A 2024 study of research into gaslighting, dating back to 1981, used that data to create a hypothesis about where the impulse to gaslight comes from. The researchers ran an experiment to test their hypothesis on the drivers of present-day gaslighting behaviours. While the researchers’ focus was on emerging adulthood and romantic relationships, the categories they used and the impulses to gaslight apply in equally enlightening ways to workplace gaslighting.

It’s useful to know why someone is gaslighting you in both personal and professional relationships. It’s also helpful for the perpetrator to understand what drives them to act in this harmful way. Gaslighting in the workplace can be just as devastating, if not more so, because the employee risks their position, livelihood, and career in walking away from the gaslighter.

In the early 1980s, psychologists defined gaslighting as a “peculiar type of violence characterized by manipulation strategies intended to control and alter the partner’s sensations, thoughts, actions, affective state, and even self-perception and reality-testing.” A gaslighting professional can also use “manipulation strategies” that impact another employee’s feelings, thoughts, actions, sense of self and understanding of reality.

In 2007, researcher Robin Stern focused on the perpetrator’s intention to“psychologically subjugate another individual.” The techniques to take control of a target ranged from active assaulting to more passive minimizing and denying. Both physically aggressive and emotionally neglectful behaviours constitute what Stern describes as “a form of psychological violence" that altered the target’s “thoughts, perceptions, actions, and affects.”

Stern’s research identified three categories of gaslighters that use excessive........

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