Somewhere between the second helping of stuffing and the annual argument about politics, your cousin Becky will lean across the table and inform you that you're "gaslighting" her.
You will simply pass the gravy and pray for a power outage.
For the three people left on the internet who haven't heard the term, gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation where someone makes you doubt your own memory, perception, or sanity.
It comes from a 1938 play called *Gas Light*, later a 1944 Ingrid Bergman movie, where a husband messes with the dimmer switches and hides household objects to convince his wife she's losing her grip.
Terrible thing to actually do to a person.
Here's the problem: we took a clinical concept describing genuine emotional abuse and turned it into a casual accusation for when someone disagrees with us about whether we already watched that episode of *The Bear*.
He just has a different recollection of who left the dishes in the sink.
It's "roommate." Therapists have been shouting into the void about this for years.
Real gaslighting is a sustained campaign.
It's being told "that never happened" so many times that you start keeping a secret diary just to confirm you're not losing it.
It's a partner who hides your keys and then asks why you're so forgetful.
It is not your boyfriend claiming he told you about the work dinner.
That's just a guy who forgot to tell you about the work dinner.
The word has also become a convenient get-out-of-jail-free card.
Got caught snooping through someone's phone?
You weren't snooping — you were responding to their gaslighting.
Clearly your partner is gaslighting you into feeling guilty.
It's the Swiss Army knife of excuses, and we're all just slicing ourselves with it.
A generation of TikTok therapists distilled decades of psychology into 30-second clips, and the algorithm rewarded the most dramatic interpretations.
Now everyone's an expert, and every minor disagreement is emotional abuse.
Here's the thing nobody wants to hear: sometimes you actually are wrong.
Sometimes you did say you'd be fine with Thai food and then changed your mind.
That's not someone manipulating you into insanity.
That's being a human being with a flawed hippocampus and a habit of talking out of both sides of your mouth.
First, we're exhausting a useful word until it means nothing, the way "literally" and "iconic" and "problematic" all went to the great semantic farm upstate.
Second, and worse, we're making it harder for actual victims to be believed.
When everyone's crying gaslight, nobody hears the person who's genuinely being driven to question their own reality.
So this holiday season, maybe save the clinical vocabulary for actual clinicians and actual abuse.
If your uncle says something you disagree with, you don't have to diagnose him.
You can just say "I see it differently" and then go get more pie.
That's Thanksgiving. **The takeaway:** We've turned a serious term for psychological abuse into a rhetorical weapon for winning arguments, and the only people who lose are the ones actually suffering.
Final Thoughts
Use the word when it applies, or accept that you might just be wrong sometimes.