What’s the difference between lying and gaslighting?

[PleaseStopExplaining]

I was telling a friend about a difficult situation I’m in and she is absolutely convinced the professionals working on it are lying to me.

I have no reason to believe they are lying to me and think what they are saying makes sense. My friend says she had previous experience with the organisation and they “always lie” because they want you to accept things, stop complaining and go away.

Anyway I then started thinking that if they were doing that, wouldn’t that be gaslighting?

Then I started wondering what the difference between lying and gaslighting is?

Gaslighting is a subset of lying where you deliberately undermine the other person's perception of reality.

An example would be altering a record of when a phone call happened to discredit you, whereas a lie might be "We don't have a record of that call".

There are overlaps, but I think it's ridiculous that gaslighting gets thrown around whenever it comes to remembering the detail of a conversation etc.

I was pondering this as well recently. I think lots of behaviour that would once have been called lying a now labelled gaslighting. And I guess essentially there is an overlap – making you doubt your own judgement/perception.

I suppose in its original use, gaslighting referred to a pattern of behaviour where this diminished confidence in one’s own perception of things was the purpose of the behaviour rather than an incidental byproduct.

Gaslighting is supposed to make you doubt your own perception of reality. Especially over time.

Gaslighting is lying but its about two people who've been in the same situations and one so adamantly has a different version of events that the other person over time starts to doubt their own judgement, feelings and self.

Lying is telling a non-truth for any reason.

Gaslighting is lying to make the other person think they're going insane.

All gaslighting is lying but not all lies are gaslighting.