When Survivors’ Language Is Misappropriated

Gaslighting was the first word that I lost.

The redefinition happened subtly enough that you could be forgiven if you didn’t realize what was transpiring. One month after the 2016 election, Teen Vogue published what would become a viral anti-Trump essay that would push the term “gaslighting” into The Conversation. Slowly but surely, it started popping up everywhere and became part of our national idiom. 

In theory, I had no problem with this at the time. As a survivor of abuse, in which gaslighting was a weapon, it was almost refreshing to have the niche term that encapsulated my experience of losing my ability to trust myself, of being berated into constant self doubt, suddenly become common parlance. Except the more people around me used the term, the less it felt like they were actually talking about the specific form of abuse that I had endured. “Gaslighting” suddenly seemed synonymous with “lying,” regardless of whether those lies had any effect on their target. The very particular distress I’d experienced — the not knowing what was true and what was false, the sense that my own perceptions were not reliable — was no longer a mandatory part of being gaslit. 

Losing that term would have been bad enough. But in the near decade since gaslighting popped up on the public’s radar, it’s been joined by several other terms that used to be relatively unknown outside of abuse and trauma circles. “Grooming” — the process by which a young person is conditioned to perceive abusive, and specifically predatory sexual, behavior as normal — now means, variously, anyone courting someone younger than them, regardless of whether the resulting relationship is abusive; someone being nice to you before revealing their nastier side; or “I don’t like LGBTQ+ people and want to pretend that they’re all child abusers.”

“Love bombing” has been lost as well. While the term originally referred to the extreme and excessive affection an abuser will use to trap a victim early in a relationship, I recently received a press release arguing that an intense summer fling that ended in ghosting could be considered “love bombing,” with no apparent realization that being ghosted is the exact opposite of being love bombed.

I have complicated feelings about this linguistic drift. On the one hand, strictly gatekeeping the vocabulary of abuse has a history of harming, not helping, many survivors. For years, I could not understand myself as a survivor of sexual assault because nothing I had endured seemed to fit within the boundaries of “rape” as I understood the term. I had never been violently forced into unwanted sex, or been drugged and taken advantage of while unconscious. Most of the time I had even consented to sex — just not to the specific acts I experienced, or in the way that things unfolded. Being able to understand my unwanted, frequently coerced, experiences as a kind of violation was incredibly healing. It enabled me to forgive myself, letting go of the self-blame that I’d taken any time a sexual encounter left me feeling dirty and ashamed.

In a similar vein, an overly narrow definition of relationship once kept me from fully processing my abusive relationship as “bad enough.” If I hadn’t been hit or ever feared for my life, could I truly be considered an abuse survivor? Learning that abuse could encompass, not merely physical violence, but also the belittling, manipulation, violation, and aforementioned gaslighting that were routine parts of my relationship opened my eyes to the true nature of my ex’s cruelty, helping me to escape from his orbit and begin my healing journey.

So there is a part of me that wants to be open to the idea that the mainstreaming of gaslighting, grooming, and love bombing is helping people who don’t necessarily understand themselves as survivors to recognize unhealthy dynamics in their own lives, and find ways to escape and heal from them. And yet the thing that stops me from taking that position is that the redefinition of these terms has not felt like an expansion of the pool of affected people, or the addition of gradation and nuance.

Instead, it has felt like an editing out of the actual experience of harm, to the point where survivors cannot trust that a listener will actually understand what they are attempting to communicate when they talk about being gaslit, or groomed, or love bombed.

What weight does the word “gaslighting” carry if you personally suffer no long term harm from another person’s lies? What is the purpose of talking about “grooming” if we’re not attempting to convey the experience of a trusted authority working to pervert one’s sense of boundaries and normal behavior? And, to return to that press release that distressed me so much, what actual harm is caused by “love bombing” if it is not a strategic manipulation intended to trap a victim, making it harder for them to escape an abuser once the relationship turns violent and cruel? I, for one, no longer feel as though these words convey the full horror and trauma of what my abuser put me through. And that has been a pretty devastating loss.

More than anything else, abuse is an assault on a person’s autonomy. Whether it’s physical or sexual violation, financial manipulation, emotional abuse, or any of the many other strategies in an abuser’s toolkit, abuse takes away a person’s ability to feel as though they control their own life and destiny. Gaining the language to contextualize and process our traumatic experiences is one small step toward reclaiming that autonomy. It allows us to tell our stories in our own words, to reframe the behavior our abusers insisted was normal as damaging and sinister.

And so losing those words is more than just a natural evolution of language. At worst, it feels almost like a secondary violation: a linguistic robbery, a theft of the crucial scaffolding that helps survivors tell our stories. And while I have no doubt that anyone who’s demonstrated the strength required to not merely survive, but also escape and heal from an abusive relationship undoubtedly has the strength to persevere through the loss of these terms, I wish that survivors didn’t have to put up with yet another indignity. I wish that we could retain control of the words that have given so many of us a guiding light when we were in our darkest moments.