Rewriting Gaslighting: Brain Science, Boundaries, and Staying Sane

Ever had someone you trust tell a story about your life that feels smoother than the truth...and somehow you end up doubting yourself? We unpack fresh research that reframes gaslighting as a brain-based learning process, driven by prediction errors and the shortcuts our minds use to make sense of trusted relationships. Instead of treating gaslighting as a vague moral failing, we explore a testable model that shows how contradictions, blame shifting, and selective context can erode epistemic confidence; the basic ability to believe your own perception.

We walk through the theories that knit this together (prediction error minimization, attachment dynamics, self-verification, symbolic interactionism, and shared reality) and translate them into plain language and practical steps. You’ll learn eight safeguards that reduce vulnerability without turning you into a cynic: pause when surprised, name the surprise, separate facts from interpretations, verify with neutral sources, track patterns over time, trust your body’s stress signals, keep a simple log, and reach out early for support. Along the way, we share a small real-life misunderstanding that spiraled, showing how quickly tone and context can warp meaning when we skip the pause and rush to explain.

We also tackle a subtle trap for the “rational” among us: using studies or logic to override someone’s lived experience can mimic the same prediction-error maneuver we’re trying to avoid. Curiosity and empathy come first; data lands better when the nervous system feels safe. And when stonewalling, image management, or refusal to do the work becomes a pattern, we talk about how to set clean boundaries and, if needed, walk away. If you remember nothing else, anchor to these three habits: pause when surprised, separate facts from feelings, and break isolation early. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs a reality check they can trust, and leave a review with the one safeguard you’ll try this week.

Chapters:

00:00 Why Gaslighting Hurts Differently
00:36 Gaslighting As A Learning Process
01:46 Theories That Explain Gaslighting
03:23 Prediction Errors And The Brain
04:16 Why This Research Matters Now
05:15 Anyone Can Be Vulnerable
05:55 Practical Guardrails To Reduce Risk
07:21 Pause, Name Surprise, Separate Facts
09:53 Patterns, Body Signals, And Logs
13:15 Reach Out Early And Break Silence
14:53 

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Chapters

• 0:10 Why Gaslighting Hurts Differently
• 0:36 Gaslighting As A Learning Process
• 1:46 Theories That Explain Gaslighting
• 3:23 Prediction Errors And The Brain
• 4:16 Why This Research Matters Now
• 5:15 Anyone Can Be Vulnerable
• 5:55 Practical Guardrails To Reduce Risk
• 7:21 Pause, Name Surprise, Separate Facts
• 9:53 Patterns, Body Signals, And Logs
• 13:15 Reach Out Early And Break Silence
• 14:53 Empathy, Rationality, And Unintentional Gaslighting
• 17:27 When To Walk Away And Key Takeaways

