Are You Being Manipulated In Your Relationship?

Manipulation is a form of emotional abuse causing the person who has been harmed to question reality. Gaslighting is an aspect of this.

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A manipulative person claims the frame, controls the timeline, and distorts the truth, all in an effort to manipulate things for their own gain and in an attempt to save face. Abusers also engage in an extraordinary level of denial, minimization, sidetracking, blaming, and seeing themselves as the victims.

I have spent a good chunk of my professional life researching, publishing, teaching, and counseling on the topic of emotional abuse and bring these insights to bear in this article. In counseling abusers, as well as training counselors and clinically supervising their doing this work, I learned a great deal about patterns of abuse and control. The thing is that someone who is abusive is generally not immediately abusive. People fall in love with those who manipulate and abuse for good reasons—because they seemed attractive, smart, funny, romantic, generous, adventurous, etc.

If I were to say to you that I could fix you up on a blind date with someone but that months later he would be likely to call you derogatory names and hurt, threaten, and isolate you, you would likely refuse my offer. But, if we both knew nothing of those behaviors and only knew the good stuff, we would likely proceed with arranging the date. This happens all the time with abusers and victims/survivors. This is because abusers often engage in very fast courtship, actively preventing the other person from fully knowing him and thus proceeding without eyes wide open and without the necessary information to make good, informed choices.

So one important way to spot abusive and manipulative behavior early on is to become aware of the danger of fast courtship. For example, when someone has a history of being abusive in relationships, that person is likely to want to get involved quickly, to seduce the other person into falling hard thus preventing her from noticing red flags. Once a person is lured in and feels connected with a sense of emotional stake in that connection, they are more likely to want to try to work things out.

Someone who is manipulative might seem charming, outgoing, and affectionate and in turn we may be led to believe we are the subject of that person's attention and interest. He may quickly suggest wild, fun adventures and special, romantic getaways and even luxurious vacations. He may show up with gifts and compliments and take us to nice places for dinner. If this person is manipulative, he may be impulsive like this with anyone and everyone, and it would not be surprising to then discover he was doing this with other women as well or even has a wife and children elsewhere. It is in this way that we see how such a big, magnetic and seductive personality might have a shadow side of unstable and chaotic relationships, emotional irresponsibility and unreliability, risky behavior, deceit, and lack of empathy.

There are many signs of the crumbling and disintegration of a relationship because of the ways that emotional abuse erodes intimacy and trust. There are also detrimental signs, like those I identify in the following list, that form a constellation of toxic qualities that can permeate and damage a relationship or any potential for change and growth:

• Contemptuous attitudes and behavior
• Relentless criticism and berating
• Inability to argue and fight fairly
• Silent treatment
• Emotional stinginess
• Withholding care and attention
• Making constant threats about the status of the relationship
• Realizing that you simply really don’t have much fun with your partner
• Consistently focusing on your partner’s behaviors and your own feelings rather than also examining your behaviors and the effects on your partner’s feelings
• Making oneself unavailable to truly be with the other person or to talk through anything of significance, constantly having reasons to be out of the house, at work, etc.
• Feeling as lonely or more lonely in the relationship than if not in one
• Feeling stagnant and unable to grow with the other person; feeling the other person is stuck and unwilling to grow and stretch himself/herself and that you are also getting stuck as a result
• Feeling that you keep circling around the same problems over and over with no let up
• Feeling increasingly irritated with qualities of the other person and with activities done together that used to be a source of fun, comfort, or happiness in the early stages of the relationship

It may be the case that a person tries very hard to communicate their unhappiness and frustration but does not feel heard, and they keep going along with the way things are. That usually means that the couple will eventually find themselves in an ultimately harder conversation. It is important for people to articulate their feelings and not to expect their partner to read their mind. If you're unhappy, you need to say it and let the other person know specifically what the problems are, and this is especially true if one hopes to repair things. Of course, if someone has already made up their mind without really telling the other person, then there may be no going back from that position. We owe ourselves and our partners clarity and honesty in terms of our expectations and sense of direction of the relationship. It's as simple and complicated as letting the other person know, "I'm not happy with the way things have been going and I need to know that you care for me." We have a responsibility to communicate our needs, desires, and expectations in a relationship.