You used to be confident in your skills, but lately, you feel like you’re constantly walking on eggshells. Consequently, you double-check every email, second-guess your decisions, and wonder if you’ve suddenly become incompetent. This isn’t burnout; rather, it is a calculated psychological tactic known as “Workplace Gaslighting.” In high-pressure environments, managers or colleagues use subtle manipulation to make you doubt your own perception of reality. Furthermore, they often use this tactic to deflect blame for their own failures onto you. Here are the 7 signs that the problem isn’t your performance—it’s the toxic system designed to keep you off balance.
1. The “Ghost” Instruction
This happens when a manager gives you a verbal directive, but later denies it ever happened when the results aren’t perfect. For example, they might look at you with genuine confusion and ask, “Why would you ever think I told you to do that?”
Without a paper trail, the situation pits your word against theirs. As a result, this makes you feel like you are losing your mind or suffering from memory loss. Ultimately, perpetrators use this primary tool of Workplace Gaslighting to avoid accountability.
2. Constant Movement of the Goalposts
You hit your KPIs, you finish the project on time, and you meet every metric. However, instead of praise, the manager tells you that the “real” priority was something else entirely. Essentially, the rules of success change the moment you achieve them.
This keeps you in a state of permanent striving. Therefore, you can never feel the satisfaction of a job well done because the definition of “well done” remains a moving target. In short, this strategy provides an exhausting way to maintain power over your self-esteem.
3. Exclusion from Critical Information
Suddenly, you “lose” your spot on email chains or colleagues leave you out of meetings essential to your role. When you bring it up, they claim you are being “too sensitive” or that the meeting wasn’t important anyway.
Actually, this isolation is intentional. By cutting off your access to information, they make it impossible for you to succeed. Then, they use that lack of success to justify further criticism. Ultimately, they set this trap before you even start your workday.
4. The Use of “Word Salad” to Deflect
When you ask for clarity or try to address a conflict, you encounter circular logic and meaningless jargon. They talk for ten minutes without answering your question, which leaves you more confused than when you started.
Honestly, the manager wants you to give up on the conversation. If you can’t understand the explanation, you begin to think the fault lies with your intelligence. Thus, this represents a classic Workplace Gaslighting maneuver to avoid transparency.
5. Public Praise Followed by Private Sabotage
In front of the team, your manager calls you a superstar. Conversely, behind closed doors, they nitpick your work to death and suggest you are “struggling.” This creates a jarring disconnect between your public and private professional identity.
Consequently, you start to wonder which version of you is real. This inconsistency provides a powerful way to erode your confidence. Furthermore, it makes you feel like you owe them for “protecting” your reputation despite your supposed flaws.
6. Trivializing Your Success
When you land a big win, they dismiss it as “luck” or the result of someone else’s help. However, they treat every small mistake like a catastrophic failure of character. In this environment, the scale stays permanently tipped against you.
Surprisingly, this happens most often to high performers. By minimizing your wins, they ensure you don’t feel empowered enough to leave for a better opportunity. Although they need your labor, they specifically do not want your ego.
7. The “Paranoia” Accusation
If you finally gather the courage to point out the pattern, they tell you that you are being “paranoid” or “imagining things.” Moreover, they might even suggest that your “mental health” impacts your perception of the office culture.
This is the ultimate form of Workplace Gaslighting. They turn your valid observations into a symptom of a personal problem. Therefore, it serves as the final step in making you completely dependent on their version of reality.
Reclaim Your Professional Reality
Workplace Gaslighting only works in the dark. Once you name the behavior, it loses its power over your mind. For this reason, start documenting every conversation, save every email, and seek validation from mentors outside of your immediate circle. You are not incompetent, and you are not crazy. Instead, you are simply working in a system that fears your autonomy. Trust your gut—if it feels like manipulation, it usually is.
Have you ever felt like you were being “gaslit” during a performance review? Share your story in the comments.
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