Gaslighting, where someone causes another person to doubt their sanity or senses, can cause psychological damage.
There’s an opposite thing, though, that can also be damaging. As far as I know, it has no name. I call it “lightgassing” (or “light gassing”). Here, I explain how lightgassing works.
Lightgassing is when one person agrees with or validates another person’s false beliefs or misconceptions in order to be supportive.
Unlike gaslighting, a tactic of jerks and abusers, lightgassing is an (unintentionally harmful) tactic of friends and supporters.
Here are common examples I’ve seen that are sometimes, but obviously not always, lightgassing:
• “Since they did X, they don’t deserve to be with you.”
• “It was reasonable for you to do Y because they made you feel bad.”
• “You did nothing wrong. It was 100% their fault.”
Ideally, when you’re upset, friends should validate your feelings and help you feel heard and understood, but they should do so without agreeing with statements they themselves know to be false.
We do a disservice to people when we encourage their false beliefs. Most people have a value of truth-telling (and knowing the truth), and by avoiding lightgassing, we stay truer to these values.
But how does one listen with openness and empathy to an upset friend and still validate *feelings*, without validating *false beliefs*? This can be a tricky maneuver, which I think is one reason people feel tempted to lightgas.
If you want to avoid lightgassing, the key is to validate those elements of a person’s *beliefs* that you know to be true while empathizing with them and validating that their *emotions* are understandable and okay to feel. But the key is to do this without reinforcing beliefs in false things.
I think it’s usually not helpful to challenge what another person believes is true right in the heat of emotion when that person is sad or upset. So avoiding lightgassing will often initially involve simply not validating/agreeing with what you believe is false. Later, when the person is feeling better, if they ask for your opinion on the facts (or you feel it’s important for them to hear your opinion), you can tell them what you believe to be true at that point.
A caveat that I think is worth mentioning is that sometimes, the only thing we know about a situation is what our upset friend or loved one has told us. In such cases, I think we should start with the assumption that what they have described is an accurate representation of what they experienced (unless any reason to doubt it emerges).
Lightgassing (or light gassing) typically happens in ordinary situations where someone feels hurt or upset. But it can also happen in more extreme situations, such as when you’re trying to help someone who is feeling upset due to severe delusions caused by psychosis.
In the case of someone with psychosis, the path of least resistance is to lightgas them by agreeing with their delusions, but this is not in their own interest. On the other hand, if you invalidate their emotions, you will likely make them more upset and may lose their trust. The tightrope to walk is to help them feel cared about, listened to, empathized with, and understood, without saying that their delusions are reality. In other words, to avoid lightgassing them while also not causing them to feel gaslit.
Does lightgassing really deserve its own term? Why not just call it “enabling”? Well, lightgassing can be a type of enabling, similar to how gaslighting is typically a form of manipulation. But lightgassing is much more specific than enabling, and enabling can include lots of things that are not lightgassing (e.g., buying an alcoholic some alcohol is a form of enabling but not lightgassing). Having a more specific term (lightgassing) makes it easier to spot and communicate about this specific pattern of behavior.
This piece was first written on October 1, 2023, and first appeared on my website on May 13, 2024.
Comments