How Gaslighting Rewires the Brain
The forensic psychology of reality manipulation.
Psychology Today/October 7, 2025
By Joni E Johnston Psy.D., Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
He'd make things up that didn't happen. Then he'd get angry when questioned, as if remembering was an attack on him.
Every time she brought up something he did wrong, suddenly the conversation became about her mental health, her past trauma, her inability to let things go.
She started writing everything down because she couldn't trust her own memory anymore. When he found her journal, he said it proved she was paranoid.
These patterns, documented in groundbreaking research, reveal a form of psychological abuse – gaslighting. In 2023, Willis Klein, Sherry Li, and Suzanne Wood published the first major empirical study of gaslighting tactics after interviewing 65 survivors. Two years later, Klein, Wood, and Bartz’s research shed some light on just how powerful gaslighting is; gaslighting doesn't just manipulate victims, over time, it literally rewires their brains. They referred to this process as "prediction error corruption."
The Anatomy of a Gaslighter
When Klein's team analyzed gaslighting survivors' accounts, they noticed a specific pattern of "turning the tables”, where perpetrators redirected conversations about their own abusive behavior into attacks on their victims. This systematic transformation from accuser to accused happened so smoothly that victims often didn’t realize what happened until much later.
How those tables were turned depended on the gaslighter’s motive. Some partners used gaslighting as part of an overall pattern of coercive control. These individuals employed many strategies to dominate the relationship: setting arbitrary rules, verbal abuse, property damage, and threats. In these relationships, gaslighting was most often used to justify their behavior.
Others tended to use gaslighting to escape consequences for specific actions. These offenders were generally less controlling, but they responded to any call for accountability by attempting to distort the victim’s reality. I didn’t yell at you; you overreacted. I wasn’t flirting with the waitress; why are you so insecure? Their gaslighting routinely focused on reframing their misconduct as the victim's misperception or overreaction.
The Neuroscience of Mind Control
Here’s how this works and why it is so effective. Our brains operate on a principle called prediction error minimization; we constantly predict what will happen based on past experience, then adjust when reality doesn't match our expectations.
In healthy relationships, partners help each other to calibrate these predictions. "Did that meeting seem tense to you, too?" becomes a reality check that strengthens our confidence in our perceptions. Gaslighters corrupt this process by creating a reality violation.
Let’s say, for instance, that you find a dating app on your partner’s phone and confront him about it. Your brain expects one of two responses: denial with supporting evidence ("Let me show you it's not what you think") or an admission with accountability ("You're right, I messed up"). Instead, the gaslighter says, “That isn’t a dating app; it’s a networking app. The fact that you immediately see 'dating' shows how damaged you are from your past relationships. I'm trying to build our future while you're sabotaging us with your paranoia."
You now face a painful choice: In the moment of confrontation, your brain faces two possible explanations:
1. "My partner is lying to me". This requires accepting that:
- The person I love and trust is deliberately deceiving me
- My judgment about choosing this partner was wrong
- My entire relationship might be based on lies
- I need to take action (leave, confront, protect myself)
2 "I'm being paranoid/oversensitive." This requires accepting that:
- I misunderstood or misremembered
- My perception was off in this instance
- But my relationship is still fundamentally okay
- I just need to work on my issues
The second option feels "smaller" because it preserves the relationship and the victim's worldview. It's psychologically less threatening to think "I made a mistake" than "My entire life is a lie." If you've invested years in a relationship, built a life together, maybe have children, accepting that your partner is systematically lying means your whole world collapses. Accepting that you're occasionally paranoid means you just need to work on yourself.
The gaslighter exploits this by making the "I'm lying to you" explanation seem even more catastrophic ("You really think I would do that? After everything we've been through?") while making the "You're paranoid" explanation seem reasonable and fixable ("We all have issues, honey. Maybe you should talk to someone about your trust problems"). Over time, choosing the "smaller" error repeatedly trains the brain to default to self-doubt rather than partner-doubt.
Over months or years of this manipulation, victims' brains literally rewire themselves. Brain scans of abuse survivors show patterns like those with severe PTSD, but with a critical difference: the areas responsible for threat assessment become both hyperactive and unreliable. Victims become simultaneously hypervigilant and unable to trust their hypervigilance.
The Neuroscience of Recovery
Here’s the good news: the brain can heal, especially with helpers such as:
External Validation: After what may seem like a lifetime of crazy-making brainwashing, survivors need trustworthy sources to provide both emotional support and to validate and confirm their perceptions. Research shows that peer validation, in particular, is a powerful weapon against a gaslighter’s monopoly on how a victim interprets reality.
Reestablishing a Mind-Body Connection: Physical practices that reconnect the mind and body proved essential in the survivor accounts. Activities like yoga and martial arts help rebuild neural pathways between perception and reality.
Rebuilding a Narrative: Creating detailed timelines of abuse and organizing events chronologically helps survivors reconstruct their narrative and reclaim their history.
Graduated Decision-Making: The studies also revealed how survivors rebuilt their capacity for independent judgment through a progressive process, starting with small decisions and gradually building up to major life choices.
Reclaiming Reality
Gaslighting is a particularly cruel form of abuse; it’s an attempt to steal a person’s ability to trust their own mind. Because when we understand gaslighting—truly understand its mechanisms and impacts—we can finally make visible the invisible crime and give survivors what they need most: the knowledge that their reality is real, their perceptions are valid, and their truth will be heard.
