Are You Being Gaslighted In Your Marriage?

Are you being gaslighted in your marriage, or is something else going on beneath the surface? In this video, Kimberly Beam Holmes breaks down what gaslighting actually is, how to know if it’s truly happening, and when a painful pattern in your marriage might be caused by miscommunication, different backgrounds, fear, or unhealed wounds—not intentional manipulation.

If you’ve ever felt confused, crazy, or like you’re losing your grip on reality during arguments with your spouse, this is the video you need to watch. You’ll learn the real signs of gaslighting, what makes it different from normal disagreements, and the three key statements you can use to set boundaries, stay grounded, and stop getting pulled into endless arguments.

Kimberly also explains why the term “gaslighting” is often misused, how fear can drive controlling behavior, and why two people can remember the same event in completely different ways. Most importantly, she shows you what to do when you feel invalidated, dismissed, blamed, or overwhelmed in conversations with your spouse.

In this video, you’ll learn:

• What actual gaslighting looks like in marriage
• The difference between gaslighting and conflicting perspectives
• How past experiences shape how spouses interpret situations
• Why you may feel "crazy" even when no one is gaslighting you
• Signs of emotional control or manipulation
• Three powerful statements that help you stay calm and set healthy boundaries
• How to reset destructive communication patterns
• When it’s time to pause the conversation—and how to exit with strength
• How to turn painful conflicts into productive conversations

Whether gaslighting is happening or you’re simply stuck in damaging communication loops, this video gives you actionable next steps to protect your sanity, improve conversations, and move your marriage toward healing.

If you're struggling in your marriage, don’t wait. Get our FREE resource: The 7 Steps to Rescue Your Marriage 👉 https://marriagehelper.com/free

