The Gaslight Effect Novels & Stories

We constantly worried about our safety and struggled with panic attacks and uncontrollable fear. She inflicts physical and psychological torture on me and my brother, using these extreme measures as a means to force me to leave Dennis and his brothers alone. The notion of breaking my spirit and making my fear for my life becomes Serena's twisted method of protection. Serena employs manipulative tactics to make me doubt myself and my relationship with The Alphas. She gaslights me, planting seeds of doubt and confusion by distorting the truth and making me question my own sanity. Serena believes that by undermining my confidence, she can drive me away.

He shouted at Linda. "Stop shouting at me! If I had known that she was going to give birth today, do you think that we were going to end up in this condition? Only if you know how much I loved her, and how I treated her right, even though she is not my daughter." She tried gaslighting him, just like she was going to do. He fell for the gaslighting again, just like the normal way he was going to keep falling for it. "She would be going through the CS session now! I wished I could have helped her in any way that I could." Linda let the tears out of her eyes, even though they were not real.

“You’re feeling weak. Dizzy. Like your body won’t respond the way it should.” “What did you do?” Stephan’s voice was rising. Panic creeping in. “What the fuck did you do?” “Gas,” Kane said simply. “Slow acting gas, I released it throughout this estate some hours ago, it seems like it’s already kicking in.” He held up his other hand and showed Stephan a small canister that had been clipped to his belt for emergency. “It takes time to fully affect the nervous system.” Kane’s smile widened. “It makes you really weak and uncoordinated. Unable to fight properly.”

"Last week, he got mad because I talked to another guy in my biology class. He said I was flirting, but I wasn't. We were just discussing the assignment. But he kept saying I was disrespecting him, and maybe I was? I don't know." There it was. The doubt. The erosion of self-trust that came from constant gaslighting. "Emma, let me ask you something. Before you started dating this person, did you think you overreacted to things?" "No. I mean, I don't think so." "And now you question yourself constantly?" She nodded slowly. "That's not you changing. That's someone making you doubt your own perceptions." I leaned forward slightly. "What you're describing, that's not love. That's control."

I scoffed, shaking my head at my own foolishness for getting involved with him in the first place. "Why does it matter what name I used? I meant to mention you. You were the one here, making me melt--" His finger traced a path under my chin, a very lame attempt at reassurance. "Have a little more confidence in yourself. Of course, I was talking about you." As his gaslighting continued, I shook my head to break free from his touch, stepping back to create distance between us. I refused to let his manipulations cloud my judgment any longer.

he said calmly, but I could tell something had shifted inside him. “Sawyer! You really don’t see my point, do you?” With tears brimming in my eyes, I asked him that question. “You are gaslighting me, you all are. My fears and feelings were genuine. Despite all that, I held your hand and decided to stand up for you and this is how you are treating me?” I knew I was talking to myself now. He wasn't going to respond to me no matter what. He didn’t respond. We drove home in silence while I cried the entire way. He never looked back at me again.

“He said that I had to get my shit together and stop imagining things.” Silver looked at her sharply. “Imagining things?” “Have you ever heard of gaslighting?” “Uhhh, no. If you say the word ‘gas’, I think of engines.” “OK, well. It’s complicated but basically, if you gaslight someone then it means that you mess with their mind on purpose. It’s prolonged psychological manipulation and it’s all about destabilizing someone to the point that they question every single thing in their life. They don’t know what’s real and what’s not, and they honestly start to think they’re insane.”

“You can’t just trap people like that! That’s ILLEGAL! There are… building codes!” The house hummed. Slow. Deliberate. Condescending. “Oh my God,” I groaned. “You’re doing this on purpose. You’re actually trapping me here like some Victorian chaperone because you don’t trust me to deal with my emotions.” The lights brightened. “Yes.” I threw my hands up. “Great. Amazing. Perfect. My house is gaslighting me.” A loud metallic buzz rattled the pipes. “I HEARD THAT!” I turned back to Lucien.

to the Blackwoods. “He’s gaslighting me, Soph,” I choked out, my chest heaving. “He made me feel like I was losing my mind. He looked me in the eye and told me I was hallucinating the lipstick. He used the college incident… he used my own trauma to make me feel like a patient instead of a wife.”

I whispered. My brain supplied the obvious answer. The psycho kind. I grabbed a pillow, hugged it to my chest, and rocked back and forth like maybe that would make the world less insane. “She knows me. She knows me,” I muttered into the fabric. “She’s just pretending. Gaslighting me. Oh my God, Lena Hale is gaslighting me. This is how people end up on true crime documentaries.” The worst part? Even knowing all that, the phantom heat of her kiss was still there, taunting me.