.

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