Category: Makes You Think

If someone was to tell you that they were going to get you to pay for their lunch, when you had no intention of paying for it, you would likely laugh at them and say “buy your own!” But a lot of people spend a lot of their time and money buying individuals lunch, or clothes, trips, groceries, rent, etc… basically paying for things that they don’t want to pay for, things that they don’t personally need or want, and parting with time and money for things that have no direct positive impact on their life.

Why do some good people give away so much time and money to people who only care about getting the time and money? Simply because they are being psychologically manipulated by someone who is skilled at getting people to feel particular things.

The Wikipedia Psychological Manipulation page is fantastic! It reveals a number of techniques that can be used to create a feeling within someone that will help you to gain the upper hand in an interaction that will help you part them from their time, money and positive emotion. I do not condone behaving like this, but given the prevalence of emotionally impaired people in the world, one is wise to be aware of how they gain the upper hand in during interactions. NOTE – there are a number of people who can be lumped into category of toxic people including sociopaths, psychopaths, histrionic / narcissistic personality disorder and people who are insecure or suffer thoughts of being inferior to others so the chances of your not being exposed to someone who uses psychological manipulation to get you to do their work from them are pretty small. By learning their weapons, you’re going to go a long way in disarming them.

Below are a few of the techniques that I have seen used effectively on other people:

Lying and lying by omission – someone says something that isn’t true or they leave out a critical fact that prevents you from seeing things objectively. For example, a girl claiming that her body friend went out without her while not stating that she told him she was too busy to go out with him (lying by omission). A guy claiming that his girl friend went on a date with another guy when in fact she went to work. Neither is an objective account of the world.

Guilt tripping – a person suggests to the victim that they do not care, is selfish or has it very easy which creates bad feelings in the victim keeping them in a self-doubting and therefore submissive position. For example, a student telling someone they want to pay for their school that because they are able to work, they have money and don’t know who tough the life of a student is.

Projecting the blame – blaming another person for things that they had a clear hand in creating. For example, when someone puts off doing something until the last minute only to have something pop-up that prevents them from completing the task; the issue becomes what came-up and NOT putting the thing off until the last minute.

Playing the victim – by projecting the notion that they are actually the victim they are able to garner sympathy from others. For example, someone playing up their challenging upbringing as an excuse for behaving in a way that they know is inappropriate. While there are things about ones upbringing that will impact their future choices, adults reach a point when they are able to see their behavior as wrong as indicated by their citing a poor upbringing as the reason why they did the wrong thing.

So how do you use the above to get someone to buy you lunch? Let’s give it a shot! How to avoid buying lunch is in italics:

Lying – Can you please buy me lunch because I haven’t had anything to eat all day because my ex boy friend emptied my back account when he broke-up with me this weekend? You should talk to the police about that, sounds like a crime has been committed. Call them on their words. If what they are saying is true, a call to the police will take care of it very quickly.

Guilt tripping – I’m so hungry! How can you eat that sushi in front of me given me that I haven’t eaten all day? Strangely, you being hungry isn’t impacting the flavor one bit. This lets them know that their experience of the world does not impact you.

Projecting the blame – I had to pay for cab fare last night so that my friend wouldn’t drive home drunk and now I don’t have any money left for food. Sounds like you care more about your friends than you do yourself. Here’s my phone, call them up and get them to pay you for the cab fair. Presenting the solution objectively will let them know that you see the world very clearly.

Playing the victim – someone stole my jacket from coat check and it had my wallet in it. Now I’m not able to buy lunch because someone stole from me. You need to start taking care of your things. It’s pretty unwise to leave your wallet at coat check. By letting them know that they created the situation themselves your give them the information to prevent it from happening again.

The key is to not respond in the natural automatic emotional way. Take what they give you and run with it. They just want a free lunch, they don’t want wisdom, humor or anything enlightened so give them these things and they’ll move on to the next person who may have the money to buy them what they want.

A common experience reported by individuals who are in abusive and toxic relationships is that of a strong effort by the abuser to control the communication that the victim has with their friends and family. Often disguised as a sincere attempt to protect the victim, the abuser will subtly imply that a friend or family member isn’t exactly as the victim believes they are – the suggestion of a questionable work ethic may come-up, questionable morals, or a general statement of disgust or just “not liking them”. This is great ammo for toxic people as victims in these relationships are prone to believe what the abuser says. It’s a war of attrition and over time it’s the small things that help to give an erroneous or controlling notion traction.

The abuser does have a lot to lose in that their illusion of control may hang in the balance; at the very least, the abuser will need to escalate their manipulation attempts once the victim begins to talk to other people usually starting with stronger efforts of character assassination once the victims communication with an objective outsider increase.

What is the abuser afraid of? Simply put, they KNOW there is something not entirely right about the relationship dynamics and they know that in a group of two, their influence has at least 50% of the impact and more likely much higher than that given their overbearing, controlling and manipulative nature. They are also aware that adding a third perspective into the mix can dramatically reduce the level of control they have as this will dilute their influence, particularly when the opinion goes against the abuser – check out Solomon Asch experiments on conformity – were one person agreeing with the victim is often enough for them to break free from the grip of the abuser.

Speaking to other people also affords the victim an opportunity to clearly define what is going on, and this is often very effective at helping someone see what is happening in their life. Friends and family tend to ask lots of questions about things that don’t make any sense so the practice of explaining these can help add some objectivity to an unclear situation. Objectivity is NOT what abusers want so they will often try to limit and control the communication of their partners.

