Gaslighting or cognitive distortion?

From a reader:

i am in a 7 year long relationship with a sociopath. he does not call himself a sociopath, but does joyfully brag that he is a full on crazy person & that it will be the reason he will be a millionaire, world leader, famous etc. he is very controlling and emotionally abusive, but also tries his best to be kind to me and show positive emotions. i will not be leaving him as most would suggest i do. i own that i am in an unhealthy relationship, and that i will feel more pain from leaving him than i will from staying with him. we both work to be happy as hard as it is. we argue a lot which is expected when a sane person is trying to have a successful loving life with a crazy person. the arguments stem from his cruelty, dishonesty, drunken blackouts to the smallest nothing that i can't even believe it caused an argument. one thing is constant though, every argument turns him vicious. screaming, threatening, punching holes in walls, breaking up with me (with no intention to do so) the works. he will say and do things, then a moment later, vehemently denies having said or done these things and calling me delusional or a lier. he seems so convinced that these things did not happen or were not said, he acts offended and hurt and very angry that i would accuse him of these things. possibly because he's said them in heated un warranted anger, then realizes how crazy or cruel he sounded and is embarrassed. i don't know the reason, but its surely not that he doesn't remember these things, he knows they happened. it is impossible to resolve an issue when the whole discussion turns into me working like hell to get him to admit what has just happened. knowing that they happened and that he is trying unsuccessfully to manipulate me does not resolve anything. many women in abusive relationships roll up in a ball and submit. that would reduce the frequency of the disagreements. however i do not do that. i fight for myself and what is true, and how i should be treated in a certain way. i definitely match him in battle, though its exhausting and feels foolish to entertain.

 i really am striving to have a productive situation that i can live with and be happy. this can not happen if i can't find a way around the habitual gas lighting. any advice would be appreciated.

M.E.:

It actually doesn't sound like he is gaslighting you so much as that he is delusional. He doesn't sound self-aware. A lot of people with personality disorders suffer from a belief that their reality is objective Reality, their truth is objective Truth, no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented to them. There's someone like this in my own life. For him, he doesn't believe that he creates reality per se, or that he controls reality in any way. He actually believes that there's an objective reality that he cannot control and that everybody's experience of reality is different, but he believes that his experience of reality, for whatever reason, happens to be unfailingly accurate to the objective reality. (I feel like this belief is also related in an odd habit of his to believe that he is not making choices in his life, but that he is just fulfilling a predestined course of action in direct reaction to things he has no control over. Conveniently, this means that he is also not responsible for anything he does, because he is never able to choose any other choice then the one he chose. The logic is very Sam Harris to the illogical extreme with a side of hindsight bias -- i.e. if he is the person he is, and if the person he is had a mind that naturally thought the thoughts that naturally led to that particular action, it must be that he had no other option or choice but to engage in that action. This link calls this an external control fallacy.)

But all people with personality disorders often (always?) suffer from cognitive distortions (I do too, of course because I am personality disordered, although I have gotten a lot more aware of it and consequently hopefully better). See this link for common examples of reality distortion, also here. The problem with this particular trait in a relationship is that it can have the same effect as gaslighting because this stuff is truly through-the-looking-glass crazy making. You will feel like you're losing your mind because your boyfriend's reality is so different from what you perceive to be reality and he is so insistent about it being true. I think that being in this type of situation could make anybody crazy, and it certainly historically has made plenty of people crazy. I myself feel like I have taken a small detour to crazy town when I talk to people who present with this trait. Sometimes it is particularly maddening, e.g. when the person says things about me, my profession, my philosophical or spiritual beliefs, or other things that I identify more closely with than others. I doubt that you'll be able to handle this constant onslaught to your sanity without incurring significant damage to your psyche or without intensive therapy. For something related, you could look up videos or writings about verbal abuse, which has a similar effect on people.

