8 Sneaky Signs You’re Being Emotionally Manipulated |
8 Sneaky Signs You’re Being Emotionally Manipulated
These red flags can be less obvious but are still seriously destabilising.
Culture & Parenting Reporter, HuffPost
Emotional manipulation isn’t always obvious. Instead of big explosions or clear-cut moments of harm, there’s typically a sense of covert control through subtle patterns and interactions that leave you feeling confused and anxious.
“It has to do with unspoken rules and expectations,” licensed marriage and family therapist Alexandria Tillard-Gates told HuffPost.
“Emotional manipulation can be present in intimate relationships, friendships and all types of family relationships. Often we experience emotional manipulation in our formative relationships and we don’t realise it until later in life.”
At the extreme end of the spectrum, there are malignant narcissists who use emotional manipulation to get what they want with no remorse or regard for other people’s feelings. But emotional manipulation is not always fully intentional.
“Sometimes it is not as calculated or nefarious as it may seem. It may be that this person just has immature forms of communicating,” said Dr. Sue Varma, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at New York University Grossman School of Medicine and author of “Practical Optimism: The Art, Science, and Practice of Exceptional Well-Being.”
But regardless of intent, the impact can be deeply destabilising.
“Emotional manipulation is when our nervous system gets needlessly triggered,” said licensed marriage and family therapist Spencer Northey. “It causes us to feel unwarranted anxiety based on distorted input. It unmoors us, dissociates reality, makes our emotions storm, makes us feel younger than we are, more responsible than we should be, or both.”
The process can be subtle, but there are ways to identify it. Here are eight signs you may be experiencing emotional manipulation.
1. You’re questioning your own reality
“When we are being manipulated in a conversation or conflict, we often feel something very strongly, but the other person denies our experience and refuses to accept that their behaviour could have caused our experience,” Tillard-Gates said. “Often the abuser lies in order to avoid responsibility. This causes us to question our feelings, experience and even our recollection of events.”
This pattern is better known as gaslighting ― a common form of emotional manipulation in which someone systematically lies or distorts reality in a way that makes you doubt your lived experiences and perceptions of things that occurred.
“When humans get together, it’s normal to have occasional misunderstandings about what happened or what’s going on,” Northey said. “Healthy dynamics work collaboratively to figure things out. There is usually an ‘aha!’ moment where the realities merge ― ‘oh, NOW I see where you’re coming from.’ Emotionally manipulative dynamics double down on the divide and rigidly avoid that coming together by insisting on one reality.”
The result of these rigidly incongruent realities is that the other person’s experience and feelings in response to it gets invalidated and denied. Over time, this can seriously erode trust in oneself.
2. Conversations constantly become about proving your love or........