For millions of us, living with an addict is part of daily life. For example, an estimated 48.7 million Americans or 17.3% of the population qualified for a substance use disorder (addiction) diagnosis in 2022. This means that, on average, one in five of us lives with an addict directly and more than half of us have a close family member or friend who is addicted to drugs or alcohol. That, in turn, can have significant impacts on your life including your financial and social standing, your economic outlook, and your mental health.
One of the biggest impacts to mental health is that individuals who have a substance use disorder are unreliable and will often lie and manipulate to get their way – whether they intend to or not.
Gaslighting is a common technique used in manipulative behavior. It doesn’t require any thought, any training, any knowing how to do it. For many of us, gaslighting others just means denying their experience and reinforcing our own. And, for an addict, that’s a natural result of denying substance abuse. In this article, we’ll look at what gaslighting is and how your loved one may be (often unknowingly) using it against you.
What is Gaslighting?
Gaslighting is a form of manipulation in which the perpetrator makes a victim feel delusional or crazy by systematically undermining their belief in things they have seen or heard. The term comes from a story in which a man, wishing to have a reason to divorce his wife, adjusts the light level on the gas lamps every day. When his wife asks about it, he insistently tells her they are the same as they always were and nothing has changed – she’s crazy. This continues until she predictably snaps under the weight of having her own experience constantly undermined.
Gaslighting is most often used in situations where the gaslighter is in a position of power and therefore a position where it’s easy to force their beliefs on others. E.g., the provider of the household, your parents, or the leader of a group. However, it’s also important to keep in mind that positions of power can be emotional. Your children can gaslight you by using their position of power as your children to convince you that nothing is wrong. So can your partner. Or your mother. Perceived innocence and “Want” to believe that they aren’t doing anything wrong can be just as powerful as faith that this person knows what is up or that person paying all of the bills. Gaslighting therefore comes in many forms.
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How do Addicts Use Gaslighting?
Addicts use gaslighting in a variety of ways, but most often to deny or to hide substance abuse. Here, you’ll get a few different types of gaslighting that can come out as either outright abusive or more underhandedly so. Let’s take a look:
Denying the Extent of the Problem – Denial is extremely common in addicts and this can be difficult to navigate. For example, denial can also mean self-denial. Your loved one may have hidden the truth so carefully that even they don’t know what it is anymore. Denial often looks like:
- “I didn’t have more than a beer” even though you know they got blackout drunk
- “I haven’t drank since last weekend” even though they might have an open container of alcohol in the house right now
- “I’m clean, honest” even though there’s paraphernalia visible
- “I can quit anytime I want” even though they never try
It can also look like:
- Refilling bottles of alcohol so it looks like they haven’t been touched
- Replacing cans in the refrigerator exactly as they were and hiding the cans
- Hiding signs of substance abuse by taking out the trash or putting cans in a weird place like the swimming pool/the attic/behind a bookshelf
All of these issues are equally problematic and abusive to you. It also means you’ll have to put aside your trust in your loved one and follow your gut feeling. Documenting evidence is a good way to ensure that you can trust yourself around this form of gaslighting.
Denying the Problem – Denying the problem is another very common form of gaslighting in addicts. Here, you’ll be presented with alternatives to the real problem and your loved one will often have a series of catastrophes after another. They might have wrecked their car, an emergency operation might mean they can’t pay the rent, their pet might have to go to the vet. Whatever the reason, they often need money or have none of it and will often come to you with excuses.
- “I need money, just one more time”
- “I quit, you know that”
- “I don’t know how X vanished” when they stole it to sell it for money
- “I don’t have rent money because my boss didn’t pay me”
- “ I lost my job again for no reason”
This kind of gaslighting can also be extremely difficult to see, which is why many people end up paying the rent or helping their loved ones with groceries and home care – therefore enabling the addiction. It can mean you have to cope with being lied to and manipulated, even though your gut instinct says something else is going on.
Worse, when you challenge any of these ideas, the conversation will often be twisted around to how you’re paranoid, crazy, delusional, untrusting. You’ll be made to feel guilty for ever thinking there was a problem or not believing things. And, that’s how gaslighting works. The perpetrator will use your emotions and wanting to trust against you.
Getting Help
Being lied to can hurt. Being told that you’re wrong, that you’re imagining things, that you’re crazy can damage your mental health and your self-esteem. How do you recover from that? How do you rebuild your relationships from that? It can be important to understand that it’s extremely unlikely that your loved one is manipulating you on purpose. Instead, most people with substance use disorders deny things to themselves as well. They might be completely unaware they aren’t telling you the truth and they might be so good at hiding things that they really do think things are fine. Getting past that means setting boundaries with yourself, getting therapy, and working towards getting your loved one into treatment.
Here, you’ll often want to start with resources like AlAnon, a group designed to support the family and loved ones of addicts. You can and should also look into counseling and therapy yourself to help you recover from the trauma and to avoid enabling your loved one. That means learning how to say no and to set boundaries even around manipulation and gaslighting.
It’s always going to be important to try to get your loved one into treatment and therapy. At the same time, you can’t do so if your mental health is struggling or if you’re not sure of yourself enough to convince your loved one that they need help. That means you may need help first. Finally, if you want to rebuild your relationship, you might want to look towards treatment that offers options for family therapy, so you can work with your loved one to move forward and rebuild healthy communication patterns. Good luck getting help and getting your loved one into treatment.
