“Gaslight”

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This is a street sign indicating the name of a local street. The word “gaslight” is evocative of a street lamp, perhaps lit elegantly along some Parisian corridor by the Seine…

However, it also has another, more insidious, meaning. To “gaslight” someone is to engage in behavior that is meant to annoy or harass while pretending that you are not doing it, in order to drive someone crazy and isolate them from others who are unable, or unwilling, to accept that such cruel behavior is taking place. It comes from the movie “Gaslight,” in which a malevolent husband attempts to drive his wife crazy by manipulating the gaslight in their house and denying it in order to murder her.

Gaslighting behavior can be “unconscious” (though to what extent is uncertain since there is ALWAYS a conscious attempt to hide the fact of the behavior) and characteristic of any number of diagnosable mental health conditions…

Or it can be conscious and willful, though, perhaps, no less characteristic of underlying trauma and pain that precipitates the behavior to begin with. This can be seen in the practices of such horrific actors as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in the years preceding and encompassing World War II. In the words of Adolf Hitler, “It is a quite special secret pleasure how the people around us fail to realize what is really happening to them.” While the fact of underlying trauma and pain may precipitate and underlie such behavior, it in no way exonerates it since we all have a responsibility to understand and address our own underlying vulnerabilities from childhood and beyond.

I pass the above intersection during one of my favorite walks in the community in which I now live. There are no elegantly lit street lamps in its vicinity, however, I like to believe, and pretend, that there are. Imagination and creativity help.