Transcript

DanielBoyd: 0:10

Okay, I'm going to go ahead and interrupt the 19-part series that we're working on. And I'm going to talk about some new research and new ways to frame gaslighting specifically, has come out. So this is a summary of the study called A Theoretical Framework for Studying the Phenomenon of Gaslighting by Kleinwood and Bartz in 2025 this year. So the core idea is that gaslighting is framed as a learning process. It's rooted in how the brain handles prediction errors. Prediction errors are those jolts we feel when what we expect doesn't match what actually happens. The authors draw on multiple psychological theories throughout this article. Some of the theories they draw on are prediction error minimization, symbolic interactionism, attachment theory, huge fan myself of that, self-verification, and shared reality to explain how gaslighting works. Not just that it works, because we all know that gaslighting works. If you've never been gaslighted before, then congratulations. But all it takes is one time. You'll never forget it. So this is also going to get into how to become virtually gaslight proof. Because remember, understanding how something works is the first step to being far less vulnerable to it. The key components of this research were as follows. So close relationships as epistemic leverage. Because we rely on trusted others to help us validate what's real, gaslighters can exploit that trust. The next one is prediction error minimization, or PEM. The victim expects consistency with their model of reality. When the gaslighter introduces contradictions, the brain experiences prediction error. Over time, repeated contradictions combined with blame shifting will distort the victim's internal model of reality. The next framework they looked at was the erosion of epistemic confidence. So basically, with repeated gaslighting, the target begins to doubt their priors or their baseline assumptions about reality, about the relationship, about anything else like that, and is more likely to accept the manipulator's version of events. Many of us have likely seen someone confuse disagreement, misremembering, or something else like that as gaslighting when it really wasn't gaslighting. So one thing this paper really hammers home is distinguishing it from related phenomenons. So the authors correctly clarify how gaslighting differs from lying, misremembering, or common conflicts. They emphasize its unique epistemic nature in that it undermines the victim's capacity to trust themselves. Quite literally, real gaslighting undermines the victim's capacity to trust their own mind. So for a quick science sidebar, let's look at why prediction errors matter. Our brains constantly predict what should happen next. And these are micro moments, like let's say how our partner usually reacts to good news or bad news or sad news, etc. We build these patterns in our brain, even little things like where a chair or a couch should be in the room. When a trusted person acts in a way that breaks that prediction, the brain scrambles for an explanation. A skilled gaslighter exploits that scramble to slide in their own explanation before you can slow down and check the facts. The fix for this? Slow the scramble, pause, name the surprise, and keep a record. So why does this matter? Why does this new research study matter? Well, they're offering a more mechanistic, testable model versus the older psychodynamic explanations. And what this does is this opens space for empirical work on who's vulnerable, when they're vulnerable, and how to intervene. The researchers also argue that anyone can be vulnerable, which is absolutely correct with all the other research I've read. Absolutely anyone can be vulnerable. So that is accurate. It's not about personal weakness so much as misplaced trust. And of course, then there's the interaction between when we've misplaced our trust, when we get gaslighted, and that ego hit of, damn it, I got gaslighted. And you got to separate that from the actual harm or damage that it can cause. And that's something that's very difficult for people to do. So let's get into this. How do we lower our own risk of being gaslit? Again, gaslighting isn't about being weak, it happens when someone weaponizes our trust. So, new research from McGill and the University of Toronto shows how it hijacks the brain's prediction error system. When a trusted person does something that contradicts what we expect them to do, our brain scrambles to explain the mismatch. If they then tell us that the confusion is our fault, we gradually start trusting their version of events more than our own. I've been through this, you've been through this, this happens. If you haven't been through it, then that's awesome. You're not jaded yet. But you should still listen to this podcast. Over time, that telling us the confusion is our fault, either directly or indirectly, it chips away at what psychologists call epistemic confidence, which is simply the ability to believe our own perception. That's why gaslighting feels so destabilizing. It's not just arguing about facts. So, how do we stop and keep ourselves from being gaslit? Especially without being a dick about it and holding space for understanding that the person who's doing the gaslighting may not mean to be doing that gaslighting, and we may be also misreading things. And not only is this useful in relationships, this can also help when you see even, let's say, a political post that seems not true or out of whack or seems like it has an agenda behind it, or you see a Facebook post that seems to have a nefarious agenda behind it, and what they're talking about seems to be trying to bend people in a nefarious direction. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna pause before agreeing with a surprising claim. Always take a breath first. The manipulator may call this stalling or being defensive, but in reality, all we are doing is slowing down that prediction error loop so our brains do not default to their explanation. The second thing we're gonna do is we're gonna name what surprised us, either out loud or in a journal. People forget that projection goes both ways. We often do project the negative or unhealthier side of ourselves onto someone else. But at least with the same amount of frequency, most of us also project the good parts of ourselves onto others and assume that they are acting in good faith as we are. People forget that projection does go both ways like this. That makes us excuse odd behavior or chalk it up to past trauma. Trauma absolutely may play a role, absolutely, of course. But trauma is rarely the full story. Now, abusive people, they may call this overthinking or making drama, but you're simply labeling the moment so it cannot be rewritten later. Just keep an eye on whether your reaction is ego-driven. If it is mostly pride getting poked, that is a separate battle that you need to fight. And that has nothing to do with the other person. That is you. That is your ego, that