Zuzanna Rucińska is a postdoc of many interests and talents, researching pretend play, virtual reality, creativity in sport, introspection, suicidal decision-making, and also at times embodied imagination (zuzannarucinska.com). So she decided to write about yet another topic she knows little of, but finds fascinating. Oh, and she’s looking for a job!
A post by Zuzanna Rucińska
Gaslighting is a form of emotional manipulation in which “the gaslighter tries (consciously or not) to induce in someone a sense that her reactions, perceptions, memories and/or beliefs are not just mistaken, but utterly without grounds – paradigmatically, so unfounded as to qualify as crazy” (Abramson, 2014, p. 2). Can you do that to yourself? I propose you can, and that imagination is involved in the process too.
Let us first learn more about gaslighting and consider how doing this to oneself might even be possible. It is not that one hates oneself so much, or engages in self-pity. We all doubt ourselves occasionally, with the “ahh I can’t write this paper!”, or “I’m not going to succeed!” (think even of the famous impostor syndrome many of us have!). This feels different, as if it’s a more profound experience.
In gaslighting, one tries to convince another that their reality is untrue. It’s a form of emotional abuse that includes “manipulative tactics such as misdirection, denial, lying, and contradiction – all to destabilize the victim/survivor” (March et al., 2025). Gaslighting can even be a common form of manipulation by people who suffer from, e.g., narcissistic personality disorder.
An example can be taken from the play Gas Light (1938) itself. Written by Patrick Hamilton, it is a psychological thriller that introduced the concept of gaslighting, understood as manipulating someone into doubting their own perception of reality. Jack Manningham hides objects and accuses Bella of misplacing them, or dismisses her concerns about hearing noises in the attic and seeing gaslights dimming and flickering whenever he sneaks up there, insisting she is imagining it and thereby trying to make her believe she is losing her mind.
What would be self-gaslighting, then? We can think of it as a process of doubting one’s own thoughts, feelings, or perceptions, questioning one’s own reality in a way that mirrors manipulative gaslighting of others. Can you do that to yourself? Is that even possible? Can you ever question your own reality by denying yourself what you think or feel? I mean, you should know what you think and feel, right?
A couple of qualifications are needed here. For the argument’s sake, I will first simply assume that you can be your own perpetrator, in a relevant sense. There is a magnitude of literature in philosophy on the topic of self-deception that can be looked at here, which could be used to make that argument (see, e.g., Martin, 2009; Funkhauser, 2019). Second, self-transparency has been known for some time to be empirically problematic (McGeer, 1996; see also Schwitzgebel’s (2011) work on unreliability of introspectively knowing our own emotions), so I will also assume that we don’t always know exactly what we feel. Third, I will work with Regina Fabry’s recent narrative view of gaslighting (2024), and on that basis make my suggestions. Fabry captures the narrative dimension of gaslighting in her recent work. She describes it as when the perpetrator “wrongfully denies that the target is competent in capturing the relevance, significance, and meaningfulness, epistemically and morally, of events in their own personal past in narrative form” (2024, p. 9). In cases of narrative gaslighting, the perpetrator can “question the accuracy of autobiographically remembered events” (p. 10), or engage in “maliciously interfering with the self-narrator’s mnemonic, interpretational, and conceptual abilities” (p. 1). I will qualify right away that in my view, we need not be committed to claiming that self-gaslighting must exactly mirror gaslighting another, in the sense that we are maliciously interfering with our own interpretational abilities. We could do it to ourselves by chance.
These qualifications would require further argument. But with them out of the way, what I want to suggest in this short post is that self-gaslighting is possible, based on a parity principle: if narrative “self-shaping” is possible (Hutto, 2016, 2022), then narrative “self-disorganising” (that can be a linchpin of self-gaslighting) is possible too.
Self-shaping is the view that we can actively construct and transform our identity, behaviors, and sense of self over time. We mould our own self-concepts, constructing our identity, developing our sense of who we are. Narratives we pick actively shape the attitude we take to ourselves and the values we embrace. For instance, Hutto (2022) describes an imagined case of Katrina, a nervous flyer who has to take lots of long-distance flights for her job. She “decides to try to pretend to be the sort of person who loves to fly rather than fears it (…) [and] enters into this pretense for the express purpose of making herself into the sort of person who loves to fly” (p. 1173). In self-shaping so described, Katrina wilfully ignores certain constraints and the negative valence planes have for her to try to change her own attitude towards them and bring forth her desired self. In essence, she tells herself a story about not being afraid of flying, and thereby engages in an act of “fake it until you make it”.
If we can engage in such ‘positive’ self-shaping, we can ‘negatively’ shape ourselves too. I prefer to speak of ‘negatively making sense’ of oneself and one’s situation, akin to what is found in mental health issues (De Haan, 2020, see also Gallagher, 2024) Sense-making is a process of understanding and interpreting experiences, events, and the world around us, creating meaning from often complex or ambiguous situations and organizing those experiences into coherent narratives. We relate those experiences to broader life (social, cultural, personal) contexts too. Negative sense-making will show up in self-confabulating, where the confabulated narratives form a way of “understanding, representing, and organizing the world” (Örulv & Hydén, 2006, p. 670). I believe it will show up in self-gaslighting too, as one uses a specific narrative to engage in extreme doubting of oneself and appropriating narratives that harm one’s well-being.
