You are so sensitive. So emotional. You are so defensive. You react too much. Calm down. Chill out. Stop fucking! Are you crazy? Plaka I did, you have no humour; You are so dramatic. Just overtake it!

Do you hear familiar?

If you are a woman, probably yes.

Do you ever hear any of these comments from your husband, your partner, your boss, your friends, colleagues, relatives after you have expressed disappointment, regret or anger about something they did or said?

When someone says these things to you is not an example of indifferent behaviour. When your husband appears half an hour late in your appointment without getting a phone – this is an indifferent attitude. A comment designed to make you feel like, “Relax, you react too much”, after you have referred to someone else’s bad behaviour, are emotional manipulation, clear things.

And that’s the kind of emotional manipulation that feeds an epidemic in our country, an epidemic that defines women as mad, irrational, hypersensitive, whimsical. This epidemic helps reinforce the idea that women only need a minimal incentive to put their (crazy) emotions into the forum. This is erroneously wrong and unfair.

I think it’s time to separate indifferent behaviour from emotional manipulation and we need to use a word that is not in our daily vocabulary.

I want to introduce a useful term to distinguish these reactions: gaslighting.

Gaslighting is a term commonly used by mental health professionals (I’m not one of them) to describe the manipulative behaviour used to confuse people to believe that their reactions are so extreme that they are mad.

The term comes from the 1944 film by MGM, Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman. Bergman’s husband in the film, played by Charles Boyer, wants to put her jewels in her hand. She realizes she can do it if she officially describes her as insane and closes her in a psychiatric institution. For this purpose, she intentionally sets the lights of the house to flicker, and whenever Bergman’s character reacts to it, she tells her how she imagines things. In this context, one who does gaslight is someone who presents false information to change the perception of the victim for himself,

Today, when the term is mentioned, it is usually because the offender says things like “you are so stupid” or “no one will ever love you” to the victim. This is a deliberate, pre-meditated form of gaslighting, similar to the actions of Charles Boyer’s character at Gaslight, where he sets up a knitted man to confuse the character of Ingrid Bergman to believe he’s crazy.

The form of gaslighting that I am addressing here is not always premeditated or deliberate, which makes it worse because it means that all of us, especially women, have faced it at some stage.

Those who engage in gaslighting cause reactions – whether they are anger, annoyance or sadness – to a person with whom they interact. Then, when that person reacts, the person using gaslighting makes them feel dishevelled and insecure, pretending their feelings are not rational or normal.

My friend Anna (all names have been changed to protect their privacy) is married to a man who finds it necessary to make unmistakable and arbitrary comments about her weight. Whenever she gets upset or angry with her rude comments, he answers in the same way, “You’re very sensitive. I was joking”.

My girlfriend, Abbie, works for a man who finds a way, almost daily, to unduly reduce her professional performance. Comments like “Can not do anything right” or “Why hired you” are often repeated. Her boss has no problem dismissing people (she does it often) so they would not have imagined these comments that Abbie has worked for him for six years. But every time she defends herself and says, “It does not help to tell me such things,” she faces the same reaction: “Relax. React too much ”

Abbie thinks her boss is just a jerk but the truth is that she makes these comments to get her to believe her reactions are absurd. And it is precisely this kind of manipulation that lets her feel guilty that she is hypersensitive and as a result has not resigned.

But gaslighting can be as simple as smiling and saying “You’re very sensitive @” to some other @. Such comments may seem inconclusive but when they speak, they express judgment on how someone else should feel.

While gaslighting is not an ecumenical truth for women, we all know that many have faced it at work, home their personal relationships.

And gaslighting does not just affect women who are not sure about themselves. Even dynamic women with confidence are vulnerable to gaslighting.

Why?

Because women bear the brunt of our rib. It is much easier to load our emotional weights on the shoulders of our husbands, our girlfriends, our relationships, our colleagues, than putting them on the shoulders of men.

It is much easier to manipulate emotionally one that has been prepared by society to accept it. We continue to burden women because they do not deny our weights so easily. It is the ultimate cowardice.

Whether gaslighting is conscious or not, it produces the same result: it makes some women emotionally speechless.

These women can not express clearly to their spouses that what they did or say hurt them. They can not tell their bosses how their behaviour shows disrespect and prevents them from giving their best to work. They can not tell their parents that, when they are critical, they do more harm than good.

When someone repudiates their reactions, these women often reduce the importance of what they said by saying “Forget it, there is no problem”

This “forget it” is not just the rejection of a thought, it is self-rejection. It is sad.

It is no wonder that women are unintentionally passive-aggressive when expressing anger, sadness or frustration. For years they have undergone so much gaslighting that they can no longer express themselves in a way that would seem authentic to themselves.

They say “sorry” before they say their opinion. In an email or message, they will put a smile next to a serious question or concern, thus reducing the impact that they have expressed their true feelings.

You know how it looks: “You’re late :)”

These are the same women who live in relationships in which they should not, who do not follow their dreams, abandon the kind of life they would like to live.

Since I started this feminist self-exploring journey into my life and the lives of women I know, this perception of women as “mad” has emerged as a major issue in society and an equally important source of frustration for women in life in general.

From the way women are represented in reality shows, how we learn to see boys and girls see women, we have come to accept the idea of women as unbalanced and irrational, especially when they are angry or upset.

The other day, on a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles, a flight attendant who recognized me from my many trips asked me what a profession I do. When I told her I was mainly writing about women, she laughed right away and asked me, “Oh, how stupid we are?”

Her instinctive reaction to my work really troubled me. While she said it, her question still gave a pattern of sexist comments that permeate all aspects of society about how men see women, which also greatly impacts on how women see themselves.

As I see it, the gaslighting epidemic is part of the fight against the obstacles to the inequality that women face continuously. Gaslighting acts deprives them of their most powerful tool: their voice. This is something we do to women every day, in many different ways.

I do not think the idea that women are “crazy” is based on some sort of huge conspiracy. On the contrary, I believe it is linked to the slow and steady rate at which women are undermined and devalued on a daily basis. And gaslighting is one of the many reasons we face @ with this common construction of women as “crazy”.

I recognize that I have been guilty of gaslighting to my female friends in the past (never to my men-my surprise friends). It is shameful, but I am glad to have realized it and stopped it.

While I take full responsibility for my actions, I believe that, like many other men, we are products of our social learning. It has to do with the general feeling that this social learning gives us about the assumption of our mistakes and the exposure of our emotions.

When we are discouraged in our youth and teenage years from expressing feelings, it makes many of us remain immune to our refusal to express repentance when we see that our actions are hurting someone.

When I was writing this article, I remembered one of my favourite phrases by Gloria Steinem. “The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn but to nurse.”

For many of us, the issue is first and foremost how we will not be able to blink out those lights and learn how to recognize and understand the feelings, opinions and attitudes of women in our lives.

But the issue of gaslighting does not have to do with the fact that we have learned to believe that the opinion of women does not have the same weight as our own; With what women have to say, what they feel is not just as valid;

Yashar Ali

The above is a translation of Yashar Ali’s “A Message to Women from A Man: You Are Not Crazy” article that first appeared in The Current Conscience and was republished in Huffington Post. Here you can see the original text.

Source: http://naieisaimisogynis.com