Hey what’s up guys! Kathy Gibbens here, and I am super excited to be starting a new mini-series with you! But first, I wanted to share a recent podcast review from Audry Cece (I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly!). Audry says, “Thank you for creating this podcast. It’s light and uplifting, yet so, so helpful in understanding how to think critically, and why no one seems to be thinking critically anymore. I’m highly enjoying this!!”
Thank you so much much, Audry, for listening & for leaving a review! Rating & reviewing this show wherever you listen is super helpful to me in being able to get the word out & for more people to be able to find it.
Ok, let’s dive into this new mini-series on Manipulation. There are still more fallacies I want to share with you, but there’s also a list of things that aren’t necessarily logical fallacies but they can cause bad thinking if you aren’t aware of them. So, I put together a list of things that people do to manipulate you into thinking or doing a certain thing.
Maybe it’s a good idea to define what I mean by Manipulate. The Oxford dictionary defines Manipulate as: controlling or influencing (a person or situation) cleverly, unfairly, or unscrupulously.
Now, a lot of the fallacies we’ve already covered can definitely fall under the manipulative banner, like the Appeal to Guilt, Appeal to Fear, Appeal to Emotion, Bandwagon, and so on. Oh, and definitely propaganda! All of these things can absolutely be manipulative. But they’re not the only things that people do that are manipulative, so this little mini-series will go through a list of other things that you’re bound to run across. I want you to be able to recognize it and name it when you see it so you’re not fooled by it!
Ok, so the first thing I want to talk about in this manipulation mini-series is called Gaslighting. Gaslighting is when someone tries to make you question your own reality or your own sanity. It comes from an old movie from the 1940s where a husband tried to make his wife think she was going crazy so he could admit her to a mental institution and steal her inheritance. Lovely, huh? So, before electricity was common in houses, houses used gas lighting. And there was a switch that could be used to control the flame on the gas lighting. If you turn it up, the lights would get brighter, turn it down and they would dim. You get the idea. Well, this husband would play with the lights, making them brighter and then dimmer. When the wife would come and say, “hey what’s going on with the lights?” He would say, “Nothing. I haven’t noticed anything, they’re not changing at all. Are you feeling ok? There must be something wrong with you if you’re seeing that.”
You see what he’s doing? He’s using language that’s making her question herself and her reality…he’s trying to make her think she’s crazy.
Now, there’s a lot of psychology behind gaslighting that I’m not going to get into b/c I’m not a psychologist. For the purposes of this episode, I just want you to be familiar with this term and what it means so you can recognize it when it happens.
There are a lot of ways gaslighting can happen, but here are just a few examples of what it may sound like:
Let’s say you’re feeling upset or sad or angry or frustrated about something. If someone says, “Stop being so emotional. It’s not that big of a deal. You just need to get over it.” That’s gaslighting. They’re trying to minimize your experience and how you’re feeling about it. Now, they may not be trying to gaslight or manipulate you on purpose. In this example, sometimes people just aren’t very good at dealing with other people’s emotions and they feel uncomfortable so they’re trying to just make you “feel better”. But either way, it’s a denial of what you’re experiencing and an attempt to make you think or feel something different.
Here’s another example that sometimes happens in the medical community. Sometimes, when someone goes to the doctor, if the doctor can’t figure out what’s wrong with the person, they’ll tell them, “it’s all in your head…you’re fine.” I actually had a doctor tell me this once! LOL! I couldn’t believe it. Just b/c they weren’t able to figure out why I was experiencing a particular symptom didn’t mean it was all in my head. Luckily, I recognized it, and I knew it wasn’t in my head and found another doctor.
So, here’s a question to ask yourself if you think you’re being gaslighted: “Is this person making me feel like I’m crazy when I know I’m not?” *repeat*
Ok, that’s it for the Manipulation mini-series Part 1, join me in the next episode for Part 2: False Urgency.
Remember: When you learn HOW to think, you will no longer fall prey to those who are trying to tell you what THEY want you to think and it all starts with asking one simple question: “Is that really true?”
