Taylor Swift’s 'Patient Zero' captures something about gaslighting that can be incredibly hard to understand until you’ve experienced it. You’re told the ex was crazy. Jealous. Unstable. Difficult. Then slowly, you start having some of the same experiences she supposedly had. That’s part of what makes emotional manipulation so disorienting. You can see something with your own eyes, hear something with your own ears, and still walk away from the conversation wondering if maybe you misunderstood it. Over time, you can lose trust in your own perceptions. And because the person doing the manipulating may seem calm, charming and completely reasonable, you can end up looking like the emotional or “crazy” one. One thing I tell people to pay attention to: after conflict with your partner, do you regularly leave the conversation more confused than when it started? Do you find yourself collecting evidence, replaying conversations or asking other people whether your reaction was reasonabl...