Gaslighting in the Workplace: Protecting Your Mental Health

Gaslighting, a form of emotional abuse, has evolved from its theatrical roots in Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light, which was later adapted into two films (Abramson, 2014), to infest various aspects of life, most alarmingly, the professional environment. Public interest has grown accordingly: Merriam-Webster named gaslighting its 2022 Word of the Year, reflecting how heavily readers looked up the term throughout that year (Associated Press, November 28, 2022)

How Workplace Gaslighting Works: Tactics and Techniques

At its core, gaslighting is about control. The primary mechanism involves a series of strategic lies, distorted facts, or making the target feel “too sensitive” or like they’re “overreacting” when expressing their feelings, leading them to question their sanity. This manipulation is particularly damaging in workplaces, where authority dynamics can amplify its impact.

Importantly, not every conflict over events or memory qualifies as gaslighting. Sweet (2019) describes it as a form of manipulation in which one person, often drawing on a position of greater power, leads another to doubt their own perceptions and judgment (see also Abramson, 2014). Sincere misremembering, poor management, or an honest mistake falls outside this definition. What separates gaslighting from these is its purposefulness, its reversal of who is cast as the wrongdoer, and its repetition over time.

This pattern of gaslighting matches the DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender) pattern, as defined by Freyd (1997, 2024). Individuals who use DARVO first deny events (“That never happened”), attack the target’s credibility (“You’re imagining things”), and reverse roles (“Now you’re harassing me”). DARVO benefits from a vulnerability Freyd calls betrayal blindness: when people depend on a relationship or institution, they may not notice, know, or remember betrayal in order to preserve it (Freyd, 1996, 1999; Freyd & Birrell, 2013). Victims, perpetrators, and witnesses can all show it, and it extends to workplace inequities, not only to trauma in the narrow sense. The idea was first developed for children who depend on caregivers. In employment, fully seeing mistreatment can threaten the livelihood and relationships a person relies on, so blindness maintains stability (Freyd & Birrell, 2013; Smith & Freyd, 2014). DARVO thus gains power from this adaptive vulnerability, silencing truth in hierarchies (Harsey & Freyd, 2022).

Researchers have begun to measure what gaslighting at work entails. Kukreja and Pandey (2023) developed and validated a scale for measuring gaslighting at work and proposed two dimensions. Trivialization covers behaviors that minimize the target’s concerns, such as unfulfilled commitments, distorted accounts of what someone said, and belittling remarks paired with the suggestion that taking offense is unreasonable. Affliction includes behaviors that erode autonomy and self-regard, such as excessive control, prompting the target to self-criticize, building reliance on the supervisor, and swinging between kindness and hostility.

Sarah’s Story: How a Junior Executive Was Gaslit

Take, for example, Sarah, a bright and ambitious junior marketing executive eager to contribute to her reputable company. Her direct supervisor, Laura, was known for her efficacy and sharp acumen. However, as Sarah began presenting innovative ideas in team meetings, Laura’s demeanor shifted from supportive to critical.

At first, Laura would dismiss Sarah’s suggestions with remarks like, “That’s interesting, but our focus should be on proven strategies.” While these dismissals may have seemed harmless at first, Laura's tactics grew increasingly intense. After one presentation, Sarah was blindsided when Laura called her into her office. “You’ve got to be more careful with your presentations. You keep repeating the same old ideas,” Laura claimed, displaying a series of notes that Sarah had never seen before.

Confused and disheartened, Sarah began to question her abilities. “I thought I brought fresh solutions to the table,” she thought. But as weeks passed, every time Sarah presented an idea, Laura twisted the narrative. “You need to pay more attention to feedback,” Laura insisted in meetings, even citing examples that never happened, leading Sarah to believe she was misremembering past discussions.

Laura also publicly undermined Sarah’s confidence, saying, “You have to improve if you want to succeed here,” while exaggerating her own successes. Sarah’s colleagues noticed the tension but were unaware of the subtle manipulation or too fearful to intervene. As Sarah’s feelings of inadequacy grew, she became increasingly withdrawn, doubting her competence and fearing that she was incompetent. Laura’s tactics reached a fever pitch when she claimed, “If only you were capable of understanding our vision,” implying that Sarah’s confusion stemmed from her shortcomings rather than Laura’s murky explanations. This statement stung deeply for Sarah, who had always been a high performer.

