An uncomfortable pattern I’ve noticed in workplaces and relationships over the years is that even (what I believe to be) genuinely well-intentioned men (I only see it with men) find themselves resorting to gaslighting at the drop of a hat in relatively low-stakes situations. Specifically, I see guys trying to resolve tension by inventing a prior misunderstanding, notionally the source of the tension, and resolving that. The other party is surprised and relieved to learn of the misunderstanding until later, when, sitting with it, they realise it never occurred.
I guess what I’m seeing is guys who’ve never learned to resolve conflict, only to “win”, overcorrecting and becoming what might be termed “conflict-avoidant”, but their avoidance strategy is pretending, the moment there is a conflict, that there isn’t one. If they can get this past everyone in the moment, face is saved and they’re off the hook for a true resolution.
It’s sort of hard to know if “gaslighting” is quite the right word for this. It gets misused a lot in place of “lying”, but “lying” is wrong here, since this is often not deliberate. For every instance of provably self-aware bullshitting, there’s another that seems as though a guy was in such a hurry to say something that he forgot to even consider whether it was true or not. But what matters most is what you did, not what you meant, so I’m going with “gaslighting” because the thrust here is about undermining someone’s direct experience and hoping they never notice.
Sometimes the idea that you were involved in a sitcom-level comedy of errors rather than a real disagreement gets retroactively applied to a larger stretch of time (as in “months ago, I thought you thought this and you thought I thought that“). Sometimes it happens in the space of one conversation. In the moment, these can be as hard to identify as each other, and if you don’t think fast enough to call it out, the moment’s gone, and you’ve tacitly accepted some false narrative.
In a one-on-one situation, you can at least try to straighten this out bringing it up again (until the fatigue of doing so repeatedly sets in, a pattern in a lot of relationships). If it happens in a group context, like a work meeting, it’s a one-and-done win – the victim appears to be the problem if they bring it up again, and even if they detect the falsehood immediately, there’s social pressure not to make anything of it, since the offender appears to be offering an olive branch.
Sometimes guys are trained into this resolution-via-misunderstanding thing to such a degree that they assume any conflict must have been a misunderstanding. The obvious (perhaps not in the moment) red flag there is that if conflict means you’ve been misunderstood, it follows that you’re always right. I’ve been this guy before, and realising this shook me out of it – certainly not before frustrating the hell out of somebody.
That’s all pretty propagatey, too, in a cycles-of-abuse way. If you’re gaslit your whole life in a “you didn’t say what you think you said” way, you might develop the habit of being extremely careful not to be misunderstood, coming by the assumption of “if I am understood, we will agree” sort of honestly. In romantic relationships, of course, this is all tied up with the training of men, when there’s a problem, that they should “fix” it, when often what your partner needs is simple acknowledgment or to mull something over together. The assumption that someone who comes to you with a problem needs a solution from you contains a lot of unflattering implications about that person.
So back on resolution-via-false-misunderstanding: as only-somewhat-adjusted dudes, we’re hopefully past Needing to Win, but we certainly don’t want to be seen to Lose, and we can’t truly resolve the conflict, because that’s likely to involve compromise (seen here as a type of loss), or vulnerability, or a level of introspection we might not be equipped for. So what we try to get, on the sly, perhaps not even consciously, is everyone’s consent to pretend this never happened.
I think a lot of guys start out earnestly wanting to resolve a conflict, but need to stay comfortable, so try to get there by figuring out a reinterpretation of past events that everyone can agree on, which is easier to devise a solution to than whatever the real thing is. A radioactive mix of people-pleasing and conflict-intolerance and a need to save face, which I think might genuinely be some guys’ idea of compromise. In my work, I’ve seen guys like that quietly decimate creative projects and processes, since every time a conflict arises it’s not only ignored, but also becomes socially sort of off-limits, the chkdsk repair approach to teambuilding*.
It’s hard to know what the right amount of vigilance is to protect yourself from this sort of thing while still being open and questioning and across your own bullshit, which for all you know might include shit like this. You have to really guard your sense of past reality, remembering how things made you feel and why, because someone in the habit of it can wipe your brain clean of those things pretty fast without you realising.
*this is the dumbest analogy ever but hear me out: chkdsk scans your faulty hard drive and “repairs” it by marking the fucked parts of it and trying not to access them in the future. obviously that doesn’t fix shit. i used to work in a pc repair shop and the manager kept running chkdsk on pcs with broken hard drives and charging $150 and sending them back out because he genuinely thought it could fix physical faults on a disk. fucked
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