People in healthy relationships do not fear their partners talking to other people because they have nothing to hide. If you find your partner, or yourself, trying to control the external communication, you should take this as a warning sign that the motives may not be as pure as they should be. Take some time to examine the reasons given for discouraging the communication and make whatever adjustments you need to in order to address the situation appropriately.

Even in healthy relationships, there will be a time when one partner needs to control the behavior of the other – usually in times of crisis when the objectivity of one is severally impacted. In a true partnership this is what needs to happen – we table the decision making process to someone who will look after our best interests when we are not able to see the world clearly. When I heard about Natalie dying, I immediately called my father to tell him because I felt that I only had a few minutes before I lost perspective and I knew my father would look out for me better than almost everyone on the planet. It was tough on him, but he held it together, he held me together and he worked with my mom and my brother to help me through it. I handed responsibility for me over to him so I could just fall to pieces. The thing is, he didn’t try to control my actions very much. He just needed to be sure I didn’t do anything rash that I would come to regret or worse, die from. I think he and the rest of my family did a great job!

So that’s the ideal, an empathetic and compassionate partner who guides you through a crisis without projecting their will on you. They help you objectively engage the world in your terms. So, in this regard, there is rarely a time when a partner should try to control your behavior.

Sadly, this isn’t the case in number of couples. Drawn to me are a lot of people who are in controlling relationships with partners who lack the awareness to objectively observe and control their own experience of the world. Given the dissonance these individuals experience between their understanding of the world and the objective reality of the world, and their inability to see that through effort they can alter their understanding, the only form of reconciliation they have is to force the world to conform to their world view. This is impossible given the size and interdependent nature of the world so they are only able to control a few things about their immediate world and most often it will be their partner and their children.

Controlling the actions of someone who loves you simply because you do not wish to put the effort into learning how to see the world objectively is immoral because it causes suffering and drastically inappropriate because it uses ones love again them. Because they love you, they give you the power to hurt them and because you have very little self awareness, you use this power to make them feel something unpleasant (hence the term toxic) that isn’t actually there.

The common scenario has the abuser (the immature control partner) feeling out of control when it comes to their partner’s actions or thoughts. Since they don’t want to put the effort into transcending their lack of understanding – or even put some time into considering that they may be able to adjust their understanding or that their understanding is based on something other than reality – they set about to create guilt within victim so they feel bad and motivated to change their actions.

Guilt is very effective only because of the compassionate love the victim feels towards the abuser. It doesn’t work with people who don’t care about them. Statements like “you are breaking up our family” or “I am going to kill myself” don’t have any impact on people who don’t care about you. But if you care about the person who says it, you are sure as hell going to feel something horrible. Toxic people are really good at making compassionate people feel badly about their benign actions.

I was chatting with a friend the other day about the cycle of abuse. There has been a shift in her thinking about a few people in her life recently and as the world changes, she is seeing things a lot more objectively. She’s seeing abuse were previously she saw herself as the cause of the actions of the abuser.

The theory isn’t entirely comprehensive but it does an effective job at describing a lot of abuse situations. There are 4 stages that those caught in abusive or conflict prone relationships will cycle through at various speeds:

1. Tension building phase – communication is starting to breakdown, the victim begins to modify their behavior in an effort to avoid triggering their partner to act abusively.
2. Acting-out phase – the abuser does or says something that hurts the victim physically or emotionally. It could be a punch in the face, the threat of violence or a manipulative technique. The goal of the abuser is to control the thoughts, emotions or actions of the victim.
3. Reconciliation or honeymoon phase – this marks the end of the abusive behavior and the start of the apologies. It is paradoxical in that the abuser is trying to control how the victim feels in order to restore the relationship back to *normal*. The abuser will often be extremely nice, apologetic and kind during this phase, or they can use psychological manipulation to win back or coerce the victim back into the relationship.
4. Calm phase – this is the phase between the acceptance of the reconciliation and the start of the tension building phase.

This isn’t entirely earth shattering, but it is a fairly good model for what happens in a number of abusive relationships.

The conversation moved towards the calm phase and how it never seemed to last very long. In fact, my friend had noticed two disturbing things about the temporal nature of the cycle.

The first is that over a period of a few years, she noticed that SHE never really entered into the calm phase or the honeymoon period either as she could never get past what had been said to her by someone who apparently loved her and she couldn’t understand how the abuser had put it behind them so quickly e.g. “how can he not still feel horrible about saying or doing that to me?”

The second was that the calm phase was getting shorter and shorter as she related her awareness of the cycle to her partner. He didn’t respond well to being made aware that the behavior was automatic, as he claimed to have no awareness that is was happening and objected to her suggestion that he was in control of his anger as it was clearly a response to something she was doing. The thing was, after the acting out phase, he always apologized and admitted that his behavior was out-of-line. She was able to circumvent the honeymoon portion and the calm phase and go directly to the tension building phase simply by letting him know which state they were in.

I’ve yet to meet someone who was caught in the cycle of abuse who was able to stop it; this isn’t to say that it can’t be stopped, just that I haven’t met an abuser who as objective enough to see the cycle for what it was and be willing to see and take on their role in putting an end to the pattern. Which does, sadly, make a lot of sense given that objectivity is needed and in partnerships of abuse, it is sadly lacking. I have met a lot of ex-abusers who are filled with remorse for throwing away relationships, children, friendship and a lot of good times because they didn’t see the cycle until it was too late.

In the end it works out though. They learn their lesson and take care of their next partner while their previous partner moves on to deal with the residue from being treated like a psychological punchbag for years.