I am familiar with the term gaslighting not because I frequent SJW conversations, facebook, twitter, etc but due to this word being used often with abuse.

Believe it or not there are really gaslighters out there. Now gaslighting is not just about trying to control the narrative of what happened in the past and say this "is official history" and you are talking delusions. Gaslighting while not part of the "original definition" but it is now part of the modern definition, gaslighting with abuse is trying to control how you feel about something, how you feel in your memories. It is not just about trying to say X occured and Y did not, but it is trying to also say you should feel good about this, for I did it for this reasons. Aka you should not hate me when I hurt you or abuse you, for I abuse you out of love.

Now what is the difference between an abuser relationship, and the normal back and forth where two people have a disagreement, you may even say the word argument about what happened, and where they trying to reconcile feelings, points of view of the situation, and so on. Well Abusers can't tolerate any form of reality that they do not feel comfortable with. They must alter your reality in order to reduce the pain of cognitive dissonance, for cognitive dissonance does not have to be painful but it often is. It is like an itch in the back of your brain you want to get rid of.

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So what I am saying Ghav, is the word really that bad of word, or is the word bad because it is used in the contexts you do not like. For example I think talking about gaslighting to survivors of abuse, and during relationships therapy and counseling is very productive. (Of course in therapy you do not use the term gaslighting but you explain the importance of I statements and so on, and the third party counselor, therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist always points out when you use the word YOU and change your style of pronouns from I to YOU.

Put another way is the word really that bad, or is it just your memories and experiences with this word. Much like how most people do not like cognitive dissonance and they try to use motivated reasoning t scratch that itch, if you are only associating the word with something that makes you uncomfortable then you start seeing the word as bad and not the environment that you just do not like.

Furthermore as I said in my post with Belas Girl. Many of the times Social Justice Warriors are good people trying to do good things, but how they do it is sometimes productive but often has counterproductive side effects as well. Well these people are often the "Mr. Rodger's" type of personality, and Mr. Rodger's is great. But when Mr. Rodger is dealing with real life adults and not 4 to 8 year olds, you need a "radical truth" / "honest person" in order to make sure the Mr. Rodgers is not being 1) condescending, 2) also understand that reality is often with complexities and multiple points of view. And while Mr. Rodgers serve a great role for society, you also have other people, people like Bill Maher in modern times but in older times Socrates, Ben Franklin, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, etc to provide a counter point of view. All these other people I mentioned are not really the people who create "systems" but instead the analysts who challenged systems that are already in place and point out the flaws, and if they have a healthy version of the personality they work together with people of different skill sets to help remedy those flaws.