You are about to watch yet another video about gas lighting from a different, unusual, eccentric angle.
As usual, before I go there I want to remind you, there are two types of gas lighting.
One often discussed and analyzed and of course with a lot of misinformation and nonsense that is verbal gas lighting.
But there is another type of much neglected gas lighting, behavioural gas lighting.
Gas lighting via signalling.
For example, virtual signalling is a form of gas lighting. It is when a behaviour, a pattern of behavior, a type of conduct, choices, decisions and actions convey information about reality which is erroneous, wrong, misinformation, disinformation.
The gas lighter behaves in ways that mislead the target or the victim into misapprehending and misperceiving reality, misjudging it.
So certain behaviours and certain actions, certain courses of action are intended essentially to manipulate other people, to modify their behaviours, to secure favourable outcomes.
This is behavioural signalling gas lighting.
It is distinct from the first type which is verbal gas lighting.
Bear this in mind as you proceed into the remainder of this video.
But before we go there, two service announcements.
This is Mongolia.
No, Mongolia is a bit bigger.
This is a postcard from Mongolia from the Enkh Empire.
It was published in Mongolia and they just published the first volume of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited in, what else, Mongolian.
We are very proud and excited to see this rendition of Malignant Self-Love and we are grateful to our publishers there, Enkh Empire.
Well done.
The next service announcement has to do with a series of forthcoming videos about woke movements and victimhood movements.
Together with Jordan Peterson and other scholars, I helped Ginger Coy compile a taxonomy of the psychopathology of woke movements. It is now available on public.substack.com.
This is Michael Schellenberg and Peter Bochosjian's blog. You can also watch interviews I've given to these various personalities and so on and so forth.
But shortly I'm going to release two video compilations.
One, interviews that I've granted regarding woke movements and victimhood movements. These interviews have never been seen. They are not on this channel. They are new.
The second part is a compilation of all the videos I've made about the psychological underpinnings and psychological theories that pertain to victimhood movements and woke movements.
So in two parts. This is it. This is a for a service announcements and let us delve right into the issue of gaslighting.
This is going to be a very short video. Really, Vaknin? You're not kidding. You promise. Please. You're not gaslighting us.
No, Sushanim. I am not gaslighting you. It's like the famous liar paradox. You know, there's this guy. He says, I always lie. Here's the problem. If he's telling the truth, then he doesn't always lie. But if he always lies, then definitely he's telling the truth. Same here. I am not going to gaslight you. Trust me.
Okay.
Today we are going to deal with a few issues related to gaslighting.
Now, for gaslighting, my name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, a former visiting professor of psychology and currently on the faculty of CIAPS, Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies. It can't get any longer.
Here's the problem.
Victims of narcissism and victims of psychopaths experience gaslighting the same way. They have an identical experience and they label it gaslighting.
A victim cannot tell the difference between the narcissist's confabulations and the psychopath's cunning and skimming lies. As far as the victim is concerned, he or she is being gaslit.
Now, this is the victim side, but this channel is an academic channel and deals with clinical psychology.
So we need to have a look at the perpetrator side, the narcissist, the psychopath.
Gaslighting requires premeditation. Gaslighting requires power asymmetry and gaslighting requires an unimpaired intact reality testing of the perpetrator.
So the perpetrator of gaslighting needs to know the difference between reality and his lies and needs to be able to tell the distinction between fantasy and reality.
Number one.
Number two, he needs to intentionally gaslight.
There needs to be premeditation, planning, cunning, skimming, essentially malice, malevolence.
The third requirement is power asymmetry.
I'm not going to eat right now.
So by these criteria, only psychopaths gaslight.
Throughout the gaslighting, the psychopath knows full well that he is lying, he's deceiving, he's distorting, he's falsifying, he's reframing, he knows exactly what he's doing.
And at any minute, he can tell the difference between what's real and what's not real.
What's out there and what's fantastic, psychopath maintains intact, perfect reality testing throughout the gaslighting process.
Second thing is that psychopaths use gaslighting, instrumentalize it, weaponize it to obtain outcomes, their goal oriented.
Only psychopaths gaslight.
Disabilities truly believe their own fantasies and confabulations.
Their reality testing is impaired beyond repair.
And they don't do it intentionally. They do it instinctively. They do it reflexively. They do it automatically the way perhaps an artificial intelligence machine would do one day in the future.
This is their programming.
If there's anyone that notices his gaslight, gaslights, it's himself.
The narcissist self gaslights.
Then he becomes convinced of his own fantasies, confabulations, narratives, fiction, and he tries to sell it on to you. Tries to convince you, control you and convert you into his view of reality, of which he is 100% convinced.
That's why narcissists are vehement and defensive when you challenge their confabulations, because they don't feel that they're lying.
Now, of course, I'm not talking about white lies and small lies, everyone lies. I'm talking about major lies, like future faking, for example.
Narcissists don't future fate. They believe in the future. They believe that you're going to get married and have three children and live happily ever after. They believe they're going to become the richest men in the world. They believe they're going to divorce and marry you. They believe all this. They don't future fate.
Psychopaths do, because they want your money or they want to have sex with you, or they want you to provide them with access or contacts or whatever. There's a reason there. There's something behind the scenes. There's a hidden agenda, ulterior motive.
That's the psychopath, not the narcissist.
How do you experience gaslighting?
Gaslighting is a form of dissociation.
I am pretty shocked and surprised that I couldn't find this very basic insight anywhere in the literature, scholarly and YouTube self-styled expert nonsense. I couldn't find it anywhere.
