Long ago, I experienced a lot of prolonged gaslighting and scapegoating (being made the sacrificial victim / villain) within my family.
- If I tried to write everything down, it would have to be organized by perspective and context, and there would be far too much for a single article to hold.
- Moreover, it would need to be reexamined from various levels (individual, family, social structure).
So,here I will focus on just a very small part of it, especially the pattern where, when I claimed to be the victim of theft, somehow I was made out to be the “perpetrator”and write about that.
Then,using as clues a 2025 theoretical paper on gaslighting from McGill University in Canada and the accompanying news releaseto
- what country, what year, and what kind of research/paper it is
- the conclusion that follows: “gaslighting can happen to anyone,”
- and how that connects to my own family experience
I will整理 it all.
1. One case of the “reality being swapped out” that I have experienced
This is just one of many episodes.
- My money was stolen by a certain family member
- I reported it as a victim, saying “my money was stolen”
- Then that person made upcompletely false stories such as “I was hit by him” and “I was abused by him”
- My family began sharing that false “abuse story” without even checking the facts.
- As a result,
- the fact that the money had been stolen was brushed aside
- My parents didn’t listen to a word I said and took the false abuse story at face value, blaming me
- In the atmosphere of the house, it came to seem as if “saying the money was stolen is just me lying.”
I kept resisting in my heart all along.
“Why are you lying?”
“Why are you making me the only wrongdoer without even checking the facts?”
It was so unreasonable that,
at one point I even thought, “If you want to make me the ‘bad guy’ that badly, maybe I should just really do it.”
(I never actually acted on it, but I was that cornered.)
This kind of thing did not happen just once.
The same pattern of “fabrication” and false accusation has been repeated countless times.
My family was filled with lies far beyond what someone raised in an ordinary household could imagine,It was a household where the side that lied held the power. Lies ruled the family.
2. Canada, 2025: A study explaining gaslighting as a “learning process that can happen to anyone”
2-1. In which country, when, and what kind of paper was published
- Country: Canada (McGill University, University of Toronto, etc.)
- Year: 2025 (published in an academic journal in June 2025; McGill University’s news release dated September 15, 2025)McGill University+1
- Paper title:
“A Theoretical Framework for Studying the Phenomenon of Gaslighting”
(A theoretical framework for studying the phenomenon of gaslighting) - Authors: Willis Klein, Suzanne Wood, Jennifer A. Bartz et al.SAGE Journals+2Suzanne Wood, PhD+2
- Journal: Personality and Social Psychology Review (a review journal in personality and social psychology)SAGE Journals+2PubMed+2
Rather than “conducting an experiment,” this paperis a review/theoretical paper that summarizes existing research and presents a theoretical model.
News sites (such as ScienceDaily) and science media also, based on this research,
introduce gaslighting as something that can happen to anyonewhen someone they trusted turns out to be wrong」
.SSBCrack News+3ScienceDaily+3SciTechDaily+3
As I’ve written many times, when I was a child, I met a teacher in a juvenile detention center whom I could trust from the bottom of my heart. Before I was sent there, I believed all adults were rotten. I had seen firsthand how they decided things unfairly, pushed us into being the bad guys, and covered up their own wrongdoing while cornering children, so I applied that to the whole world. By seeing adults as trash, I was protecting my heart. But then I met a teacher who was trustworthy enough to dispel that assumption. And I truly wanted to reform myself. That was because I came to see the goodness of the ordinary world, which I had believed contained nothing but rotten people. And in juvenile detention, I came to want to trust my family again. That later strengthened the gaslighting within my family, and I had no way of imagining at the time that the gaslighting I was suffering would become even more powerful. I had no knowledge of such things, and gaslighting itself had only recently begun to become widely known; it is a difficult issue. There was no way a child at the time could understand it. In other words, I ended up trusting my family. From there, I was rapidly influenced by my family’s twisted religious beliefs and other factors, and I myself began to fall into a state similar to brainwashing. Gaslighting was happening in that process as well. As I mentioned earlier, News sites (such as ScienceDaily) and science media also, based on this research, “introduce gaslighting as something that can happen to anyone when someone they trusted turns out to be wrong”It is said that this is a structure in which “anyone can become a victim,”I told you that this was introduced asthis was exactly the situation.Because the person I trusted—namely, my family at the time—was the one who was wrong, gaslighting was able to function so deeply. This text was entered using voice input, so there may be some misrecognitions. If there are any, I would like to correct them later, so I’d appreciate it if you could let me know in the comments.
「カナダ・2025年ガスライティング研究が示す「誰でも被害者になりうる」構造と、盗みの被害を“加害者物語”にすり替えられてきた僕の家族体験」の続きが購入後に読めます。
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