Gaslighting, where someone causes another person to doubt their sanity or senses, can cause psychological damage.

There’s an opposite thing, though, that can also be damaging. As far as I know, it has no name. I call it “lightgassing” (or “light gassing”). Here, I explain how lightgassing works.

Lightgassing is when one person agrees with or validates another person’s false beliefs or misconceptions in order to be supportive. 

Unlike gaslighting, a tactic of jerks and abusers, lightgassing is an (unintentionally harmful) tactic of friends and supporters.

Here are common examples I’ve seen that are sometimes, but obviously not always, lightgassing:

• “Since they did X, they don’t deserve to be with you.”

• “It was reasonable for you to do Y because they made you feel bad.”

• “You did nothing wrong. It was 100% their fault.”

Ideally, when you’re upset, friends should validate your feelings and help you feel heard and understood, but they should do so without agreeing with statements they themselves know to be false.

We do a disservice to people when we encourage their false beliefs. Most people have a value of truth-telling (and knowing the truth), and by avoiding lightgassing, we stay truer to these values.

But how does one listen with openness and empathy to an upset friend and still validate *feelings*, without validating *false beliefs*? This can be a tricky maneuver, which I think is one reason people feel tempted to lightgas.

If you want to avoid lightgassing, the key is to validate those elements of a person’s *beliefs* that you know to be true while empathizing with them and validating that their *emotions* are understandable and okay to feel. But the key is to do this without reinforcing beliefs in false things.

I think it’s usually not helpful to challenge what another person believes is true right in the heat of emotion when that person is sad or upset. So avoiding lightgassing will often initially involve simply not validating/agreeing with what you believe is false. Later, when the person is feeling better, if they ask for your opinion on the facts (or you feel it’s important for them to hear your opinion), you can tell them what you believe to be true at that point.

A caveat that I think is worth mentioning is that sometimes, the only thing we know about a situation is what our upset friend or loved one has told us. In such cases, I think we should start with the assumption that what they have described is an accurate representation of what they experienced (unless any reason to doubt it emerges).

Lightgassing (or light gassing) typically happens in ordinary situations where someone feels hurt or upset. But it can also happen in more extreme situations, such as when you’re trying to help someone who is feeling upset due to severe delusions caused by psychosis. 

In the case of someone with psychosis, the path of least resistance is to lightgas them by agreeing with their delusions, but this is not in their own interest. On the other hand, if you invalidate their emotions, you will likely make them more upset and may lose their trust. The tightrope to walk is to help them feel cared about, listened to, empathized with, and understood, without saying that their delusions are reality. In other words, to avoid lightgassing them while also not causing them to feel gaslit.

Does lightgassing really deserve its own term? Why not just call it “enabling”? Well, lightgassing can be a type of enabling, similar to how gaslighting is typically a form of manipulation. But lightgassing is much more specific than enabling, and enabling can include lots of things that are not lightgassing (e.g., buying an alcoholic some alcohol is a form of enabling but not lightgassing). Having a more specific term (lightgassing) makes it easier to spot and communicate about this specific pattern of behavior.

This piece was first written on October 1, 2023, and first appeared on my website on May 13, 2024.

They can take on a life of their own through self-perpetuation, get over-zealously applied, or become hijacked.

This often turns good things into mixed things and sometimes even corrupts them into bad things.

Here are four interesting examples:

(1) Zoning laws in the U.S. helped solve problems (like keeping pollution-spewing factories away from people’s homes and helping keep cities pleasant). Later, they got used in a way that increased race-based segregation, and they also contributed to excessive housing prices.

(2) Anti-nuclear advocates pushed for improved nuclear safety standards, aiming to prevent nuclear disasters and reduce nuclear proliferation. Now, extreme safety standards make it ridiculously expensive, and society has mostly lost out on a powerful tool to combat climate change

(3) Drug oversight (as from the FDA) protects us from harmful and useless drugs. In a free-for-all market of dangerous chemicals, this is valuable. But it’s also developed into a huge bureaucracy that makes it extremely expensive and slow to get drugs to market. Many die waiting.

(4) To protect patients, U.S. psychologists must be licensed by their state to do therapy. This leads to better-trained therapists. It also sometimes makes it a nightmare for therapists to move states and makes it harder for patients to find a therapist and to do remote therapy.

What’s the takeaway here? Systems that are good still need to be checked and re-analyzed; otherwise, they may start doing some harm.

And if you take a good thing too far, it may become bad.

This piece was first written on August 5, 2023, and first appeared on this site on September 14, 2023.

1: Start to think that one ideology you like – which contains genuine benefits, truths, and positive moral elements – might be the only valid perspective.

2: Surround yourself with believers until you’re convinced that your view is common and normal.

3: Ignore your own doubts so that you can fit in better. Join in on chastising (and eventually ostracizing) insiders who doubt too much. Punish slightly more harshly than you feel is fair in order to prove that you are one of the good guys.

4: Since challenging the ideology is punished, pretend to believe more than you really do – contributing to the sense that almost everyone else has no doubts – in a self-reinforcing cycle.

5: Assume that since your view is obviously correct, normal, and morally good, those who strongly oppose your view are bad people.

6: Since you are good and they are bad, conclude that you, as the good guys, should try to destroy them (figuratively, or in extreme cases, literally).

7: But how can you tell who is bad? Decide that a set of beliefs that sound similar to the bad people’s beliefs are off-limits. Anyone who believes them is probably bad. In those cases, humane treatment is no longer necessary.

8: Even just spending too much time with one of the bad people, or speaking well of them, is morally suspect. Why would you do that if you weren’t bad too?

9: Unfortunately, some true beliefs were accidentally put on the “bad” side of the good/bad dividing line. Now there are true things that you would become a bad person for believing.

10: Because of that, you and your group must avoid looking at reality too closely, lest you become bad too.

11: If you start to notice something true that you’re not allowed to believe, look away quickly or contort reality to make it seem different than it is.

12: Intensify your self-delusion and your punishment of non-believers so that you can make sure that still more people in your group will delude themselves out of fear.

13: Start teaching children (before they are old enough to think for themselves) that your belief system is the only correct one, perpetuating the system for future generations.

14: Congratulations! You’ve succeeded at being a good person who harms the world. Your mostly good ideology has eaten itself and has become more bad than good.

This has happened many times throughout history, and it will happen many more times. Watch out for this pattern so that you (and the people you love) don’t end up as “true believers” who do harm by accident.

This piece was first written on August 7, 2020, and first appeared on this site on April 29, 2022.