Elizabeth*

Elizabeth’s first encounter with gaslighting happened at her first job as a 19-year-old sales consultant. ‘My manager would torment me,’ she says. ‘The more I thought I was handling the situation the right way by trying not to show that it was getting to me, the more it antagonised him.’

Her manager would make subtle jabs at her performance in front of everyone in the office. ‘If we were in a training session, I would be targeted for not being fast enough,’ she recalls. ‘During every task

I was told I was not good enough, regardless of whether it was better than my peers’ attempts.’ The abuse wasn’t a secret either. Her colleagues were all aware of it

– one had even complained about the situation to HR, but nothing changed. This went on for a year before Elizabeth couldn’t take it any longer and left. ‘I was so young at the time that I didn’t really know how to deal with the manipulation and the constant attacks. Leaving was the best option for me.’

Almost two decades later, it happened again – this time it was at the hands of one of the directors of the company she worked at. ‘He was your typical white-male misogynist,’ she says. ‘He had no time for women in the workplace, especially if you dared to be a woman of colour.’ She and a black female colleague bore the brunt of his abuse. ‘He would call her or me to a “meeting” outside of the office where he would offer us huge packages to resign immediately,’ she says. When she complained to HR, he told them that the meeting hadn’t happened. ‘He’d have these meetings off the property so that we couldn’t prove that they had