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Chapters

• 0:00 Are You Being Gaslit?
• 1:05 What Gaslighting Really Means
• 3:59 Different Histories, Different Realities
• 7:15 Control Versus Miscommunication
• 9:30 Healthy Disagreement Markers
• 12:20 Resetting The Focus At Home
• 15:22 When It’s Actual Gaslighting
• 18:01 Three Red Flags And Responses
• 22:22 Boundaries, Calm Exits, Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Are you being gaslighted or is it something else? Or is it, are you being gaslit? Whichever way you want to view it, we are going to be talking about that in this video. So if you have ever been in a situation where you feel crazy, where you feel like you are losing your sanity, then stop here. This is the video you need to watch because I'm going to be explaining what might be happening, what might not be happening. How do you know if it's actually gaslighting or if it's something else? But either way, there's going to be three key statements that I'm going to share with you that you can use when you feel stuck in these kinds of situations to help you set boundaries and feel sane again. My name is Kimberly Beam Holmes, and I am the CEO at Marriage Helper. And honestly, as I have completed and been working on my PhD in psychology, one thing that you need to know about me is I am super resistant and reluctant to fall into a lot of these pop psychology verbs and terms that people use. I absolutely hate how easily people adopt some of these terms like narcissism or gaslighting and just begin to use them so commonly as a blanket statement in their lives, whenever things get hard or whenever they're dealing with difficult situations and difficult people. So this video isn't going to be one of those where I just say, yes, you're probably being gaslighted. And here's what you need to do. I'm actually going to kind of make you think because that's what you actually need to do. It's really easy to throw a term at a hard situation and a hard relationship. But the more difficult thing and the stronger thing for you to do is to really identify what's the core issue, what can I do about it and do that thing in order to try and turn the relationship around. So today we're going to cover gaslighting. So here's the core of it gaslighting became a term that's been used in psychology, but it was originally even talked about or the nomenclature came from a movie from the 1940s called Gaslight. And it was a movie about a husband who was intentionally dimming the lights in his home and telling his wife whenever she would say, Why are the lights low? He was intentionally telling her, they aren't your imagining things. There was an intention on his part to try and form her perception of reality. And so at the core of gaslighting is this one premise. It is someone's desire, strong desire, to try and deeply control a situation. And the intention of that person is to try and get the other person to question their own sanity and their own reality. This is deep level control. Here's the thing: you are never going to know the gaslighter, quote unquote, the gaslighter's intention in any given situation, unless they explicitly say it, which isn't gonna happen. Let's be real. And so when people throw around this term, I'm being gaslighted, or you're gaslighting me, you're assuming, number one, an intention of another person. And number two, you might not actually be referring to the right thing that's happening in your situation. As I said, gaslighting is it came into the psychological world from this movie. And so psychology has adopted that term as a blanket term to talk about a deep-seated manipulation or control whose goal and which the goal of is to get a person to question their sanity and their reality. This is not common. Now, control is common and it's very common in relationships. But I think the majority of the time when people say, I feel like you are gaslighting me, or I feel like this person is gaslighting me, what is actually happening is that there is a difference of understanding and of previous experiences. Let me explain what that means. Let's say you have two people. They've gotten married. One person comes from a Christian upbringing of faith. They came from a family who stayed together. Parents never divorced, they had a happy, healthy, secure childhood and lived a pretty great life. Went to school, had all of their needs met, and really had a lot of friends. That was that is their history. And this person married someone who came from extreme abuse in their background, that came from a situation where they were constantly criticized, where they were constantly put down, where they didn't know even sometimes where their next meal was going to come from. But these two people end up getting married. Can you begin to see how they might actually have two different interpretations of the same event? It's even true that two siblings that grow up in the same household and have the same parents can remember the same event that they both experienced differently because they are filtering it through their own lens of their filters, their personality styles and temperaments, the things that they struggle with, the narrative going on in their own head. My dad and his brother are pretty close in age. They're about a year apart. And unfortunately, they grew up in a household with a dad who was an alcoholic, which was my grandfather. And so both of them would experience some of my grandfather's alcoholic rages and the things he would say and the fights that he would have with his wife, with my grandma. Both of my both my dad and my uncle would experience this. But to this day, 60 years, 70 years later, when they talk about those situations, my dad remembers it one way and my uncle remembers it very differently. That doesn't mean that one of them is trying to gaslight the other. It means that depending on a culmination of the sum of their interpretation of their life experiences, they are going to remember things differently. And that's okay. So let's go back to the marriage example. We have two people who came from very different backgrounds. And let's say that all of a sudden you have a situation where the wife is beginning to make her own friend group. She's going out on weekends, going to girls' nights, and the husband already is coming from a stance of, I am scared of losing you because I've experienced so much loss and so much trauma in my past. And so as that wife is trying to just go out and make friends, the husband begins trying to control out of fear. We're not going to get into that in this video. But as he is trying to control, he might even be trying to get her to see things differently. Like you're doing this because you just want to get back at me. Maybe they had a fight earlier and she's just going out to be with her girlfriends. It was already planned, but the husband is reading into it and trying to tell her what her motives are and how her motives are wrong and how she's really trying to just get back at him or to manipulate him. When she begins to hear this over time, she's going to begin to feel like she is crazy. She's going to begin to question her own motives. She's going to begin to wonder these things that my husband is saying because they're coming from two totally different backgrounds. He's controlling out of fear. There's a lot of reasons people control. We'll