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Examining workplace abuse through a strengths-based lens helps expose gaslighting.

Workplaces may focus on targets' mental weakness when the focus should be on perpetrators' dysfunction.

To maintain mental strength, remain clearsighted about the unjust harm being done to you.

When we examine workplace bullying in an extreme form, namely the punitive treatment of LGBT military personnel over the decades, targets of less systemic workplace abuse can gain valuable insights. In this post, the insights in the military examples are juxtaposed with four non-military, bullying workplaces described in The Gaslit Brain, in order to help targeted employees to identify when gaslighting is being used.

Instead of the more typical pathologizing of LGBT military personnel, Dr. Heliana Ramirez and Dr. Paul Sterzing, social work experts and researchers, focus on the “strength, resilience, and resistance” demonstrated by targeted service members and veterans. Valuable insights can be gained by their approach for all targets and survivors of systemic workplace bullying.

Gaslighting used in workplace abuse

The first insight emerges from examining the way perpetrators use gaslighting to fault those they target for maltreatment. Citing extensive research, Ramirez and Sterzing reveal “centuries of official and unofficial anti-LGBT military policies” that positioned victims as the ones doing wrong, being mentally ill, and unfit for work.

The textbook reversal of the bullying offender and the targeted victim has been normalized and systematized in the military. The gaslighting is clear in that the discriminatory, un-empathic, callous treatment of victims is justified by perpetrators who position their targets as mentally ill, morally corrupt, or mentally deficient.

Neuroscientific research documented........

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