How relational manipulation erodes trust, identity, and even the soul—according to therapists, philosophers, and The New Yorker

In a quietly blistering essay published in The New Yorker, Rachel Aviv traces the intimate horror of gaslighting—not just as emotional abuse or interpersonal drama, but as a profound moral violation. Not just a matter of “he said, she said.”

Not even a problem of lying, strictly speaking.

Gaslighting, when examined closely, is the sabotage of a person’s ability to trust themselves. It’s not about deception alone; it’s about unmaking someone’s inner compass—their sense of perception, memory, and reality.

And in my office, I see the aftermath all the time.

The client sitting in front of me is usually not enraged. More often, they’re sheepish, shame-faced, unsure. “Maybe I’m being dramatic,” they say. “I know I can be sensitive.”

They’ve been trained to doubt their own pain.

Picture this: You're in your 40s or 50s, carrying a bit more belly than you’d like, feeling persistently low, and not having much sex—maybe less than once a month.

That’s another pretty common American snapshot.

Now imagine this trifecta—low sexual frequency, depression, and abdominal obesity—as a subtle but powerful predictor of early death.

According to a 2025 study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, this exact combo may quietly and cumulatively shorten your life, especially if you're a man (Teng et al., 2025).

This isn't moral panic or pop psych clickbait. It’s epidemiology. And the numbers are quietly devastating.

If porn-induced dissociation had a mascot, it would be the glassy-eyed man in front of six screens, edging into oblivion.

His jaw slack. His dopamine hijacked. His browser history a Dantean archive of algorithmic seduction.

This is not just porn addiction.

This is gooning.

And it’s quietly becoming the most extreme expression of compulsive masturbation in the digital era.

Once upon a time, puberty blockers were used to delay puberty in eight-year-olds with a pituitary problem. Testosterone was for men in midlife crisis.

Surgeons would not remove healthy breasts unless they were asked very nicely by an oncologist.

Then, for reasons both noble and tragically naïve, we rewrote those rules.

We called it progress.

And for some, it was. For others, it was a detour into a medical maze with no exit and no map.

This isn’t about whether transgender people deserve care. They do.

The question is whether we’re giving them good care—or just fast care with bad evidence and even worse incentives.

You know the type. Your boss grins like a Bond villain, praises you with the same tone he uses to order decaf, and has mastered the dark art of dodging accountability while somehow basking in your accomplishments.

He’s not charming. He’s not ethical. He might not even know your last name.

But he’s climbing the ladder—and you’re left wondering what universe this HR department lives in.

Welcome to the strange world of Machiavellian leadership. Where manipulation wears a nametag, and your office feels more like a Game of Thrones prequel than a team meeting.

What Is a Machiavellian Leader?

If ordinary jealousy is the emotional equivalent of heartburn, then pathological jealousy is a full-blown esophageal rupture—gnawing, irrational, and impossible to soothe with antacids or compliments.

And when it comes to female pathological jealousy?

Let’s tread carefully, kindly, and scientifically—because the story is not about emotional hysteria, but about a system overloaded with stimuli, shaped by culture, and haunted (often quietly) by economic fear.

Let’s dive into what researchers have uncovered so far.

Let’s begin with the universal law of the modern workplace: if you haven’t met the passive-aggressive narcissist yet, you’re the passive-aggressive narcissist.

Just kidding. Probably.

Imagine this: you ask your colleague for help. They smile like a toothpaste commercial and say “Of course!”

And then—poof—vanish until five minutes after the deadline, at which point they cheerfully drop a half-finished spreadsheet on your desk and announce they “figured you’d want the chance to shine.”

Or maybe your friend gazes at your new haircut and says, “Wow. You look so different.”

This is not the stuff of FBI profiling. But it's still psychological warfare by paper cut.

Repeated over time, these tiny slights fray your sanity. They are the slow-drip poison of emotional dysfunction: hard to detect, harder to prove, and hardest of all to endure.

Strangling a partner during sex has leapt from niche BDSM play and Japanese shibari clubs to bedrooms and college dorms on nearly every continent.

Large‑scale surveys show that the practice—often marketed online as edgy “rough sex”—is now common in anglophone countries and rising fast elsewhere.

Yet biomedical data keep reminding us of an inconvenient truth: there is no physiologically safe way to compress someone’s airway or carotid arteries for pleasure.

In a culture hyper-aware of injustice—where microaggressions can spark think pieces and emoji use is a political act—you’d think we’d be past the idea that only women can be victims of abuse.

But a new study in Psychology of Men & Masculinities suggests otherwise.

The researchers didn’t just find implicit bias—they built a scale to measure it. It’s called the Intimate Partner Violence Myths Toward Male Victims (IPVMM) scale, and its message is clear: we’re still not taking male victimization seriously—and sexism is to blame (Russell, Cox, & Stewart, 2024).

It starts innocently. A raised eyebrow, a tone that comes too sharp, a forgotten appointment. The partner with trauma flinches—not visibly, but somewhere deep and involuntary.

The other partner, perhaps raised in emotional safety, is confused: What just happened? I only said I’d be five minutes late.

This is trauma mismatch.

And it is not rare. It is becoming one of the most quietly destabilizing forces in modern couples therapy.

One partner’s nervous system lives in a battlefield. The other grew up in a library.

They fall in love. They move in. They try to split chores and build a life. But the nervous systems don’t match—and so intimacy becomes a series of misfired signals and accidental injuries.

Or, How Gen Z Learned to Ghost Their Parents Without Smashing a Single Plate

In another era, family estrangement arrived with the drama of a stage play: slammed doors, shouted ultimatums, maybe even a birthday party ruined by a bottle of wine and some long-simmering truths.

But now? Estrangement has gotten quiet. Sneaky. Bureaucratic, even.

Adult children are walking away not in rage but in silence. They stop answering texts. They miss a few birthdays.

They “forget” to return a call. Over time, the thread wears thin. Then one day, the parent realizes they’ve become someone their child used to know.

Researchers call it “low-contact.”

Reddit users call it “voluntary orphaning.” Parents call it betrayal. And therapists? We're calling it a symptom of something bigger.

Why Now?

Covert narcissists kick down the door shouting, “Behold, it is I!” slipping in through the mail slot, borrowing your sweater, and softly complain it itches.

Thanks to TikTok therapists and hashtag diagnostics, clinical offices are now crowded with clients carrying self-applied labels—and lawyers wielding affidavits that read like DSM-5 karaoke.

The term "narc" has become the internet’s new four-letter word, while in real life, judges wrestle with a murky question: where does diagnosable personality disorder end and plain old spite begin? (Seo & Kim, 2024)

Why Now?