And further thoughts for the blog audience:

This issue is particularly relevant right now because I've been seeing a lot of this on here recently. It's a variation of what I tweeted recently -- there are a lot of uses for reason, but changing people's cognitive distortions is not one of them. I have tried a million times to reason with people in my life who suffer from cognitive distortions, but I have never been successful. All I have seen work is extensive therapy by someone incredibly qualified who is somehow able to teach them to first recognize that they aren't happy with the way they deal with the world, second want to figure out if there's something they could be doing better, third identify specific patterns of negative beliefs (i.e. cognitive distortions) in their life, fourth get them to consistently detect instances in which they do this, and possibly finally (and by this time they probably don't even need it because they've already reached the right conclusions themselves) -- reason.

The person I know with the belief that he is the only one consistently seeing reality for what it is just recently confessed to me that he now recognizes that just because he feels something doesn't mean that his feeling necessarily reflects reality. (The first link calls this "emotional reasoning": "We believe that what we feel must be true automatically. . . You assume that your unhealthy emotions reflect he way things really are — 'I feel it, therefore it must be true.'".) Wow, that's amazing. If he can get there, there's hope for everyone, but not likely via well-meaning others trying to show them the error of their ways by trying to rationalize with them.

Why is it that we can pass by someone crazy on the street or on a bus or train and just mentally give them a pass but the seemingly normal people with cognitive distortions drive up our blood pressure and drive us crazy too? Maybe because the crazy person is obviously crazy, so we just write off their crazymaking behavior without internalizing any of it. But the more you learn to recognize cognitive distortions in others, the more they become obviously crazy too, which hopefully leads to less craziness in you. 

Going limp: or how to response to a sociopath attack

Sometimes I give advice to people about how to deal with the sociopaths in their lives. Often they ignore the advice, or attempt to cherry pick the advice in such a way that the advice is essentially useless. Or they think they're following the advice, but they do it in a completely backwards way. For example, one time one of my overweight co-worker had decided to start what must have been the 201st diet of his life. He showed up at work and proudly announced that he had skipped breakfast. Another co-worker told him that skipping breakfast would actually make him fatter by triggering the body into starvation mode, such that his body would horde the fat stores while it still could. He promptly left the office and came back with a half gallon of buttermilk that he chugged, all so he wouldn't get fat. 

When people ask me about how to deal with the sociopaths in their lives, all I do is think about what would work on me or what has worked by me against other sociopathic individuals. One of the pieces of advice I often give is a variation on the strategy of "going limp". If the person you are "fighting" against needs any part of your engagement (e.g. they need you to stand up so they can keep pummeling your torso with punches, or they are gaslighting you and need you to overreact so they can portray you as crazy), you just go limp. You very passively do nothing, don't react, slump, relax or cease all efforts or reactions to your adversary. Becoming deadweight is often the easiest and most effective way to lose someone's interest.

This old comment from an old post gives similar advice:

One great way to manipulate a sociopath is to play naive, innocent, unaware. 

Cause major inconveniences for the sociopath but act like none of that was intentional, you actually even have no idea about these inconveniences (and see how they are not willing to share or put themselves in a victim position voluntarily, while being quite pissed off about it). 

They just hate it when 'universe' or 'chance factor' plays against them (a sin they are not in full control) and there is no one there to blame. 

In these situations they are upset but they cannot turn their rage against you because that would be accepting the fact that maybe you are smarter, maybe you are gas-lighting them but that just cannot be, you are so naive and more importantly they are so smart. 

This, of course, works if you got something they want, otherwise you ar non-issue anyway.

Don't ever appear like you know deep psychology around a sociopath, they'll act like they have no idea what you're talking about anyway. 

