I’ve been in workplaces throughout my corporate career where things were happening that were so strange, or so different from my memory of events, that I’ve genuinely wondered whether I was being deliberately manipulated, or even gaslit.
I suspect I’m not alone in that. Everyday I hear from people on social media who are all having remarkably similar experiences. Maybe your manager insists they never said something you remember very clearly. Maybe a decision gets rewritten after the fact. Or you raise a concern about something, and somehow end up defending your interpretation of it rather than discussing the event itself.
Gaslighting has become one of those words we reach for when something like this happens. I use it jokingly myself, including with my ten-year-old when he tries to convince me something happened very differently from the way I remember it.
However when I started looking into gaslighting at work, I found the concept was more complicated than I’d assumed. I’d always thought intent was fundamental. Someone had to know what really happened and was deliberately trying to convince you otherwise, just to mess with you.
However, that’s not necessarily the case.
What counts as gaslighting at work?
For background, the term comes from the 1938 play Gas Light, later adapted for film. In the story, a husband manipulates his wife into believing she’s losing her mind. Among other things, he changes the gas lights in their home and then denies anything’s changed when she notices.
The original story captures an important aspect of gaslighting, because it goes further than lying or disagreeing with someone. True gaslighting seems to be when the behaviour starts undermining the other person’s confidence in their own perception of reality.
The workplace version of this is still a relatively new area of research. We don’t have a reliable estimate of how common it is, and researchers are still working through exactly how it should be defined. What we do know is that individual behaviours associated with workplace gaslighting can look… well, pretty ordinary really. Things like:
A manager making you a promise and then denying it later
Someone misrepresenting something you said
Someone senior dismissing a concern you’ve raised or redirecting the conversation to make you the problem instead
Being told you’re imagining things.
On their own, none of those behaviours necessarily constitutes gaslighting. Researchers highlight the fact that gaslighting sits separately from other forms of workplace mistreatment - such as lying, manipulation and bullying - although there may be some overlap. The key factor to consider is how the behaviour develops over time, and whether it starts undermining your confidence in your own interpretation of events.
Some workplace research allows for gaslighting to be intentional or unintentional. In other words, you don’t necessarily need a manager to be consciously plotting how to make you doubt yourself for it to be classified as gaslighting behaviour. The pattern of their behaviour tells you far more.
How you might experience gaslighting
Unfortunately, the impacts of this sort of behaviour can extend well beyond an irritating relationship with a bad manager. Research into gaslighting describes increasing self-doubt and reduced trust in your own ability to make decisions and interpret reality.
In a practical sense, it can really slow you down and make your working day a lot less productive. You may start checking and double-checking emails you would have previously drafted and sent without a second thought. You might start keeping detailed notes because you’re worried you’ll remember something incorrectly. You could find yourself spending time after meetings checking in with colleagues to ask whether they heard the same thing you did.
The emotional and psychological impact can be even more insidious. The workplace literature also discusses people withdrawing, staying silent, taking time off and wanting to leave the organisation. At that point, someone else’s behaviour is consuming your mental energy, even when they’re nowhere near you.
Is it gaslighting, poor management or something else?
It can be very difficult to tell if what you’re experiencing is gaslighting, poor management, a dysfunctional workplace or something else.
Imagine your boss tells you on Monday that a piece of work is due on Friday. On Wednesday, they ask why you haven’t delivered it. They insist the deadline was always Wednesday.
On its own, this doesn’t tell us much. Your manager might have forgotten, or they might have changed their mind and failed to tell you. Perhaps there was a genuine misunderstanding.
Now imagine it keeps happening. When you question the discrepancy, your manager tells you that you misunderstood the conversation. Or perhaps you’re too literal, or you always seem to get confused about instructions. You may even be told that this is something you need to work on. Their mistakes somehow keep becoming feedback about you.
After enough of these interactions, you might start wondering whether they’re right. Maybe you are misunderstanding things. Perhaps your memory isn’t as reliable as you thought.
That cumulative pattern is much closer to what researchers describe as workplace gaslighting. However, it can be very difficult to recognise the pattern while you’re inside it, because each individual incident can have a plausible explanation. It’s often only when you look back that you can see how seemingly unrelated events fit together.
The importance of introducing evidence
One of the key tests you can run to see if you’re experiencing is introducing evidence to each incident. Let’s go back to our deadline example from earlier to see how that would work.