Let us consider a likely example of self-gaslighting. This example is inspired by the work of Lucy Osler (Cardiff University) and Louise Richardson-Self (University of Tasmania) working on epistemic injustice and underdiagnosed endometriosis (talk from 24 September 2024, University of Birmingham, UK). Endometriosis is a condition in which cells similar to the lining of the uterus, or endometrium, grow outside the uterus, causing severe pain – yet somehow it is easy to miss in tests. Anecdotally, Lucy and Louise cite examples from interviews with women with endometriosis, who after hearing from the [often male] doctors that “lab results show nothing is wrong”, literally start questioning if they are in pain at all, or if they imagined it. Or maybe “it’s not so bad”.
This is, in my view, a case in point of self-gaslighting. It is not the doctor who tells the patients they are crazy; these women start thinking this about themselves. But how is it possible to even question if we feel pain? I take it that the self-gaslighting here has a lot to do with inconsistent socio-cultural narratives about women and pain. On the one hand, women are “over-sensitive”: girls cry when their hair is pulled but a little bit, and so probably the pain is “not really that bad”. On the other hand, women are supposed to “tough it out” and endure pain; after all, childbearing is a natural, beautiful process, and pain is just part of it (I hope the sarcasm is visible in the writing here). My point is simply the following: we cannot separate the process of understanding oneself, whether positive self-shaping or negative self-gaslighting, without the cultural context in which we are in and the kinds of narratives that roam around. This point is not even that original, if we consider the sociological relevance of gaslighting – rooted in social and gender inequalities and executed in power-laden relationships (Sweet, 2019).
What does all this have to do with imagination? Aside from it being possible to think of our self-imaginings as culturally shaped (see Alfredo Vernazzani’s post here) and emotive or affective (Langkau, 2021), engaging in [narrative] self-gaslighting will be an imaginary process, as it happens “in the head”, in the form of self-talk. Self-talk (as found when addressing oneself in a mirror), just as imaginary-talk (as found in imaginary friend play – see Rucińska, 2022), I take to be an internalized public practice of speaking (or narrativizing) continuous with social-talk (Geurts, 2018), that can be engaged in without moving one’s jaw muscles. It is described as an internal or external dialogue a person has with themselves. It can be silent (inner) or spoken (aloud) and involves addressing oneself, mainly to regulate emotions, motivate oneself or reflect on situations.
Self-talk, in my view, is an imaginary phenomenon. It could involve sensory (auditory) imaginings, such as when the “voice” of your abuser is introjected and perhaps even incorporated as one’s own, which is when self-gaslighting could occur. Self-talk could also be compared to the act of actively re-enacting the movements (here: speech) in imagery, in the embodied and enactive sense, just as visualisations require habitually acquired cross-modal motoric and peripheral processes (Rucińska & Gallagher, 2021). What I doubt self-talk is like is imagined talk (à la Gregory, 2016); in Gregory’s work, imagined talk is like an auditory verbal hallucination, or a “failure to monitor the production of auditory imaginings of the voices of others” (p. 654 ). The self-gaslighter at least seems to be in control of her imaginary self-talk, which is unlike hallucinating – though I might be proven wrong here.
Exploring these connections between imaginings and self-gaslighting will be one of the future works lying ahead for me. I welcome any specific suggestions to the literature on narrative imagination, self-talk and self-deception to help with my aim.[i]
References
Abramson, K. (2014). Turning up the lights on gaslighting. Philosophical perspectives, 28, 1-30.
De Haan, S. (2020). Enactive psychiatry. Cambridge University Press.
Gallagher, S. (2024). The self and its disorders. Oxford University Press.
Geurts, B. (2018). Making sense of self talk. Review of philosophy and psychology, 9(2), 271-285.
Gregory, D. (2016). Inner speech, imagined speech, and auditory verbal hallucinations. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 7, 653-673.
Hutto, D. D. (2016). Narrative self-shaping: a modest proposal. Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, 15, 21-41.
Hutto, D. (2022). Getting real about pretense: A radical enactivist proposal. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 21(5), 1157-1175.
Funkhouser, E. (2019). Self-deception. Routledge.
Langkau, J. (2021). Two kinds of imaginative vividness. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 51(1), 33-47.
March, E., Kay, C. S., Dinić, B. M., Wagstaff, D., Grabovac, B., & Jonason, P. K. (2025). “It’s All in Your Head”: Personality traits and gaslighting tactics in intimate relationships. Journal of Family Violence, 40(2), 259-268.
Martin, C. W. (Ed.). (2009). The philosophy of deception. Oxford University Press.
McGeer, V. (1996). Is" Self-Knowledge" an empirical problem? Renegotiating the space of philosophical explanation. The Journal of Philosophy, 93(10), 483-515.
Örulv, L., & Hydén, L. C. (2006). Confabulation: Sense-making, self-making and world-making in dementia. Discourse Studies, 8(5), 647-673.
Rucińska, Z., & Gallagher, S. (2021). Making imagination even more embodied: Imagination, constraint and epistemic relevance. Synthese, 199(3), 8143-8170.
Rucińska, Z. (2022). Imaginary friend play in light of enactivism. Theory & Psychology, 32(2), 202-220.
Schwitzgebel, E. (2011). Perplexities of consciousness. MIT press.
Sweet, P. L. (2019). The sociology of gaslighting. American sociological review, 84(5), 851-875.
Vernazzani, A. The culturally-inflected imagination. The Junkyard of the Mind blog post, 5 February 2025. https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2025/1/31/the-culturally-inflected-imagination
[i] Many thanks to Alfredo Vernazzani for reading an earlier draft of this post and already suggesting cool literature on how to develop this topic further.