Everyone on the autism spectrum

This NY Magazine article, "Is everyone on the autism spectrum?" has some pretty funny moments, but this is probably the most relevant. In regard to the difficulty of making psychiatric diagnoses, particularly amateur ones:

Men have caught on and, in a kind of inverted gaslighting, begun to describe themselves as having Asperger’s as a way of controlling their spouses. “Having Asperger’s-like syndrome does not give you Asperger’s,” says David Schnarch, a Colorado-based couples therapist. “Having a big belly does not make you pregnant. I’ve not seen a single case of what I would consider to be diagnosable Asperger’s. But I have seen any number of cases of wives accusing husbands of it, any number of cases of husbands claiming to have it.” It’s the new ADHD, he says. “The wife doesn’t want to accept that the husband knows what he’s doing when he’s doing something she doesn’t like.” Schnarch recalls a man who phoned him the day before a scheduled initial couples session and announced that he’d just been diagnosed with Asperger’s. “As soon as this happened,” Schnarch says, “I knew I had difficulty.” He contacted the referring therapist, who said he’d suspected the man had Asperger’s because he said things to his girlfriend that were so cruel he couldn’t possibly understand their impact. As far as Schnarch was concerned, it was an all-too-familiar instance of ­sadism masquerading as disability. “If you’re going to perp, the best place to perp from is the victim position.”

I like the part about big belly not making you pregnant -- PCL-R, anybody? And the flipside of the coin are the self diagnosers who need a diagnosis to give them a sense of ... antisocial belonging?

SNL Dateline

A reader sent me this very funny portrayal of creepy SNL Dateline parody Keith Morrison: "When I was four years old I saw a birthday clown drown in a pool."



"Tell me, did killing him get your rocks off?"

"No.  You know, I'm not weird like that."

"Not even a little?"

"Ah, what the heck, it got me off a little."

"Yeah..."

In the same episode, gaslighting, or a copy of the teleplay here for those that cannot watch.

An example of gaslighting

From a Pepsi commercial (via a reader):

Brangelina

I know most of you don't think there is anything up with them, but I keep reading stuff like this, so I'll probably keep posting it until I get vindicated. In regards to a recent premiere arrival:

Needless to say, everyone lost their sh-t and [the interviewer doing the press line] had to step aside and wait for the crazy to calm before she could resume her interviews. I’ve seen this happen in person before. I’ve seen this go down, I’ve watched [Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's] reactions. It doesn’t faze them at all. People could be hurling themselves off of balconies and in between moving vehicles, those two behave as though they’ve seen it all before, so pedestrian, like it’s the natural order of things. And because they act like it’s a given, people keep responding to it like it’s a given. This is what I mean when I say they know exactly how to play it and work it to their advantage. You know in sport when coaches study tape, look at how a formation develops, analyse what was effective and not the last time around, what to tweak, what to move or modify? The Brange is so good at what they do, it’s like they take the same clinical approach to their brand. One day, in 50 years, when their time will have passed, I hope we get a book about it. They could teach the others so much.

I hope there will be a book, but I don't think it would happen unless it was Brad writing about Angelina after a messy break up in which he is blinded by his (narcissistic?) rage to lash out where he thinks it will hurt her the most. What Brad will fail to realize until it's too late is how masterfully she will take him down like she did with her father Jon Voight.

Actually, the Jon Voight example is a good cautionary tale for those people who feel like they want to "take down" a sociopath, as some of readers are eager to do. Back in 2002 Voight said Jolie had "serious mental problems," which at the time was almost credible. In fact, the producer of Tomb Raider sequel, which she was then filming, actually felt the need to address the accusation, explaining "I have an excellent team around her. If there was a problem, I would know it." She immediately cut off all contact with her father, claiming that the toxic relationship would be detrimental for her newly adopted son and asserting that her father's motives for wanting to "help" her were entirely dishonorable, he was an absentee father, a cheating husband, etc. Voight's claims, without anything else to substantiate them, ended up making him seem infinitely more crazy than she was, in much the same way that gaslighting works. The lesson to be learned is that claims that are already outlandish sounding, e.g. "X is a sociopath," are very hard to make credibly without the accuser seeming crazy (even when the accused someone as clearly off, e.g. Joey Buttafuoco).

Sociopath girl and gaslighting: Mini's First Time

One of my readers recommended Mini's First Time as a portrait of a young, teenage, sociopath girl. It's not the best film, but relatively accurate (for Hollywood) and also an excellent portrayal of gaslighting someone.