The Difference Between Gaslighting & Disagreeing With Someone's Experience/Recollection
Sometimes, disagreeing with someone's experience or recollection of an event can be misconstrued as gaslighting.
So I'm going to make the distinction between the two. Gaslighting can be unintentional. But for the sake of this post, I'm going to go with the default notion that gaslighting is intentional.
An Atheist on Tumblr helped me distinguish gaslighting and disgareeing with someone's experience or recollection of an event.
And to help draw this distinction, I'm going to use a scene from Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera. While an opera is being perfomed, the Phantom murders someone. The murder sends everyone in the opera house into a panic. Among the many panicking people is the female protagonist, Christine Daaé. Now, Christine didn't see the murder but as you can imagine, word travels fast in an panic-stricken opera house. In her panic mode, she leads Raoul, her childhood sweetheart, to the roof. Christine has quickly figured out that it is the Phantom who has murdered somebody. On their way up to the rooftop, she tells Raoul that the Phantom will kill as many people as possible to get to her. In the 2004 movie, she is afraid that he will kill Raoul. In the stage production, she is afraid that he will kill her. Raoul responds to Christine's claims by saying "There is no Phantom of the Opera," twice.
Once they're on the roof, Christine tells Raoul about her encounter with the Phantom the night before. And here I'll leave the relevant lyrics.
Christine: Raoul, I've been there
To his world of unending nightTo a world where the daylight dissolves into darkness
Darkness
Raoul, I've seen him!
Can I ever forget that sight?
Can I ever escape from that face?
So distorted, deformed, it was hardly a face
In that darkness
Darkness
But his voice filled my spirit
With a strange, sweet sound
In that night, there was music in my mind
And through music, my soul began to soar!
And I heard as I'd never heard before
Raoul: What you heard was a dream and nothing more
Christine: Yet in his eyes
All the sadness of the worldThose pleading eyes
That both threaten and adore
Some people do consider Raoul's line, "What you heard was a dream and nothing more," to be gaslighting. I was once one of those people.
But there are several facts that debunk the gaslighting theory.
First, the audience witnessess Christine's first encounter with the Phantom. Raoul does not. The closest he gets to witnessing Christine's first encounter is hearing a male voice coming from within her dressing room the night before.
But guess what he says to the managers the morning after:
Raoul: (brandishing another of the Phantom's notes) Where is she?
Andre: You mean Carlotta?
Raoul: I mean Miss Daaé
Where is she?Firmin: Well, how should we know?
Raoul: I want an answer. I take it that you sent me this note
Andre: What's all this nonsense? Of course not!Raoul: She's not with you, then?
Firmin: Of course not!
Andre: We're in the dark.
Raoul: Monsieur, don't argue. Isn't this the letter you wrote?
Firmin: And what is is that we're meant to have wrote?...Written!
(Raoul hands the note to Andre)
Andre: (reads aloud) "Do not fear for Miss Daae. The Angel of Music has her under his wing.
Make no attempt to see her again."
Raoul: If you didn't write it then who did?
So Raoul clearly heard the mysterious male voice coming from within Christine's dressing room the night before and then gets an anonymous note the next morning, telling him to not see Christine again. He thinks the managers sent it to him. And when they say that they didn't, he has no clue who else could have written such a note to him. The existence of a societal outcast living under the Opera House has not even occurred to him. This isn't gaslighting on Raoul's part. This is someone who's just out of the loop, because no one has bothered to tell him about what's going on at the Opera besides, well, opera performances.
Second, the Phantom is like Bigfoot. While the opera company believes he exists, some people in the story don't believe he does. Some believe he exists without having seen him at all. For those characters who didn't believe he's real, they believe he exists once they've seen him.
Third, "Phantom" is another word for ghost so maybe Raoul thought the Phantom was an actual ghost. Also, Raoul didn't have sufficient reason to believe such a fantastical story.
Fourth and finally, these lyrics follow the whole "Yet in his eyes" bit:
Raoul: Christine, Christine
Phantom: (eerily) Christine
Christine: (stage production only): What was that?
Anyone who has seen the stage production knows that Raoul heard the Phantom's voice, too, because he looks around and when he can't find the Phantom, he comforts a frightened and distraught Christine.
So Raoul is merely disagreeing with Christine's recollection based on a lack of sufficient evidence, not gaslighting her. If Raoul was truly gaslighting Christine, he would have dismissed the Phantom's voice on the rooftop and said something like, "I didn't hear anything. There's no one here. You're crazy."