cover that in a completely different video. But the ultimate outcome is that the two people can't get on the same page. They keep talking about their own experiences. They can't understand each other. And over time, this could look like gaslighting, even when it's not. And I would say the majority of the time that people say, I'm being gaslighted, what they really are truly experiencing is that they are struggling to communicate with someone that they just see the world differently than. Here's the things that you need to look for to understand: is this just a disagreement that you need to figure out how to understand each other, or is this something more? When you're in a disagreement where you're trying to get on the same page with each other, then the key here that you want to have in this conversation is: are we trying to actually understand each other? Are we both in this situation trying to say, hey, I'm struggling to see it from your perspective? Can you help me understand? The outcome in a healthy disagreement that you want to look for, even if you're struggling to understand how the other person is interpreting it, the outcome that you're trying to get to here is getting on the same page. And this is the key difference. Now, if you haven't been having a healthy type of disagreement where you just stay stuck in these cycles and stay stuck in these loops, then it is going to feel like gaslighting because you just keep fighting about the wrong things. You keep fighting about the way you see it versus the way your spouse sees it, and it's keeping you stuck in this loop to where you might feel like you're going crazy. So what you need to do, you need to reset the focus. So the next time you get into one of these disagreements, and let me give you an example here. When my husband and I first got married, he approached all of our disagreements in a very logical way. I approached most of our disagreements in a very emotion-based way. When he would come home after a long day of work, I was wanting and craving connection. He, however, was wanting some alone time to be able to recharge. And since we weren't mature enough or using what I'm about to share with you to really get to the core issues that were going on, I was just seeing what my needs were. I need connection with him. I need time with my husband. I want to feel wanted and loved and seen. He was seeing it from the perspective of why can she not respect my request to have some time alone? And so, since we weren't able to speak each other's language, we just kept fighting about what our needs were and saying it from our perspective. But because we weren't trying to truly hear or understand the other person, it just continued this cycle. Maybe you have felt that way. I mean, he would come home and I would say, I want to spend time with you. He would say, I need space. And I would say, Why don't you love me? Why are you not paying attention to me? Why can't you just do this one thing for me? To where he would begin saying, Why are you so needy? Why are you so insecure? And we just fought about the wrong things. We were attacking each other's character. We weren't actually looking at the key of the situation. And listen, the term gaslighting wasn't really a thing back in 2010 when we were having these fights. But if it were, I guarantee you, I probably would have felt like my husband was gaslighting me because he was taking my need and he was spinning it in a way that made me feel like maybe I shouldn't have that need. But he wasn't gaslighting me. He cared about me. I cared about him. We just didn't know how to speak each other's language. And so over time, we began to realize these fights aren't going anywhere. They're not helping us to grow closer to each other. How can we reframe it? So in our conversations, when we would begin to fight about this, we had to learn. And honestly, it just started with one of us. And honestly, it started with me. Not to toot my own horn because I did so many things wrong. But one person has to just start doing the right things in order to turn a disagreement around. And if you're watching this video, guess what? It's you. So you get to be the one to be the mature person in the moment and change the dialogue. And again, I'm going to give you three things that you can say, but I want to take this over to gaslighting. So if it's actually gaslighting, if it's actually where there's deep control happening, then it's going to be a consistent pattern over a long period of time. It's going to lack the other person ever trying to understand your point of view. It's going to include a lot of character assassination, or someone might say, you're just too stubborn to understand anything, or you're just too needy, or you're just too emotional. You can't think clearly. It's going to include a lot of statements like that to make you second guess who you are. It's going to make you question your sanity and make you feel like your needs, which are absolutely valid, are all of a sudden absolutely unnecessary. And that's where it begins to become a problem. But like I said, there are three key things that we want to look for and three key statements that you can say when you feel like these things are happening. The first thing that you want to notice is denial. Denial is going to happen if you go to the person and you say, but you said this. And they said, That's not what I said. I never said that. This is one of those instances that you can get caught in that spiral because now you're just going to be fighting about who remembers what. And honestly, you might remember what the person said a bit differently. You remember the gist of it, you remember, you remember the overall sentiment of it, but maybe you didn't get the words quite right. And those are the things that you might start fighting about. That's not the actual core issue. And if you keep going down that rabbit hole, it's only going to make it worse. So when denial comes into place, and maybe you're the one doing the denying, you have to do some sex, some self-reflection. But when denial starts to happen, here's what you can say. I remember the gist of what we talked about. I remember what you said. I remember what I said. I remember it. We don't have to keep rehashing this out. Just stand your ground, say the thing, and move forward. Because continuing to stay on that topic isn't going to make anything better. The second thing you want to look for is invalidation, especially of feelings. So when someone says you're just overreacting, or you're just cold hearted and don't care about anything, or you just don't see reality. All of those are invalidating the way that you feel. And one of the things that we teach at Marriage Helper is that your feelings are valid, whether or not they're based on reality. Your feelings matter because the way you feel about something is a signal from inside your body that something is wrong. Or if it's a positive feeling, it's a sign that something is right. And so again, as we talked about before, feelings come out of our interpretation and the sum of our interpretation of experiences that we've had. I'm gonna have a different feeling about a situation than my husband will. We aren't supposed to have the same feelings because we are wired differently. That's okay. It's the invalidation of someone's feelings just because someone