When Someone Moves the Furniture and Tells You You’re Imagining It

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You know that feeling when something is off — not dramatically, catastrophic, just off — and you can’t quite name it? A tightness in your chest. A slight shift in the ground. And then someone you trust tells you that nothing has shifted. That you’re imagining it. That you’re too sensitive.

So you second-guess yourself. And then you second-guess the second-guessing. Eventually, the tightness in your chest stops feeling like information you are picking up and starts feeling like evidence that you’re the problem.

That’s gaslighting. And it’s worth understanding more clearly than the word usually gets — because it shows up in places we don’t expect, including inside ourselves.

First: What’s Actually Happening

Gaslighting isn’t just lying. It goes after the systems you use to know what’s true.

You have three internal functions or systems running all the time. These “three minds” provide us a surprisingly useful lens for understanding ourselves and others:

• A danger detector — fast, intuitive, body‑based.
• A connection tracker — scanning for belonging and safety with others.
• A thinking mind — slow, reflective, making meaning.

Gaslighting undermines all three:

• Your danger signal is wrong.
• Your need for connection is embarrassing.
• Your thinking can’t be trusted.

When all three get attacked, you don’t just doubt the situation. You doubt your capacity to know anything at all.

The Part Nobody Talks About

Most gaslighting isn’t intentional.

People can honestly believe their version of events. They may have learned to override their own signals — and so they override yours. They may trust their interpretive framework more than your lived experience.

“You’re just anxious,” said gently, can still overwrite a real signal.

This matters because gaslighting isn’t only about bad actors. It’s about what happens in a culture that trains people not to trust what their body knows.

Then There’s Technology

Our information environment quietly does a version of this to everyone.

It gives us information with the weight of knowledge — fast, confident, packaged as certainty.

But there’s a difference between knowing about something and actually knowing it. Real knowing lives in the body and in experience. The other kind lives in your head as a repeatable structure.

Online, those two get blurred. And then we apply that blur to each other:

I’ve read about anxiety responses, so I understand what you’re experiencing.

I know about your situation because I saw a video about it.

My explanation is clearer than your lived reality.

That’s the structure of gaslighting — regardless of intent.

What False Certainty Costs

Over time, the person on the receiving end starts doing it to themselves.

The tightness in the chest gets ignored.
The sense that “something is off” gets renamed “my anxiety.”
The early knowing — the kind that shows up before language — gets replaced by someone else’s more articulate story.

Eventually, the gaslighting becomes internalized. No one needs to override the signal anymore. You override it yourself.

And that’s dangerous. Because the signal being dismissed is the same one that warns you when a relationship is becoming unsafe, when a situation is deteriorating, when clarity is actually someone else’s confidence wearing your voice.

When that signal goes quiet, you lose a vital navigation system.

The Thing We Need to Talk About: Uncertainty

Here’s something that rarely gets said plainly enough.

Not knowing is normal. Figuring things out as you go is not a failure state. It is the actual condition of being alive and in relationship with other people who are also figuring things out. Not one of us has ever lived this moment in this version of the world before.

You are not supposed to be standing on top of the mountain with a clear view in every direction. Most of the time you are making your way through a dark valleys on the side of the mountain, with approximate bearings and imperfect visibility, trusting that the direction is roughly right.

That has always been true. The difference now is that we are being trained — by every scroll, every search, every confident answer delivered in milliseconds — to experience uncertainty as a malfunction. Something to fix. Something to resolve immediately. A problem that has a solution if you can just find the right source.

So we reach. For the clear answer. For the decisive voice. For the person or the feed or the framework that will make the not-knowing stop.

And here is where gaslighting and false certainty meet: the person who offers you a confident, clean explanation of your own experience is often not trying to harm you. They may genuinely believe it. But they are also, often without knowing it, offering you relief from uncertainty at the cost of your own signal.

This is what you’re feeling. This is why. This is what it means.

It resolves the discomfort. And it does it by replacing your not-yet-knowing with someone else’s already-decided.

What we actually need — in our relationships, in our inner lives, in our culture — is almost the opposite of what we’re being trained toward. We need the capacity to stay in uncertainty together. To be in relationship with someone who is also figuring it out, and to let that be enough. To say I don’t know yet and have that be a real and honest and acceptable place to stand.

This takes courage. Not the dramatic kind — the ordinary, daily kind. At the breakfast table. In the coffee shop. At your desk. From the podium. The willingness to stay in conversations that haven’t resolved. To sit with a feeling that hasn’t been explained, yet. To trust your own signals even when you can’t yet articulate what they may be telling you. 

That’s not weakness. That is one of the most important strengths or capacities a human being can develop right now. The capacity to “take-2” and then move on.

The Way Back Is Simple — Not Easy

Start with one question:

Where does this knowing live — in my body, or only in my head?

Lived knowledge has a body address. In the chest, the gut, the quality of your attention. You can feel it if you slow down enough.

Imported certainty — someone else’s thinking, or the internet’s confident answers — tends to live only in the mind. Clear words, no resonance. Just noise.

It’s not a perfect test. But it’s better than asking your thinking mind to check itself.

Start lower. Check the body. Ask whether this certainty was earned through experience or absorbed from somewhere else.

And then — the harder part — stay with the uncertainty long enough for something true to form, instead of grabbing the first confident answer that makes the discomfort go away.

The grab for certainty is understandable. The nervous system is genuinely relieved when it finds solid ground. But when certainty becomes non‑negotiable, when the not-knowing becomes intolerable, we become vulnerable to anyone offering a clean story — including one that quietly overwrites what we actually know.

The antidote isn’t more certainty. It’s more tolerance for the valley. More practice staying present with the not-yet-clear. More willingness to say to the person beside you: I don’t fully know either. Let’s figure it out.

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What do you currently feel the need to be certain about — and can you trace it back to something you actually lived?

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Karen Judd Smith is the author of Transilience: A User’s Guide to Being Remarkably Human (GDE Press, 2026).