Relationships can be complex, especially when subtle forms of manipulation are at play. Emotional manipulation often slips under the radar but can have a significant impact on your mental and emotional health over time. This article outlines key signs to watch for, helping you safeguard your relationships and ensure they remain healthy and genuine.
Excessive Gift-Giving
Gifts and favors are sometimes used as a tool to make you feel indebted to the manipulative person. This is used to make it hard for you to say no to their requests or to disagree with their perspectives. Look out for gifts that seem excessive or seem to be dependent on you doing something.
Playing the Victim
If someone seems to exaggerate the problems they face, they might be using them to manipulate you into feeling sympathetic towards them. This tactic is sometimes used to gain more of your time, but it can also be used to cover up their bad behavior.
Silent Treatment
Manipulative individuals will often use the silent treatment to force the victim to comply with their wants or to apologize to them. If you experience this, Choosing Therapy recommends changing your communication patterns by “creating structured conversations.” You should also set clear boundaries if this tactic becomes a regular occurrence.
Encouraging Dependency
It’s common for manipulative individuals to try to make you as dependent as possible on them. This might be done by taking over the management of finances or by putting your skills and abilities down, causing you to feel that you’re incapable of leaving the relationship.
Twisting Your Words
One of the key parts of manipulation is undermining someone’s confidence in themselves and trying to make them doubt their own mind. Abusers will therefore often try to rephrase or reinterpret your words to fit into their agenda or create conflict with you.
Frequent Criticism
Constantly being criticized can undermine your self-esteem over time, which makes you more reliant on the manipulative individual. Abusive people will generally criticize you for unavoidable parts of your personality, and Healthline says, “Often, the manipulator is projecting their own insecurities.”
Guilt Tripping
Guilt can be used to control others by suggesting they owe you something. Often, this is an emotional need, and the manipulator will exaggerate how your actions have hurt them in order to make you feel bad and change your behavior going forward.
Selective Memory
If someone is claiming to forget events where they behaved badly or remember things differently from you, they may be trying to make you doubt your own memory. If this happens regularly, you could try keeping a log of events that sticks to the facts.
Being Overly Sensitive
The main aim of manipulative individuals is to get you to act or think in a way that suits them, and one way in which they try to achieve this is by seeming excessively hurt if your actions don’t align with their wishes. It’s therefore essential to try to establish clear personal boundaries with the individual.
Controlling Your Finances
Controlling your finances will stop you from being independent and allow manipulators to have a say over everything you do. They might give you a strict allowance or not let you see how much money is in your joint account. You might also find that they’ll try to stop you from progressing in your career.
Undermining Your Achievements
By belittling your personal and professional achievements, a manipulative person can make sure you have a low level of self-esteem, something they need in order to control you. You might find that they make dismissive comments, or they may say that your success is due to luck rather than hard work or skill.
Threatening to Leave
Most people have a natural fear of being alone or failing, and manipulators will use this to their advantage. Making threats will make you feel insecure and less able to make independent decisions. If you face this, try to build a support network away from the individual.
Ignoring Boundaries
Personal boundaries are a key part of any successful and respectful relationship. If someone persistently ignores or oversteps your boundaries to meet their needs, it will leave you feeling as if you have no rights in the relationship. It’s therefore crucial to continuously reinforce your boundaries, regardless of how they react.
Monitoring Your Activity
Whether they keep tabs on where you are, look through your messages with others, or want to know what posts you’re liking on social media, monitoring you in this way is manipulative. If you experience this, it’s important to set clear limits with them on what is acceptable so that you feel that your privacy is respected.
Playing the Martyr
Another manipulative behavior is exaggerating the sacrifices they’re making for your relationship to gain sympathy. This can leave you feeling obliged to meet their needs, so it’s important to challenge these claims and try to rebalance the dynamics of the relationship.
Sudden Mood Shifts
According to Restored-UK, emotional manipulators can “maintain control through their moods which can vary so drastically that you don’t know what to expect so you are always walking on eggshells.” Generally, these lack any sort of consistent trigger, which further confuses the victim.
Excessive Compliments
Abusers will sometimes flatter you to cover up their bad behavior or make you less likely to question them about it. Often, these compliments will be followed by asking you to do them a favor or to agree with them on something.
Isolating You from Others
Friends and family can be a threat to manipulative individuals who don’t want you to be influenced by the perspectives or behaviors of others. As a result, you might notice they become overly critical of others in order to reduce the amount of time you spend with them.
Gaslighting
Gaslighting is a psychological tactic that “misleads the target, creating a false narrative and making them question their judgments and reality,” according to Verywell Mind. Victims may experience being dismissed with phrases such as ‘you’re imagining things’ or ‘that never happened.’