Emotional manipulation happens when a person seeks power over someone else and uses dishonest or exploitative strategies to gain it.
An emotional manipulator seeks to use, control, or victimize someone else, which is completely opposite to people in healthy relationships.
It is necessary to identify emotional manipulators, particularly if they are in your inner circle. Here are 7 things emotional manipulators use against you.
1. Gaslighting
If a person makes you question whether or not you are actually sane, they are trying to manipulate you. They will deny your reality and will remember things differently than they do. They are doing this to make you feel crazy. It’s all about making you second guess yourself until you give up and let the manipulator have their way.
2. Using your own words against you
Emotional manipulators often have the tendency to use your own words against you in the form of fake apologies to make them look like a martyr, who just compromised and forgave you!
3. Withdrawing affection
When manipulators really aren’t getting what they want from you, they will often start to give you the cold shoulder until you surrender, or they will begin to threaten to break up with you. They know that people love affection, and withdrawing it causes them to panic.
4. Emotional blackmail
Manipulators have the potential to end up getting you to take the blame for their wrongdoings. This will result in you keeping up with them, even when they are bad for you.
5. Social and emotional bullying
Manipulators don’t always use physical violence. Constant criticism, raised voices, and threats are forms of emotional bullying. Social bullying can take the form of rumor spreading or deliberate exclusion from certain activities or places. It can also take the form of intellectual bullying, wherein someone tries to claim the role of subject matter expert, making another person feel inadequate and dependent on them for information.
6. Turning everyone against you
The easiest way to make someone feel powerless and to take away their confidence is to turn everyone against them. This is why many emotional manipulators will try to discredit people who they no longer feel they can control, as well as people who they feel are threats.
7. Guilt and sympathy
Many people are highly susceptible to guilt and will even go so far as to punish themselves. Emotionally manipulative people prey on this vulnerability. They are apt to play the victim or remind you of past favors, instilling a sense of obligation or sympathy that makes them more likely to get what they want.
