If you’ve been gaslit, you might have noticed something strange happening inside your body. You second-guess memories you once felt certain about. Your heart races when you try to explain your side of things. You feel exhausted even when you’ve done nothing physically demanding. You might wonder if you’re losing your grip on reality.
You’re not imagining it. Gaslighting doesn’t just hurt your feelings—it creates measurable changes in your brain and nervous system.
What Gaslighting Actually Is
Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which someone systematically causes you to doubt your own perceptions, memories, and sanity. The person doing it denies your reality, twists facts, and insists that your version of events is wrong—even when you know what you experienced.
Over time, this pattern erodes your ability to trust yourself. It’s named after a 1944 film in which a husband manipulates his wife into believing she’s mentally unstable by dimming the gaslights in their home and denying it’s happening.
What It Feels Like Inside Your Body
Gaslighting doesn’t stay abstract. It lives in your body.
You might feel a tightness in your chest when you’re about to share your perspective. Your thoughts may become foggy during conversations, making it hard to remember what you were trying to say. You might rehearse interactions over and over in your mind, trying to figure out what’s real.
Many people describe feeling like they’re walking on eggshells, never quite sure which version of reality will be accepted today. Some say they feel like they’re going crazy. Others describe a bone-deep exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix.
These aren’t character flaws. They’re neurobiological responses to sustained psychological threat.
Why Your Brain Responds This Way
Your brain is designed to create a stable understanding of the world. It relies on pattern recognition, memory, and sensory input to help you navigate reality safely. When someone consistently tells you that what you remember didn’t happen, or that what you clearly saw isn’t real, it creates what psychologists call cognitive dissonance—a deeply uncomfortable state where two opposing beliefs exist simultaneously.
Your brain experiences this as a threat. In response, your nervous system activates the same pathways it would use to protect you from physical danger.
Gaslighting also exploits your brain’s natural tendency toward social belonging. Humans are wired to maintain relationships, especially with people we depend on or love. When someone important to you insists you’re wrong about your own experience, your brain faces an impossible choice: trust yourself or trust them.
Over time, many people’s brains begin to defer to the gaslighter’s version of reality simply to reduce the distress of constant conflict. This isn’t weakness—it’s a survival adaptation.
How Gaslighting Affects Brain Function
Research on chronic psychological abuse shows that sustained emotional manipulation can alter brain structure and function in several key ways.
Memory and the hippocampus. The hippocampus is responsible for forming and retrieving memories. Chronic stress and manipulation can impair hippocampal function, making it genuinely harder to remember events clearly. This creates a cruel cycle: the gaslighting makes you doubt your memory, and the stress of being gaslit actually impairs your memory, which then seems to confirm the gaslighter’s claims that you’re “always forgetting things.”
Emotional regulation and the amygdala. The amygdala processes emotions and threat detection. Under prolonged gaslighting, the amygdala can become hyperactive, causing you to feel anxious, scared, or emotionally reactive even in situations that wouldn’t have bothered you before. You might feel like you’re overreacting to small things, which gaslighters often use as further “proof” that something is wrong with you.
Decision-making and the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex manages executive functions like planning, decision-making, and self-regulation. Chronic manipulation and cognitive dissonance can impair this area, making it harder to think clearly, make decisions, or feel confident in your choices. This is why people being gaslit often feel paralyzed when trying to make even simple decisions.
What Happens to Your Nervous System
Beyond the brain, gaslighting activates your autonomic nervous system—the network that controls your automatic stress responses.
Chronic hypervigilance. Your sympathetic nervous system, which controls your fight-or-flight response, may become chronically activated. You might feel constantly on edge, scanning for signs of danger or inconsistency in conversations. Your body stays in a state of alert, which over time leads to exhaustion, muscle tension, digestive problems, and sleep disturbances.
Shutdown and freeze responses. Some people’s nervous systems respond to gaslighting by moving into a dorsal vagal state—a shutdown or freeze response. This might look like dissociation, emotional numbness, brain fog, or a sense of being disconnected from your body. You might feel like you’re watching your life from the outside.
Disrupted stress recovery. Normally, your parasympathetic nervous system helps you return to calm after stress. But when you’re being gaslit, there’s no safe moment to fully recover. The threat is ongoing and unpredictable. Your nervous system never gets the signal that it’s safe to rest.
