The correct framing of gaslighting is not that someone is lying to you. It is that someone is systematically attacking your ability to find out.
Paige Sweet's 2019 analysis, built on interviews with domestic violence survivors, adds the element that individual-psychology accounts miss. Gaslighting is not merely private confusion; it works by mobilizing existing credibility hierarchies. The abuser does not have to win an argument with you alone — he has to be the more credible party to third parties, and the structural conditions frequently make him so. She has a psychiatric history he arranged to have documented. She is visibly distressed and he is calm. He is respected at work.
That is why the countermeasure has to be external and documentary rather than internal and argumentative.
The early signals are behavioral rather than emotional, and they are worth listing because most people notice them before they name them.
You have started keeping screenshots. You rehearse conversations before having them. You apologize preemptively. You check with other people whether an interaction happened the way you remember it. You have a growing sense that you are difficult to be around, which arrived without any specific evidence.
The evidence-keeping is the one to pay attention to. Some part of you correctly identified the situation and began building a defense before the rest of you agreed.
The mechanism that makes repeated contradiction so damaging is chapter 65's. Memory is reconstructive: each retrieval rebuilds the trace from fragments, and post-event information — including confident authoritative contradiction — is integrated into it. Your uncertainty is not a character weakness. It is the predictable output of a memory system operating normally under a specific attack.
The protocol is contemporaneous recording. Dated, written at the time, in your own words, before any discussion of the event with the other party. Not a diary of feelings — a record of what was said and done, with times.
Two properties matter. It must be external, meaning held somewhere the other party cannot reach, ideally by someone else. And it must precede the argument about it, because a record made afterwards is a reconstruction and inherits everything this chapter describes.
The counter-response is corroboration and distance, in that order. One other person who was present, or who was told at the time, converts a private account into a checkable one — which is chapter 306's dissenting voice applied to your own reality.
This counters Law 17.