else doesn't feel that way, or maybe didn't even intend for the other person to feel that way. The invalidation is what leads to the negative cycle. So when you feel like your feelings are being invalidated, all you have to say is, I'm not debating my feelings. That's it. That is how I feel. We're not going to debate it. We don't have to debate it. You can stand your ground without engaging in the conflict. The third thing that you want to look for in these types of discussions is what's called countering. So instead of a person taking blame themselves and being able to see how they might have done something that affects you, they might say something like, You're the one with the problem. One of the callers from a recent call-in show that we did here at Marriage Helper called in and said, The issue that I'm having with my husband is I can't get him to talk to me. He's completely disconnecting. He wants me to try and fix things, but I can't figure out what to do. We asked some questions to try and understand what the core issue was. And what we found out was there had been a history of infidelity, but there was current flirting. The wife was still reaching out to other men, trying to just flirt with them. She liked the dopamine high, so to say. There's unforgiveness in your relationship, and that needs to be dealt with. But if you're able to say, no, there is not something that I have done that has been left unforgiven or that we haven't talked about, they're just continuing to turn the tables back at me. And listen, like there's an asterisk here we have to put no one's ever perfect. There's always things that we can that we can forgive. But if there's not something big that is really the thing here, and again, the person is also kind of using this as a character assassination, like you're the problem, it's not me. It's defensiveness and it's trying to put the blame back on you. Then the key statement that you can say in this kind of situation is listen, this is what I'm feeling. This has been my experience. I am telling you the way that I feel for us to work together to try and make it better, not for us to just stay stuck in this cycle. Your spouse, if they have been saying these kinds of things to you, and if you feel like you're going crazy, then the thing that you need to focus on is not going down the rabbit trails. You can use statements like, these are my feelings and they are valid. This is my experience and it's how I feel. Let's work together to try and figure out the core issue. Or even saying, I remember the gist of what we talked about. And that's not what I'm trying to discuss here. Those are key statements that you can use to stand your ground and to keep the conversation on pace, as opposed to trying to go down these rabbit trails that are the things that are going to make you feel crazy the more you try and go down those. Stay focused. Whenever you get in these discussions, whether your spouse is trying to tell you that you're the problem or that you are too reactive or that you are too shut off, try and understand the core of where they're coming from, but then stand your ground and keep your intention of, I'm gonna do everything I can in this conversation to understand the core problem. That is what can turn this behavior around. When you begin to set some boundaries around how you fight, how you're not going to engage in these unnecessary side trails and how you are going to stay focused on, I want what's best for the relationship. I want us to fix these core issues. We're gonna do this without attacking each other's character, without making assumptions about each other, and we're gonna do it because it's the best thing for our marriage. That is what you can do. So here's the final thing you need to understand. It's going to take time for you to reset how you fight and how you talk about some of these things. And the first, second, or even third discussion where you try and reset these boundaries is gonna be messy. And that's okay. You're gonna learn from how you do it and you're gonna do it better next time. So here's what I want you to know and understand. Say these things with love in your heart and in your voice, the tone that you use, all of those things matter. But you can leave the conversation if it continues to go downhill. And that's okay. You're absolutely able to say, I want to continue this discussion, but let's both do it when we are in a better place to do so. I remember one discussion, a very difficult conversation that my husband and I had once. Again, this was years ago, but it was actually the conversation where I ended up leaving him for a period of time. There had been a lot of, you know, this kind of stuff where I was trying to tell him how I felt and he was just telling me I was too sensitive or I was being this, that, or the other. And I finally got to the point where I couldn't take it anymore. I remember packing my bags, walking into the bedroom, and saying to him, I love you and I want this to work, but it can't work as long as there is this toxic fighting between the two of us. He then said, You're just storming out in anger, you're just doing and I wasn't. I was calm as everything. And I just stood there and repeated, I love you and I want to make this work, but I can't keep enduring this. And I left. Now, I don't endorse anyone ever leaving. And in fact, I think that if I were to go back and do things differently now, I would do it a bit of a different way. But the core for you to understand here is that you have the ability to leave the conversation. Be sure that you stay calm. The one who stays calm is the one who is in charge. And so as long as you are able to keep your cool, and is and if you feel that you are starting to get riled up, that you can't continue this conversation in any kind of productive way, that's when it's okay to exit and to come back later. Because the more ramped up you are, the more irritated, angry, frustrated, all of those things, that's when you become defensive. That's when you start in your entertaining these rabbit trails, and that's when things completely fall off the off the off the road. That's when things end badly. So whether or not you're actually being gaslighted, these are the things that you can do. This is the mindset that I want you to take into your next conversation, into your next disagreement. And these are the boundaries that you can set of the rules of engagement that you want to have when you fight. Ultimately, the goal is to save the marriage. It's to fix these things, it's to make it better in the future. And you're gonna have to go through some suck in order to make that happen. Like I said, every Wednesday at noon we do a live show, at least of the time of recording this video. And so we would love for you to join us Wednesdays at noon central time. You can also click the link here and watch more videos of other live shows we've done. These are real people calling in with their questions and we are answering them off the cuff. We weren't planned or none of them were planned or pre planned. These are real situations. And so you get to hear real situations of other people that are going to be a lot like situations you're experiencing, but also you get to hear the heart of marriage helper and how we respond and how we try and help people just like you. Until next time, remember there is always hope.