Your manager says Wednesday. You remember Friday. Then you find the email, and it says Friday.
In an ordinary disagreement, that should settle at least the factual question. Your manager might say, “You’re right. I did say Friday. The deadline changed and I should have told you.”
However, what happens if that doesn’t resolve the situation? Perhaps they tell you that they mentioned the new deadline verbally, or that you should have known what they meant. They might even say that everyone else understood and you’re being pedantic by producing the email.
In this situation, the evidence hasn’t resolved the discrepancy. The conversation has moved away from what happened and towards whether you can be trusted to interpret what happened correctly.
If that happens once, I wouldn’t read too much into it. If it keeps happening, you’ve got a pattern that could point towards gaslighting behaviour.
What you can do about it
If you recognise some of this, you’re probably wondering what you can do about it. I should say here that I’m not an expert in diagnosing or supporting people who are experiencing gaslighting or any sort of bad workplace behaviour, so this is general advice only.
First of all, I don’t think your first priority should be proving that your boss is gaslighting you so you can take your case to HR. You don’t need that label to do something about it. You may never know what they intended, after all.
Instead, start documenting what happens. If your manager gives you an important instruction verbally, follow it up in writing. Keep records of significant decisions, deadlines and feedback. When something changes, record the change.
Most importantly, record what happens when you try to correct the record or introduce evidence. Does the other person acknowledge evidence? Can the two of you disagree without your memory or competence becoming the issue? Can a misunderstanding actually be resolved?
If, however, you seem to always end up back in the same place, where somehow you’re the unreliable employee who needs coaching, you might have a problem on your hands.
It can also help to talk through specific incidents with someone you trust. Ideally, you want someone who can give you another perspective rather than automatically tell you that you’re right. Sometimes distance makes a pattern easier to see.
Gaslighting or not, the behaviour is important
If you started reading this article because you were trying to work out whether you’re being gaslit at work, I’m probably going to leave you with a slightly frustrating answer: you may never know for certain.
You may never know what someone intended. In fact, it’s highly unlikely most of us will be able to neatly separate gaslighting from dysfunction, terrible management or some combination of all three. That being said, perhaps you don’t need to.
What you can know is what happened. You can document conversations and decisions, record what changes and pay attention to what happens when you produce evidence. Over time, you can stop trying to explain each incident and start looking at the pattern.
Then you need to look at what that pattern is doing to you. Are you constantly second-guessing yourself? Checking conversations because you no longer trust your memory? Becoming less confident in decisions you once would have made without thinking twice?
You don’t need to prove that someone is gaslighting you before you can decide their behaviour is unacceptable, and you certainly you don’t need their agreement about what happened before you can decide what you’re going to do next.
One thing I’m thinking about this week
Have I ever told you about the pub test?
Some of you in Australia will know the term, or perhaps have another name for it. When I worked in PR and media management, we used it as a pretty simple reputational test for when SHTF and we needed to step in and manage the situation. Forget the internal explanations, policies and carefully constructed talking points for a moment. If you explained what was happening to a bunch of ordinary people at the pub (or bar, if you’re in the US), would they think it sounded reasonable?
Here’s a de-identified example from my own career.
Let’s say you work for an organisation that provides safety-critical rescue services. Some of your employees rescue people from burning structures and vehicles, which means they need to train regularly for dangerous situations.
Now imagine that somewhere along the way, someone injures themselves using a tall ladder during training. The organisational response is that employees can no longer train on ladders above a certain height. Let’s say it’s… oh I don’t know, one metre, or around three feet for our imperial system friends. There’s a whole committee working through the issue. There are safety requirements and risk considerations behind the decision. Inside the organisation, everyone thinks this is hunky dory.
Then the media finds out, and suddenly the story is essentially: people whose job involves rescuing others from dangerous situations aren’t allowed to practise using a ladder more than a metre off the ground.
And now imagine you’re the head media person who has to defend it when the press gets hold of it at 3pm on a Friday (yes, that was me). Good luck with that - there goes your weekend.
We call that failing the pub test. A company can have an entirely rational internal explanation for a certain decision, and it still sounds absurd and indefensible once it leaves the building.
I’ve been thinking about this recently because an extraordinary amount of corporate life fails the pub test. That’s what I’m writing about next week, so I just wanted to give you something to chew on until then.
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