Struggling to make sense of her performance reviews, riddled with vague criticisms and unsubstantiated concerns, Sarah found it nearly impossible to discern what was genuinely expected of her. The crippling self-doubt festered, and fear of reprisal from Laura kept her from seeking help or validation from her peers.

Sarah’s experience shows how gaslighting can work without a single dramatic act: a pattern of dismissal, shifting standards, and unverifiable criticism is enough to leave a capable person doubting her own judgment.

Photo by Avi Agarwal @aviagarwal via Unsplash.

The Impact of Workplace Gaslighting: Sarah’s Case and Its Consequences

Workplace gaslighting has devastating consequences for individuals and, in turn, harms the organization. Targets like Sarah experience chronic confusion, disorientation, anxiety, depression, burnout, hypervigilance, and self-doubt, often leading to social withdrawal and turnover intentions (Moisoglou et al., 2025a, 2025b). Sarah’s case shows how these outcomes emerge not from a single event but from a sequence in which each step makes the next more effective.

The sequence began with trivialization (Kukreja & Pandey, 2023). Laura’s early remark that the team should focus on “proven strategies” was easy to defend as ordinary management, yet it set the pattern of dismissing Sarah’s contributions without engaging them. Because the remark was deniable, Sarah had no grounds to object. The second step cut her off from evidence. By presenting notes Sarah had never seen, Laura created an information imbalance: Sarah could neither verify nor rebut criticisms she was hearing for the first time. The third step was more direct. When Laura cited feedback conversations that never took place, Sarah was asked to choose between her own memory and her supervisor’s account. Because Laura held formal authority and Sarah’s career depended on Laura’s evaluation, the safer conclusion was that she had misremembered. This is the point at which doubt shifts from the situation to the self.

Public comments such as “You have to improve if you want to succeed here” then widened the damage. They gave colleagues a one-sided picture of Sarah’s performance, while Laura’s inflated accounts of her own achievements strengthened her credibility. Witnesses were left holding Laura’s version of events with no reason to question it, which helps explain why Sarah’s colleagues noticed tension but did not intervene. The remark that Sarah might lack the capacity to understand “our vision” completed the shift of responsibility. Laura’s unclear communication was recast as Sarah’s deficiency, an example of what Kukreja and Pandey (2023) describe as affliction: behaviors that prompt targets to criticize themselves and erode their sense of competence.

Sarah’s experience shows how this individual suffering between supervisors and subordinates creates cultures of fear, reduced productivity, and distorted team dynamics. It also shows why the damage reaches her career, not only her well-being. Performance reviews filled with vague, unsubstantiated criticisms left her unable to tell what was expected of her, so she could not improve even if she wanted to. Such reviews also became part of her record. Any later account she gave of Laura’s behavior had to contend with a documented history that seemed to support Laura’s version. Meanwhile, Sarah stopped offering the innovative ideas she was hired to contribute, so the organization lost the very thing that first drew Laura’s criticism. Individuals who use these tactics not only undermine targets but also cultivate environments that stifle collaboration. They live with a pervasive fear that others will belittle or misunderstand their contributions.

Sarah’s silence deserves particular attention. She did not report Laura, and the story gives two reasons: she doubted her own competence, and she feared reprisal. Both are understandable. Research on betrayal blindness suggests that people who depend on an institution may avoid recognizing mistreatment because acknowledging it would threaten the relationship they rely on (Freyd, 1997; Smith & Freyd, 2014). Her fear was also not unreasonable. Had Sarah challenged Laura’s account, the pattern could easily have escalated into DARVO: denying the examples were invented, attacking Sarah’s credibility, and a reversal in which she became the problem (Freyd, 1997; Harsey & Freyd, 2022). Her silence, however, came at a cost. Without a trusted colleague to compare notes with, she had nothing outside her own head to test Laura’s claims against.

