Gaslighting in Intimate Relationships: Recognizing and Responding to Sexual Manipulation

If you feel something is amiss in your relationship, trust your instincts. Over the past few years, the term “gaslighting” has become commonplace. However, as the term gains popularity, its true meaning often becomes diluted. Before delving into the topic of sex with a gaslighter, it’s essential to clarify what gaslighting entails.

Understanding Gaslighting

Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse where one person seeks to gain control over another by making them doubt their own sanity. This typically manifests through systematic lying, undermining another’s reality, and manipulation. Survivors of gaslighting often describe the experience as disorienting and isolating. Abusers frequently exploit vulnerabilities and insecurities to enhance their manipulative tactics. Recognizing the warning signs of gaslighting is crucial for identifying and potentially stopping it. However, it’s important to note that this is not about shifting responsibility onto the victim but about spreading awareness to mitigate harm.

It’s also vital to pay attention to less obvious areas where coercive behavior like gaslighting might occur, such as sexual encounters or other intimate moments of closeness and vulnerability. To better understand how such behavior might manifest in a sexual context, we spoke with sexologist and relationship expert Lucy Frank.

Sex with a Gaslighter: What It Looks Like

Frank emphasizes that gaslighting is almost always an attempt at control, a way to manipulate or rewrite the past to suit the gaslighter’s narrative. “Gaslighting is when you are made to doubt your own perception of reality. It’s a repeated pattern where your feelings, memories, or reactions are constantly invalidated or twisted until you start doubting not the situation, but yourself,” she explains. “At its core, it’s about power and making someone lose trust in their own internal compass.”

In sexual or intimate situations, gaslighting can be used to undermine consent or avoid responsibility after a coercive experience. “In sex, gaslighting often revolves around themes of consent, boundaries, and desire. In practice, it might sound like: ‘You wanted it,’ ‘You’re overreacting,’ or ‘It wasn’t like that,'” says Frank.

Ultimately, it’s a way to control another person and avoid taking responsibility for coercive or abusive behavior. “Discomfort might be minimized, pressure might be framed as passion, and clearly stated boundaries might be dismissed as ‘mixed signals,'” she adds. “Over time, the focus shifts from what you felt to defending your version of events against the other person’s narrative.”

The Impact of Gaslighting in Sex

Gaslighting isn’t limited to a single episode. It gradually makes you accept a false narrative and doubt yourself in the future. If you’ve experienced gaslighting in a sexual context, you might start trusting your boundaries less or feel that sex is primarily about the other person’s satisfaction rather than your own needs.

“Gaslighting around sex makes people constantly question their intimate experiences: Was their ‘no’ real? Is their discomfort justified? Are they ‘making a mountain out of a molehill’?” Frank explains. “This is often accompanied by feelings of guilt and shame—as if you’re not meeting your partner’s needs. For some, sex becomes something to be controlled and ‘done right,’ rather than something enjoyable. For others, it’s safer to avoid it altogether. Pleasure becomes intertwined with anxiety and self-blame—it’s very unfair, but unfortunately, it’s extremely common in my therapeutic practice.”

What to Do If You’ve Experienced Gaslighting in Sex

No matter how hard a gaslighter tries, they usually can’t completely erase that subtle internal tension that tells you something isn’t right—and can’t be true. However quiet that inner voice may be, it’s incredibly important to listen to it and allow yourself to follow it.

After experiencing gaslighting in an intimate context, one of the most important steps is to reconnect with yourself and try to make sense of your own thoughts and feelings. “Start by taking your reaction seriously,” advises Lucy Frank. “Confusion, anxiety, or the feeling that something was wrong—these are signals, not exaggerations. Intuition exists to protect us, so it’s worth listening to.”

Support is also crucial. This could be a conversation with a friend, seeking help from a professional, or calling a helpline. Talking about what happened can help you process the experience and validate your version of events.

“Talking to a safe person—a friend, therapist, or support service professional—can help ‘ground you’ and reconnect you with reality,” Frank explains.

It’s also important to give yourself time and resources to recover before engaging in intimacy again. “Understanding the rules of consent and your own boundaries can be very supportive,” Frank concludes. “Not to endlessly analyze the past, but to restore trust in yourself for the future.”

Based on materials from Cosmopolitan UK