By their very nature, gaslighting and manipulation can sometimes be difficult to detect.
That’s because both cause clients to second-guess their perception of events . . .
. . . or even to question whether someone is intending to cause them harm in the first place.
So how can we help a client begin to discern what’s really going on?
In the video below, Russell Kolts, PhD, shares some of the key indicators of gaslighting and manipulation that can help your client start to figure things out.
For me, that’s the clue that someone’s being manipulated. If they’re consistently engaging in stuff that they’re not comfortable doing, they don’t want to do and yet they’re doing it. And so I think that’s a good sort of pointer. With gaslighting, which is sort of similar, I think it’s when people present sort of ambivalence, even around their own experience. They maybe talk about what they’re feeling or talk about their reactions, but there’s a real tentative quality to it. And when you sort of probe there, when you go, well it sounds like you’re maybe you sort of kind of feeling this way, but you’re not quite sure. Well then usually you get the kind of unpacking of, well, this is kind of what I feel, or this is what I hear from my partner. This is what I hear from my parents. This is what people say to me. And so sometimes they can actually identify the feedback they’re getting from others that’s triggering that feeling in them.
One of the things that’s important to think about is what’s the client’s behavior within those relationships? And so what we might have, if you’ve got someone in a relationship that’s very punishing or very manipulative, is someone who has developed a protective strategy of going passive, right, of maybe not standing up for themselves and sort of not allowing themselves to be manipulated necessarily. That’s not their fault, but finding themselves, doing things out of that passivity that they don’t want to do. And so I think it’s really easy if you’ve got a client who’s sort of used to doing that to step into the role of therapists, that’s a little more dominant than you want to be, right, where you’re asking the client to do something, or you’re covertly pressuring them to do things. It’s easy to fall into similar patterns that they might see in their relationship.
And so for me, when I’m working with all clients, really, but particularly with clients who experience manipulation, a big part of the story arc of the therapeutic relationship is to create a relational context with my clients in which they can feel an increasingly developed sense of agency in which they feel increasingly comfortable being assertive with me, sharing their experience with me, actually increasing ability to engage in sort of mindful, like kind curiosity about their own experience and being able to communicate that in ways that I can then validate and reinforce. So they’re discovering in the therapeutic relationship, maybe for the first time, a new way of being in a relationship in which they have agency, in which they can utilize skills and develop skills like assertiveness and things like that.
So I think that’s really important. And I think you can do that really socratically. I think we can do it in the background. I think the therapist really has to recognize that our clients are the experts on their own experience and that therapy isn’t something that we do to, and with a client. At its best, it’s a co-created process in which the client and the therapist are working together to build this experience that’s going to be helpful and healing. And so that requires finding ways to give the client some agency.
Gaslighting and manipulation can fly under the radar unless we know the warning signs. That’s why we’re sharing expert strategies for How to Work with Gaslighting and Manipulation.
Inside, hear from top minds in the field including Richard Schwartz, PhD; Pat Ogden, PhD; Ruth Lanius, MD, PhD; George Faller, MS; and many more.
Please check it out, but before you do, I’d like to hear your thoughts. How do you help clients who you suspect are experiencing gaslighting or manipulation? Let me know in the comments below.
I find working with Janina Fisher’s TIST model very helpful in situations such as described above.
Once the client understands their natural defense response preferences and how those came about developmentally – they can access more mindful, intentional, compassionately curious agency in noticing initial reactions and exploring/developing new ways of responding. This work begins intra-personally and eventually wires new patterns outward, into the interpersonal realm.
great article
I have found this article really helpful. I have found myself trying to get my client to stand up to his manipulative mother. I have noticed that he feels a sense of overwhelm when he tries to change the relational pattern of being passive and doing things resentfully. This article had helped me think how I might use our relationship to help him feel more empowered.