Gaslighting Exposure, Cognitive Emotion Regulation, and Relationship Satisfaction in Pakistani Couples: An Actor–Partner Interdependence Study
This study of 100 married Pakistani couples reveals that both partners' exposure to gaslighting and the use of maladaptive emotion regulation are strongly and negatively associated with relationship satisfaction through significant actor and partner effects, while adaptive regulation offers limited protective benefits.
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In the quiet corners of a marriage, trust is the foundation upon which everything else is built. When that trust is shaken, the relationship often begins to tremble. One particularly insidious way this happens is through a form of psychological manipulation known as gaslighting. This is not a loud argument or a physical blow, but a subtle, persistent effort by one partner to make the other doubt their own memory, perception, and sanity. It is a process where a person is convinced that their reality is flawed, leaving them feeling confused, insecure, and dependent on the manipulator. Alongside this, how a person manages their own emotions plays a critical role in a marriage. People use mental strategies to handle stress and difficult feelings; some of these strategies are helpful, like finding a new perspective or accepting a situation, while others are harmful, such as blaming oneself endlessly or dwelling on the worst possible outcomes. Understanding how these two forces—the experience of being manipulated and the way emotions are managed—interact within a marriage is vital, especially in cultures where leaving a marriage is often not a socially or practically viable option.
A team of researchers set out to explore these dynamics within the context of Pakistani marriages. They focused on one hundred couples who had been married for between two and ten years. The study was designed to look at the relationship as a whole unit, recognizing that what happens to one spouse inevitably affects the other. The researchers asked each partner to report on their own experiences: how often they felt gaslit by their spouse, how they typically regulated their emotions, and how satisfied they felt with their marriage. They used specific questionnaires translated into Urdu to measure these factors, ensuring the questions made sense within the local cultural framework. The goal was to see if the way one person felt gaslit or managed their emotions influenced not just their own happiness, but also their partner's.
The findings revealed a stark and powerful connection between being gaslit and feeling unhappy in a marriage. For both husbands and wives, the more they felt their reality was being denied or distorted by their partner, the less satisfied they reported being with the marriage. This effect was strong and direct. However, the study also uncovered a "spillover" effect, where the experience of one partner deeply influenced the other. When a wife felt she was being gaslit, her husband's satisfaction with the marriage dropped significantly. Similarly, when a husband felt gaslit, his wife's satisfaction decreased. This suggests that the distress caused by this psychological abuse does not stay contained within the person experiencing it; it permeates the entire relationship, lowering the quality of life for both partners.
The way couples handled their emotions also played a major role, but in a specific way. The researchers found that using harmful emotional strategies, such as self-blame or ruminating on negative events, was strongly linked to lower relationship satisfaction for both partners. This pattern held true regardless of who was using the strategy; if a husband or a wife tended to cope with stress by blaming themselves or others, the marriage suffered. Interestingly, the study found that using helpful emotional strategies, such as acceptance or positive thinking, did not significantly boost relationship satisfaction on its own. In fact, for the most part, these positive strategies did not act as a shield against the damage caused by gaslighting.
There was one notable exception to this pattern, which offered a glimpse into the complex gender dynamics of the relationships studied. The researchers found that a husband's ability to use positive emotional strategies did offer some protection for him personally. When a husband was able to regulate his emotions in a healthy way, it lessened the negative impact that feeling gaslit had on his own happiness. However, this protective effect did not extend to the wives; a wife's ability to regulate her emotions did not buffer her against the harm of gaslighting, nor did it significantly protect her husband. In a twist that highlights the complexity of these relationships, the study also noted that a wife's positive emotional regulation sometimes seemed to intensify the negative impact of gaslighting on her husband's satisfaction, suggesting that in this specific cultural context, emotional responses are deeply intertwined and cannot be easily separated from the relationship as a whole.
The researchers emphasized that because this study looked at a single point in time, it cannot prove that gaslighting causes the drop in satisfaction or that emotional strategies are the sole cause of the problem. It is possible that unhappy marriages lead to more gaslighting, or that other unmeasured factors are at play. However, the data clearly shows that these two elements—being subjected to psychological manipulation and relying on harmful ways to cope with stress—are deeply linked to marital dissatisfaction in Pakistan. The study suggests that because marriage is often viewed as a permanent social obligation in this region, couples may stay in difficult situations where these negative patterns persist. The findings point to the need for interventions that address both partners simultaneously, helping them recognize these destructive patterns and develop healthier ways to relate to one another, rather than focusing on just one individual.
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