Self-Silencing, Gaslighting, and Poor Mental Health

In the 1990s, psychologist Dana Jack noticed a pattern among some of her female patients. Some of her patients were choosing to stay silent about important issues in their relationships, stifling their own self-expression to maintain a sense of intimacy and stability. Forgoing self-expression out of concern for the relationship is known as self-silencing, and it is associated with poor mental health and depression. Self-silencing theory attributes this tendency among women to socialization into traditional gender roles.

Recently, Ercan Aras and Meva Demir-Kaya at Igdir University and Ataturk University in Türkiye noticed that self-silencing has some conceptual similarities to gaslighting. Just as self-silencers are placing their partner’s needs above their own, targets of gaslighting are placing their gaslighter’s viewpoint above their own. In both gaslighting and self-silencing, this prioritization of the other’s needs and views over one’s own is theorized to be for the sake of maintaining an intimate connection.

Both gaslighting and self-silencing can lead to adverse mental health outcomes, such as depression. Finally, while anyone can be a target of gaslighting or self-silencing, there are elements of both that put women at greater risk. Gaslighting often makes use of harmful stereotypes about women as being overly emotional or irrational to convince women to doubt themselves, whereas self-silencing results from traditional gender socialization.

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After noticing the similarity between gaslighting and self-silencing, Aras and Demir-Kaya wondered if these two harmful psychological phenomena are related to each other. They hypothesized that women who are more likely to be self-silencers may also be more at risk of gaslighting, and that both self-silencing and gaslighting would lead to feelings of depression and anxiety. They also hypothesized that some of the effect of self-silencing on depression and anxiety is due to self-silencers experiencing more gaslighting. This is what psychologists and statisticians refer to as a mediation model.

To test this idea, Aras and Demir-Kaya recruited 333 women for a cross-sectional study. Meaning, each participant filled out a survey measuring the degree to which they engage in self-silencing, the degree to which they have experienced gaslighting, and their level of anxiety and depression.

As expected, they found that women who engaged in more self-silencing had higher levels of depression and anxiety. Similarly, they found that having greater exposure to gaslighting was also associated with more depression and anxiety. What Aras and Demir-Kaya showed for the first time in this study was that women who engage in more self-silencing also tend to be exposed to more gaslighting, and that some of the effect of self-silencing on depression and anxiety can be explained through exposure to gaslighting.

One important caveat is that because Aras and Demir-Kaya used a cross-sectional design (that is, their participants responded to all their measures at one time point), we cannot conclude that self-silencing causes gaslighting, or that self-silencing and gaslighting cause depression and anxiety. We can conclude that these experiences are all correlated, though. This study does point to an interesting relationship between self-silencing and gaslighting that warrants further research.