I have spent days on end watching the Lindsay Clancy trial asking myself the same question. How could she not have known?
How could the healthcare providers surrounding her not have recognized what was happening? Wouldn’t there have been signs?
Wouldn’t we recognize the signs when something in our lives is becoming profoundly dangerous? Wouldn’t we know? And then I caught myself. Because I should know better.
There was a time in my own life when I was standing frighteningly close to danger. I recognized the danger. What I could not yet comprehend were its full dimensions.
I was face-to-face with circumstances that, viewed retrospectively, seem impossible to miss. An apparent attempt on my life: a sack full of oil-and-gasoline-soaked socks, with quarts of the incinerating liquid itself loose inside the flimsy bag, placed beneath the driver’s seat of my car. Attempts to use divorce court to have me psychiatrically incarcerated for 30 days, allegedly to retake testing I had already passed with flying colors.
I did not miss these signals. Taken together, they were what motivated me to leave the state. Today I can look backward and see the pattern.
But there is an enormous difference between recognizing frightening events as they occur and comprehending the trajectory those events belong to.
That is part of what the Lindsay Clancy trial has brought back to me. We imagine that the greater the danger, the more obvious it should become.
But sometimes the opposite is true. The more inconceivable the danger, the harder it can be to comprehend.
Because comprehending it requires accepting something about another human being that may fall completely outside everything your mind has previously understood to be possible.
You see the event. You know something is wrong. You may even know you are in danger. But you don’t yet possess the larger organizing reality that makes all the pieces intelligible.
And when you finally do, you look backward and ask the question people looking from the outside inevitably ask: How could I not have seen it?
Perhaps that is the wrong question.
Perhaps the better question is: How could I have understood something I had never before imagined another human being capable of doing?
I was fortunate. I got out with my sanity and my life. And perhaps that is one of the many reasons I have found the Lindsay Clancy case so gripping.
Something about this case has awakened a recognition in me: how radically different danger can look from inside an unfolding experience than it does when we look backward and finally see the whole.
Gaslighting is one thing. “Gas-burning,” as I call it, is something else.
Gaslighting distorts your reality. Gas-burning is what happens when the distorted reality doesn’t merely confuse you. It destroys you.
© 2026 Dr. Jeanne King, Ph.D. Mind Matters Media LLC
Clinical Psychologist | Trauma, Coercive Control, and Family Systems Dynamics
Dr. Jeanne King, Ph.D. helps people worldwide recognize, end, and heal from domestic abuse.