Have you heard of Gaslighting, Enabling, and Projection
Understanding the dynamics of manipulation and support can be quite important for good interactions in the complicated interaction of human relationships. Three such dynamics—gaslighting, enabling, and projection—each unique but frequently confusing. This blog seeks to define these terms, give samples, draw attention to their variations, and offer guidance on handling these difficult behaviors.
What is Gaslighting?
Often evoking cognitive dissonance and other changes such low self-esteem, gaslighting is a type of psychological manipulation whereby a person or group covertly seeds doubt in a target individual, so questioning their own memory, perception, or judgment. Gaslighting is the attempt to destabilize the victim and delegitize her beliefs by means of denial, misdirection, contradiction, and misinformation.
〰Example: If a person consistently tells their partner that their feelings are irrational and not based on reality, eventually the partner may start to believe they are overly sensitive or even irrational.
〰Impact: Gaslighting victims could find themselves nervous, perplexed, and unable of trusting their own feelings and experiences.
〰Neuroscience of Gaslighting: Particularly in areas related to emotional control and memory, gaslighting can cause great psychological and emotional stress that alters the structure and function of the brain. Chronic stress can change the hippocampal area, which is essential for memory formation and recall, so making it challenging for victims to believe their own memories. Furthermore, the continuous stress reaction caused by gaslighting could cause the amygdala to be continuously active, so raising emotional reactivity and anxiety. This increased state can interfere with the prefrontal cortex’s capacity for logical decisions and clear thinking, so reinforcing the victim’s gaslighting dynamic.
〰Dealing with Gaslighting: It’s important to ground yourself in your own perceptions and feelings. Keep a record of events and conversations, seek support from friends or a therapist, and consider distancing yourself from the gas-lighters.
What is Enabling?
Enabling can often be mistaken for support, but it is actually reinforcing bad habits by eliminating the personal consequences. Although it comes from either love or fear, enabling stops personal development and accountability.
〰Example: Covering for a coworker’s repeated tardiness or errors, for instance, helps them to avoid the required consequences and realize the need of changing.
〰Impact: Enabling can lead to a endless cycles of dependency and unhealthy behaviors, where the enabled person never faces the full impact of their actions.
〰Neuroscience of Enabling: The neural pathways linked with reward and pleasure could help to reinforce enabling actions. Particularly when a person releases neurotransmitters like dopamine, enabling another often results from an emotional reaction anchored in the reward system of the brain. This can lead to a feedback loop whereby the enabler keeps acting to prevent negative emotions and preserve emotional balance in the relationship. This can strengthen neural connections that enable more habitual behavior over time, so making it more difficult to interrupt the cycle without deliberate effort and maybe therapeutic intervention.
〰Dealing with Enabling: It is absolutely vital to establish and follow strict boundaries. Encouragement of responsibility in the enabled person also helps them to face the inevitable results of their activities.
What is Projection?
Projection is attributing one’s own unpleasant emotions, ideas, or motivations to another person. Problems in embracing these attributes in oneself lead to this defense mechanism.
〰Example: Accusing a partner of cheating without evidence, driven by one’s own feelings of attraction to someone else or guilt about past infidelity.
A parent who suffered academically in their childhood and still feels inadequate and frustrated about their own educational experiences may project these emotions onto their child. Should the child struggle with their homework, the parent may become unduly critical or anxious, interpreting these problems as more serious than they really are. Even when the child is making a reasonable effort and performing satisfactorily, the parent may often say things like “Don’t end up struggling like I did,” or “You’re just not trying hard enough.”
〰Impact: Projection can lead to misunderstandings and conflicts in relationships, as it distorts how one sees others and avoids addressing personal issues.
〰Neuroscience of Projection: Projection is the process by which one misattributes personal traits or emotions to others; this can be connected to defense mechanisms the brain uses to shield the individual from low self-esteem or inner conflict. From a neuroscientific standpoint, this can be grasped via prefrontal cortex activity involved in impulse control, judgment, and social behavior. Projecting might be an attempt to externalize inner conflicts someone cannot resolve inside. One could consider this mechanism as a defensive mechanism meant to prevent cognitive dissonance, the mental discomfort brought on by holding contradicting ideas or beliefs.
〰Dealing with Projection: Self-awareness is key to dealing with projection. Reflect on your feelings and consider whether they stem from within. Therapy can also be helpful in uncovering and addressing these tendencies.
Differentiating Gaslighting, Enabling, and Projection
While enabling is about preventing someone from facing the results of their actions, usually to avoid conflict or out of a mistaken sense of protection, gaslighting is about manipulation to distort reality for the victim. Conversely, projection addresses seeing in others what we cannot tolerate in ourselves. Effective addressing of these trends starts with their recognition.
Conclusion
Knowing the subtleties among gaslighting, enabling, and projection will help one develop better self-awareness and relationships. Acknowledging these habits helps people to move in direction of more honest and supportive interactions. If you find yourself coping with any of these problems, keep in mind that support—from friends, relatives, or professionals—is just around you. Every stride you take advances your emotional wellness and helps you to recover your autonomy.
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- Rotunda, R. J., West, L., & O’Farrell, T. J. (2004). Enabling behavior in a clinical sample of alcohol-dependent clients and their partners. Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, 26(4), 269-276.
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- Stern, R. (2018). The gaslight effect: How to spot and survive the hidden manipulation others use to control your life. New York: Harmony Books.
Sajid Ahamed is a “Certified Trainer of NLP” and organizes John Grinder approved New Code NLP and NLP Master Practitioner Certifications Courses in India and the Middle East. He has more than 1000 hours of coaching experience and is an ICF accredited Professional Certified Coach (PCC). Apart from the Trainings, he covers a wide niche of coaching including Relationship Coaching, Parenting Coaching, Leadership Coaching.
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