Yes, CBT Is Gaslighting.

"Gaslighting!"

These days, it seems to be the answer to everything.

Disagree with someone's interpretation of events? Gaslighting.

Suggest they might be mistaken? Gaslighting.

Ask whether there could be another explanation? Believe it or not... gaslighting.

The word has undergone one of the most dramatic cases of semantic expansion in recent years. Originally, gaslighting referred to a specific and deeply abusive form of psychological manipulation in which someone deliberately causes another person to doubt their memory, perception, or sanity in order to gain power and control over them.

Today, it often seems to mean little more than "you questioned my interpretation of reality."

And if that's what gaslighting means now, then I suppose CBT is one giant gaslighting exercise.

Every day, psychologists ask questions like:

"What's the evidence for that belief?"

"Could there be another explanation?"

"Is your mind jumping to conclusions?"

"What would you say to a friend who had this thought?"

We're explicitly encouraging people to doubt their automatic interpretations of reality.

We're asking them to question whether the stories their minds are telling them are actually true. In other words... we're getting people to mistrust their own thinking.

If we use the expanded internet definition of gaslighting, then yes—that's exactly what we're doing. Except, of course, it isn't gaslighting.

The crucial difference is truth, intent, and consent.

An abusive partner gaslights someone to make them easier to control. They distort reality for their own benefit.

A CBT therapist challenges someone's beliefs in order to help them see reality more accurately. It's collaborative, transparent, and always in the client's interests.

Ironically, many people come to therapy because they've already been "gaslit"—not by another person, but by their own anxious or depressed minds.

Their brain tells them they're worthless. Their OCD tells them they're dangerous. Their panic tells them they're dying. Their social anxiety tells them everyone is judging them.

CBT asks: "Hang on... are we sure about that?"

One of my pet peeves is concept creep. I’m not sure if it’s happening now more than 20 years ago, but it sure seems to be happening a lot.

Violence.

Trauma.

Sexual assault.

Aggression.

Harm.

Abuse

These words have all undergone concept creep over the past decade or so, diluting their meaning.

But allow me to go a bit deeper into this.

CBT starts from the premise that it’s not events themselves that cause suffering, but our interpretation of events.

Here are what I would consider the ‘big three’ foundation CBT quotes:

People are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of them - Epictetus

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so — Hamlet

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it—and this you have the power to revoke - Marcus Aurelius

Now, is this true? Is it really true that we suffer not because of events themselves, but because of how we interpret or frame events? Yes. Yes it is actually.

So this point is quite profound.

But…one can see how it could get a bit gaslight-y. If we take this idea or this philosophy all the way to its logical or extreme conclusion, we could end up saying that it really doesn’t matter at all how you live, what happens to you, because everything is just ‘in your head.’ You might as well be living in squalor, disease-ridden or whatever. If life is all just ‘what you make of it’ then none of us should really focus on improving our circumstances or improving the circumstances of anybody else. We all just need to ‘think better’ and everything will be better. Poverty is just as good as wealth. Sickness is just as good as health. Pain isn’t really real.

Again, this is really tricky because it’s kind of true. Do you think the party was good? Then it was. Do you think you had a good day? Then you did.  Everything is just how we think about it.

And yet somehow, all of us have an intuitive sense that conditions matter. That we can’t just think our way out of a crappy situation. That pain is in a sense real. That there really is value in say, having clean drinking water, and not dying at age 20.

But this tension is where CBT – or really, Stoicism is closer to what we’re really talking about now - gets its critique from. 

There’s no easy answer here I don’t think. We just have to accept two things can be true at the same time:

1.        The mind is extremely powerful and we have a lot of power to change how we feel by changing how we think about things

2.        Real life circumstances matter and we should try to improve circumstances

Maybe it’s simply case of admitting that none of us are going to become perfect Stoics or perfect monks who literally don’t care about our life circumstances.  But we could all benefit from becoming more Stoic and more flexible so we can be more happy and less anxious.

In other words, perspective might be limitless in theory, but in practice, it’s not. And we live in that tension.

PS. I want to make clear – real gaslighting can and does occur in therapy sometimes and when this occurs it is bad. That’s bad therapy and not really CBT at all.