is something that needs to be gotten hold of. And if you can get to the point where you can notice when your ego is being hurt or being bruised or being challenged, and you can recognize oh, this is literally just my ego talking. That is all it is. If you can get to that point, your life will be so much better. So much better. So, number three, let's separate the facts from the interpretations. Write down what we saw or heard, then what we felt or inferred secondly. A gaslighter may say we are ignoring context, but the step actually preserves context. It keeps feelings from rewriting the raw event. Here's an example. Once I gave someone a quick congratulatory clap on the back in public after something that she had done, and it was a lot of work, and I was proud of her. The fact was simple. I clapped her on the back. She immediately turned and said, Bro, I told you I'm not into impact play. So in my mind, impact play was a private bedroom-only term. And I thought she was joking the way I would, because we had a lot of synchronicities, it seemed like. So I answered back in the same tone. And boy, did that make it worse. The interpretations that followed, hers about my intention and mine about her tone, turned one harmless gesture into a tense standoff. Had I separated the raw reaction from the story that I told myself from what she meant, I would have paused instead of reacting, and that misunderstanding would have been much harder to spiral or spin. Looking back, I realized that one small misread moment set the tone for months of strain. Even after I worked on myself in therapy, the pattern between us kept proving itself, even though I kept trying to prove it wrong. It taught me that sometimes what damages trust early can stay unresolved. Not always because of malice, per se, but when one party refuses to work on themselves, neither person's story about the moment ever really fully heals. Let's look at the fourth thing. Check your memory with a neutral third source. And I cannot stress neutral enough. For example, a text thread, a receipt, an unbiased friend's recollection of the event. A manipulator may say you're dragging other people in, and often they share only the parts that make them look good. We have to remember that we are not building a team against them, and we better not be doing that. But we are protecting reality from selective storytelling. The fifth thing to do is to watch for patterns of blame shifting. Healthy people admit mistakes. We all make mistakes. If you're someone that has never made a mistake, you are mistaken. But gaslighters will say you are stuck in the past or trying to hurt them whenever you point out a pattern. Yet patterns over time is what reveal whether behavior is accidental or deliberate. The sixth thing we gotta do is we gotta trust our body's stress signals. Because a manipulator may dismiss your tension as being too sensitive or too emotional or too crazy. And yes, you should look at yourself objectively. Are you controlling your emotions as best you can? Of course, because we want to maintain that external self-awareness of how other people may take this. But long-term tightness in your chest, or shrinking your opinions, or walking on eggshells around one person, those are pretty valid warning signs. You need to look deeper at that point. Now, a gaslighter may say that you are keeping score or digging for ammo, but it is neither. If we're one of those people that tend to forget bad behavior because we truly want to see the best in people, even if we're constantly disappointed, or even if we're just somewhat disappointed sometimes, a log becomes a memory safety net that shows trends where we would otherwise miss them. So a log when it comes to this stuff is important because that way you can actually see what's going on. The eighth and final thing we need to do is reach out early. We have to talk to a therapist or a trusted friend as soon as that pattern feels bigger than we can sort out alone. If the other person agrees to therapy only to clear the air or refuses joint sessions, that just often signals a focus on appearance instead of change. It's disappointing, it's heartbreaking, but that is the way it is. People are who they are at the end of the day, and they will show you. Remember, gaslighting thrives in silence and surprise. We have to break the silence, we have to slow the surprise, and then we reclaim the driver's seat of actual reality. So the key three things, if you take nothing else out of this episode, the key three things to make yourself less vulnerable to gaslighting is number one, pause when surprised, because pausing slows down the brain's prediction loop. Number two is separating facts from feelings. Separating facts from feelings keeps the record clean. Number three is break the silence early. Isolation, when you're being stonewalled, all of that stuff, or if you're just not interacting with the other person, it's all isolation and it all fuels distortions. So, with all of this being said, I do have to put in a note for myself. As someone who leans on research and data to explain human behavior, I do have to be extremely careful not to accidentally make someone doubt their own perception. I find facts and studies to be useful because they are. But if I do drop them into an emotional conversation without empathy, or at least seemingly without empathy, it can feel to the other person like I'm trying to override their lived experience. Remember, everyone's experience is valid, everyone's feelings are valid. Whether or not that is actual reality is a different story. Because if it comes down to their truth versus your truth, and neither one of you can see actual reality, or at least one of you cannot see actual reality, then there is no getting around that. You cannot prove a negative, you have to pretty much walk away at that point because at minimum they are certainly not on your level when it comes to that stuff. They are not on your page. But I do understand that when it feels like we are overriding their lived experience, that is a softer form of the same prediction error effect, basically replacing their felt reality with our explanation. And it can unintentionally mimic gaslighting. And I think this is where a lot of people confuse a real manipulator and a real gaslighter with someone who is just a rational person, a logical person, stuff like that. So basically, even the quote-unquote rational people among us need to slow down, ask questions first, and make room for the other person's sense of reality. And remember, if the other person does stonewall you and they refuse to engage and they won't go to therapy, they won't go, they won't work on themselves, they won't go to group therapy with you, and they'll finally only cave to going to therapy with you under the guise of to clear the air, then you've got to cut your losses at that point, unfortunately. But that's all I have for today. Tell other people who could use these steps, they work. They really work. Have a great day.