Moreover, this example shows how gaslighting can go unnoticed in professional settings. Unlike overt bullying, which involves observable behaviors like yelling, public humiliation, threats, or social exclusion that witnesses can readily identify, gaslighting operates covertly through subtle reality distortion, leaving targets isolated and questioning their own perceptions. This insidious invisibility makes gaslighting particularly destructive, as it erodes individual mental health while silently dismantling organizational trust and ethical cultures from within.

How to Stop Gaslighting: Strategies for a Healthier Workplace

The first step in addressing workplace gaslighting is recognizing patterns of behavior that undermine an individual's confidence in their perceptions, memory, or judgment. However, awareness alone is not enough. Preventing and addressing gaslighting requires organizations to foster open communication, psychological safety, and accountability, so that employees can raise concerns without fear of retaliation or dismissal.

Jennifer Freyd's (2021) concept of institutional courage offers a valuable framework for this work. It calls on organizations to respond to reports of harm with transparency, accountability, and a genuine commitment to protecting those who speak up. In practice, this means adopting a “cherish the whistleblower” approach: listening carefully to employees who raise concerns, conducting impartial and respectful investigations, protecting confidentiality where possible, and addressing substantiated misconduct through meaningful corrective action. Rather than reflexively disbelieving complainants or prioritizing the organization's reputation, leaders must demonstrate that speaking up is both safe and worthwhile.

Research by Welch and Stubben (2020), published in Harvard Business Review, reinforces the organizational value of effective reporting systems. Drawing on 15 years of anonymized data, the researchers found that companies with more extensive internal whistleblowing activity tended to have better organizational outcomes, including fewer lawsuits and stronger financial performance. Their findings challenge the assumption that a higher volume of reports necessarily signals a more dysfunctional organization. Instead, reporting can indicate that employees trust the system enough to raise concerns and that organizations can identify and address problems before they escalate. Importantly, secondhand reports, information shared by people who witnessed or learned about potential wrongdoing rather than experiencing it directly, can also provide valuable signals of broader organizational risks. Leaders should therefore take concerns seriously even when the person reporting them is not the direct target of the alleged behavior.

Organizations can further strengthen prevention efforts through training that helps employees recognize gaslighting, DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender), and other forms of psychological manipulation. Complementary evidence from Kuntz and Searle (2023) suggests that bystander intervention training can improve employees' attitudes and beliefs about intervening in workplace incivility and bullying, although these improvements may diminish without sustained organizational support. Equipping managers, HR professionals, and bystanders to spot concerning patterns and respond constructively can help prevent harmful behaviors from becoming normalized. Clear reporting procedures, independent review mechanisms, protection against retaliation, and consistent follow-through are essential to turning awareness into meaningful change.

Farid et al. (2024) further highlight the importance of supportive workplace relationships. Their findings suggest that coworker support may help buffer the negative relationship between supervisory gaslighting and work motivation. Organizations should therefore foster supportive teams, encourage employees to speak up about harmful supervisory behavior, and ensure that concerns are taken seriously and addressed fairly.

Ultimately, a healthier workplace depends on an ethical climate in which employees can question decisions, challenge harmful conduct, and report concerns without being discredited or punished for speaking up. Organizations must move beyond encouraging employees to report misconduct and demonstrate, through their actions, that they will hear those reports and handle them fairly.

Sarah’s story illustrates what can happen when manipulation and control take precedence over trust and healthy professional relationships. Addressing these dynamics requires more than individual resilience; it calls for organizational cultures that respect employees' autonomy, take concerns seriously, and hold people accountable for harmful behavior. By recognizing gaslighting and strengthening the systems designed to prevent and address it, workplaces can better protect employees’ psychological well-being while fostering integrity, trust, and professional respect.

If you suspect you are being gaslighted, professional therapeutic help is essential for your well-being. Expressing your feelings in a safe environment outside your workplace and having a professional validate them can help you gain clarity and confidence in your perceptions.

About the Author

Dr. Kerstin Hecker, PhD, is a workplace bullying researcher, depth psychologist, Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, and holistic counselor. Her work focuses on workplace bullying, covert aggression, abuse of power, relational harm, organizational dynamics, and the effects of chronic stress. She offers online counseling in English and German.

© 2025 Dr. Kerstin Hecker. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced, distributed, or used in any form without prior written permission from the author, except for brief quotations with proper citation.

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