From the course: Communicating about Culturally Sensitive Issues

Combating gaslighting

From the course: Communicating about Culturally Sensitive Issues

Combating gaslighting

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- Did you know that there are times when you as a well-meaning person may unintentionally gaslight your colleagues of a different background? There's a simple recipe for it. Confirmation bias plus toxic positivity equals gaslighting. Gaslighting is the act of undermining another person's reality by denying the facts, the environment around them, or their feelings. Here's an example of how well-meaning people may unintentionally gaslight their colleagues. One of my friends confided in me that: Whenever a colleague of a different background talks about a microaggression, I noticed that I have a tendency to just say, "Oh, I'm sure the other person didn't mean it that way." I've seen a lot of my other colleagues do the same thing. It's like we're just trying to justify what happened and explain it away by either saying what happened was unintentional or by minimizing it by saying it wasn't that bad. Why do we do that? One reason I think good people make this mistake is that they genuinely want everything to be okay, which leads them to inadvertently deny that things are not okay. Because of that, and because of confirmation bias, they're going to be drawn to explanations that support their view of the world. And if they can convince their friend of a different background that what happened wasn't offensive, they think it will make their friend feel better. Also, it's likely that, especially at work, they have a relationship with both parties, the perpetrator and the recipient. So, not only do they want the person who was the victim to feel better, they also don't want to interpret the situation in a way that makes their colleague seem like a bad person. The trouble with that is that in trying to find a way to protect both of them, it minimizes the experience of the person who was hurt. Despite my friend's positive intentions, by filtering the interaction through their preferred conclusion that what happened wasn't offensive, they're denying the impact of the behavior in question. This is closer to gaslighting than it is to helpful encouragement. You can't solve a problem if you can't or won't see the problem. The simple solution is to honor their experience through empathy. Everyone's an expert in their own lived experience. Honor that and try to see things from their perspective.

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