But stop to think about it for a minute and you will see how right I am, because I'm always right.
Gaslighting is a form of dissociation.
We know of three types of dissociation. Amnesia, forgetting things. Derealization, when we experience reality as unreal, dreamlike, nightmarish, and depersonalization, when we experience ourselves as not being there, as floating above our bodies.
This is not happening to me. This is common in trauma, in trauma states or post-traumatic conditions.
So these are the three forms of dissociation.
And immediately you see the parallels between dissociation and gaslighting.
Because when you experience gaslighting, reality doesn't feel real. You are forced to derealize.
The psychopath or the narcissist force you to derealize, to let go of reality, to lose your grasp on it, to doubt your own judgment regarding reality, and then to adopt alternative facts and alternative reality. And this is derealization.
Similarly, when you are in the throes of gaslighting, you feel that you are not you. You feel that somehow you have abandoned and vanquished your own identity. You feel alienated and estranged from yourself.
Even if someone else has taken over, you feel body and mind snatched. This is gaslighting.
And so this is a form of dissociation.
But how does the narcissist succeed, or the psychopath, succeed to inducing you this state of affairs, this state of mind? How do they coerce you into dissociation via entraining?
The narcissist uses entraining to convert you, the victim, into an extension of himself. He renders you an internal object.
But not only does he regard you as an internal object, you begin to regard yourself as a figment of the narcissist imagination and mind. You lose your reality. You feel unreal. You feel that you are reduced to two dimensions, a cartoonish figure in the narcissist's trip. The narcissist assimilates you, subsumes you, takes over you, brainwashes you if you wish.
I don't know which of these terms appeals to you.
But somehow you lose who you are. You lose your substance, your quiddity, your identity, your core. You become diffuse. You become like a cloud, like smoke and mirrors.
And then the narcissist inhales you in and you become an element in his mind. And this is done via entraining.
And I encourage you to watch my videos on entraining. And this allows the narcissist to treat you as if you were a part of himself, not a separate external object, because narcissists don't do external objects. They cannot perceive other people's externality and separateness. They don't realize or cannot conceive of other people as out there with your own needs and wishes and priorities and emotions and cognition. No such thing as far as the narcissist is concerned. You're an avatar. You're just part of his imagination.
So the narcissist proceeds to experience himself vicariously through you, the victim.
Narcissists use victims as extensions of themselves, as internal objects that allow them to experience themselves by proxy via the victim.
The narcissist experiences his own dissociation, his own derealization, his own depersonalization through you. He then forces you to become, or coerces you to become a part of his shared fantasy. And he experiences his fantasy through you.
Usually you merge and fuse on a cellular level with a narcissist until nothing is left of you, you become one of his tissues. I mean organic tissues.
So the narcissist kind of digests you and then uses you as you're an object, you're an internal object. He uses you to experience himself and this is what people erroneously call the narcissist gaslighting.
The narcissist has to confabulate in order to bridge over substantive memory gaps. He needs to invent narratives and stories that make sense somehow of his disjointed, disrupted, broken existence. Discontinuous non-identity has to make sense of all this, of all these myths. The same way someone with multiple personality disorder used to be called split personality or dissociative identity disorder also tries, she tries to make sense of her existence.
Narcissist is doing the same. He's trying to make sense of it all. And he creates stories that are plausible, probable, likely, yeah, it must have happened this way. No other way.
And then it becomes reality, becomes the truth. And then he imposes this on you and you perceive it as gaslighting.
It's not, it's a desperate attempt to convert you, to force you to confirm to the narcissist that his fantasy is not a fantasy, it's reality. That his confabulations are not mere or pure inventions. They've actually happened.
He wants you to tell him that his false self is not false. He wants you in short to become his reality testing.
And this is the narcissist's gaslighting.
Psychopath is an entirely different thing.
And if you want to understand the psychopath gaslighting, why not watch the two original movies titled Gaslight, where you see a skimming, cunning con artist who marries a rich woman and then absconds or tries to abscond with her property and wealth and money by convincing her that she's going insane.
This is gaslighting. This is psychopathic gaslighting. It's goal oriented. It's premeditated. It's carefully planned, meticulously planned, every detail. And it's intended to drive you insane, to convince you that your grasp of reality has slipped and you're no longer, you're no longer with us. You're no longer there. Your dependency on the psychopath grows as the gaslighting proceeds to the point that you no longer trust your own senses.
You need to see everything and hear everything and taste everything and judge everything through the psychopath. You lose your agency and he becomes your external regulator and external agent.
This does not happen with the narcissist. This is not, the narcissist is not goal oriented. His goal is for you to become his reality tester, for you to tell him what is reality.
Psychopathic gaslighting and narcissistic so-called gaslighting are exactly the opposite.
The psychopath wants to become your reality. The narcissist wants you to become his reality, but he wants you to become his reality, which is fantastic and confabulated, that's why you feel mistakenly that he's gaslighting you.
Okay, listen guys, this is video number 246 that I've made about gaslighting.
Really there's nothing more I can say.
If I didn't dump it enough for you, dump it down enough for you, then I'm afraid I'm the wrong guy.
Go and look elsewhere. This is the most basic way I can discuss psychopathic gaslighting versus narcissistic confabulation, which is misperceived as gaslighting.
So I hope I made some sense and help you to differentiate between these two phenomena.
Although I repeat again, as victims, this doesn't matter to you because the experience is identical.
So walk away, not contact in both cases.
Have a nice, lit, but not gaslit day.