Signs Your Brain and Nervous System Are Affected
You might notice:
- Difficulty remembering conversations or events that just happened
- Constant mental replaying of interactions to figure out “what really happened”
- Trouble concentrating or completing tasks you used to handle easily
- Increased anxiety, especially before or during interactions with the gaslighter
- Physical symptoms like headaches, stomach problems, or muscle tension
- Feeling confused or “foggy” during or after certain conversations
- Difficulty making decisions without excessive doubt
- Feeling emotionally numb or disconnected from yourself
- Hypervigilance or scanning for threats in routine interactions
- Sleep problems, including insomnia or nightmares
- A sense that you can’t trust your own judgment anymore
These symptoms aren’t permanent damage. They’re your brain and body responding to an abnormal situation.
The Long-Term Mental Health Impact
Sustained gaslighting is associated with several mental health outcomes that reflect the neurobiological changes happening beneath the surface.
Research shows that people who’ve experienced gaslighting often develop symptoms consistent with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), including hypervigilance, emotional dysregulation, and negative self-concept. Anxiety and depression are common, as is a persistent sense of self-doubt that can last long after the gaslighting relationship ends.
Some people develop what’s called “learned helplessness”—a state in which you stop trying to change your situation because you’ve learned that your actions don’t matter. This happens when your brain has been repeatedly told that your perceptions and efforts are worthless.
The erosion of self-trust can affect every area of life—relationships, work, parenting, and daily decision-making. You might find yourself constantly seeking validation from others because you no longer trust your internal compass.
What Actually Helps
Recovery from gaslighting is possible. Your brain has neuroplasticity—the ability to form new neural pathways and heal from trauma.
Validate your own experience. Start documenting your experiences. Keep a journal, save text messages, or record your memories of events. This isn’t about “proving” anything—it’s about giving your brain consistent evidence that your perceptions are real.
Reduce exposure when possible. If you can safely create distance from the person gaslighting you, do so. Your nervous system needs space to regulate without constant threat.
Rebuild your internal reference point. Practice noticing your own thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations without judgment. Mindfulness practices can help you reconnect with your internal experience and begin trusting it again.
Seek trauma-informed support. A therapist trained in trauma, particularly those who use approaches like EMDR, somatic experiencing, or internal family systems, can help you process what happened and restore your sense of self. Support groups for people who’ve experienced emotional abuse can also reduce isolation.
Regulate your nervous system. Practices like deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, gentle movement, or spending time in nature can help your autonomic nervous system return to baseline. Your body needs to relearn what safety feels like.
Reconnect with trusted others. Healthy relationships with people who respect your reality can serve as “external validators” while you rebuild internal trust. Choose people who listen without judgment and who don’t try to tell you what you experienced.
Tools That Can Make This Easier
Certain resources and approaches may support your healing process.
Structured journaling methods designed for trauma recovery can help you organize your thoughts and track patterns over time without becoming overwhelming.
Nervous system regulation tools such as guided audio programs for grounding, apps designed for trauma survivors, or body-based practices can give your system concrete ways to move out of hyperarousal or shutdown.
Educational resources about gaslighting and psychological abuse help you understand that what happened to you has a name, that others have experienced it, and that your responses are normal reactions to abnormal circumstances.
Therapeutic workbooks focused on rebuilding self-trust, processing complex trauma, or understanding manipulative relationship dynamics can supplement professional support.
Community connection through support groups—whether online or in person—can reduce the isolation that often accompanies gaslighting and provide reality-checking in a safe environment.
You Can Trust Yourself Again
If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself, please know: your brain and nervous system are doing exactly what they’re designed to do in an impossible situation. The confusion, the doubt, the physical symptoms—none of these mean something is wrong with you. They mean something was wrong with what was done to you.
Healing takes time, and it’s rarely linear. But with support, distance from manipulation, and practices that help your nervous system feel safe again, you can rebuild trust in yourself. Your brain’s neuroplasticity means that the changes caused by gaslighting are not permanent sentences.
You are not broken. You are responding to trauma. And you can recover.
References
American Psychological Association. (2022). APA dictionary of psychology: Gaslighting. https://dictionary.apa.org/gaslighting
Bernstein, D. P., & Fink, L. (1998). Childhood Trauma Questionnaire: A retrospective self-report. The Psychological Corporation.
Gass, G. Z., & Nichols, W. C. (1988). Gaslighting: A marital syndrome. Contemporary Family Therapy, 10(1), 3-16.
McBride, K. (2008). Will I ever be good enough? Healing the daughters of narcissistic mothers. Free Press.
National Domestic Violence Hotline. (2023). What is gaslighting? https://www.thehotline.org/resources/what-is-gaslighting/
Sarkis, S. A. (2018). Gaslighting: Recognize manipulative and emotionally abusive people—and break free. Da Capo Lifelong Books.
Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press.
Sweet, P. L. (2019). The sociology of gaslighting. American Sociological Review, 84(5), 851-875.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving. CreateSpace Independent Publishing.
