Dealing with Emotional Blackmail
Seminars@Hadley
Dealing With Emotional Blackmail
Presented by
Lauri Dishman
Moderated by
Larry Muffett
June 30, 2016
Larry Muffett
Welcome to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I’m a member of Hadley’s seminars team and I also work in curricular affairs. Today’s seminar topic is one that came about from discussion during a previous seminar. Audience members expressed a strong interest in hearing more about this topic so today’s seminar is the result. Our presenter today, Lauri Dishman, is a veteran seminar presenter. Lauri is a licensed clinical professional counselor with her own practice called Your Inner Focus located in the Chicago suburbs. Today Lauri will discuss methods of dealing effectively with emotional manipulation and blackmail. Now, let me welcome Lauri and we’ll get underway. Welcome Lauri.
Lauri Dishman
Good morning everybody. Well, first of all, welcome everyone and thank you for joining me today at Seminars@Hadley. What we’re gonna be talking about are those individuals who, when we encounter them or when we interact with them, we feel like we really just can’t trust them. That, no matter what you say, in some way they’re gonna turn the situation around and make it seem like they’re the victim or that somehow they’ve been unfairly judged. Or, after you’ve had a conversation with this person, they leave you feeling mixed up or confused, twisting your words or motives so that you feel a little bit misunderstood and maybe come out thinking that they’re always right and whatever you say is inferior to the situation.
These are people that make us feel guilty or make us feel bad about ourselves overall because no matter what we do, no matter what we say, no matter what we try to encounter or try to accomplish with this individual, you are always wrong. It doesn’t matter; we’re always wrong no matter how hard we try. These are the folks that are very passive aggressive with us. These are the folks that’ll maybe smile to our face and make it seem like everything’s okay, but then, the next thing you know, you hear about them talking about you behind your back, or they’re gossiping about you or trying to smear your name or your reputation in some way. These are people that make us feel very uncomfortable in our general lives; that just make us question ourselves. I know in my own experience, I know that’s what’s happened where you question your own integrity or you question your character because these people, that’s exactly what it is that someone who uses emotional manipulation or blackmail is really trying to do.
Now, in researching for this seminar, I read this amazing book. It’s called Emotional Blackmail by Susan Forward. If anybody is experiencing any type of manipulative relationship, this is a really wonderful book to pick up. She has a really great, succinct definition about what emotional blackmail is. She says it’s “a powerful form of manipulation in which people close to us threaten either directly or indirectly, to punish us if we don’t do what they want.” So basically, if you don’t behave the way I want you to, you’re gonna suffer in some way. Either I’ll take something away, or I will gossip about you behind your back, or I’m going to smear your reputation, or try to make you feel bad in some particular way.
If this is somebody in your life who is there in your life for a long period of time or who has been, especially if it’s someone we’re very close to, or it’s a relative, or somebody who it’s like you’re encountering this person on a regular basis, if you fall into a pattern where this person is constantly manipulating, you start to question yourself. We start to internalize these things. It can be very, very hard emotionally for us. It can really impact our self-esteem and our self-concept. We just leave ourselves baffled thinking I don’t understand why I feel comfortable with so many other people, but for some reason, this one person is making me feel incredibly uncomfortable and making me doubt myself. It often happens.
As I went online, I also encountered these different listings and it talked about the various types of emotional manipulation. There’s one that’s the constant victim. This is the individual that will always find a way to end up being the victim. You know, “I’m the one who’s suffering and you’re not recognizing my plight in all of this and nobody ever understands me.” That type of thing. There are others who are what they call the one-upmanship expert. This is the person who uses putdowns or snide remarks and criticisms to show that they’re somehow superior and they know more than you do. There are triangulators. These are people that might pit your brothers or sisters or your siblings against each other, or pit your friends against each other and try to get others to take sides with others. This was common, probably, in high school or in grammar school, but they’re people that do this even in adulthood and it can be very, very overwhelming.
Then there are the blasters. These are the people that just blow up; they get really angry. If you say something, or you disagree with them in some way, or you do something that they don’t agree with, they try to coerce you by just getting really angry and blowing up at you to the point where you’re so rattled that you feel like you have to give in and comply to whatever it is that they say. There’s also people that they call the iron fist who use real true intimidation and throw their weight around to get you to do whatever they want. These are the quid-pro-quo kind of a tit-for-tat type of people. And then they have the multiple offender, which are the people that use multiple means of doing all of these things. There are just all of these different, various types of emotional manipulators, and I’m sure that, in our lives, we have run across people like this.
You know me, for those of you who have tuned in to my seminars, I really like to use the text box option and then I also like to sometimes pause to get people’s stories, and I will in just a moment, but if you have a person in your life who you think falls under this category and it’s a story, or really more an example, that you’re willing to share, I would love to hear that. But also, really more to hear about how hasthis really impacted you and maybe what have you done to handle these particular situations. And we’re gonna get to that in just a bit. I’m gonna just review a little bit more to help us clarify the difference between a relationship that’s healthy and a relationship where emotional manipulation is really going on.
Clearly we all have conflicts with people. We are gonna have disagreements. We wouldn’t be the human race; we wouldn’t be a better world if we didn’t. But, for some reason, there are some people that, when we do have these disagreements, there’s definitely a mis-communication or a disconnect. Susan Forward talks about the difference between loving and caring relationships and those where emotional manipulation is going on. For those who have a healthy relationship and there’s disagreement, they’re gonna talk openly about it. They’re going to be honest about their feelings. And the other person is also gonna want to find out how the other person feels. They’re gonna want to know, “Oh my goodness, I didn’t realize you felt this way, let’s talk more about what’s causing you to feel this way.” And they’re gonna want to know why you’re resisting. They’re gonna want to know your side of the story, so to speak. And they also accept responsibility if they realize–
It’s funny because I had a similar situation with a friend of mine who I had been exchanging emails with her, and one day she just emailed me, she said, “Is everything okay? It seems like that I’m annoying you when I email you because your emails are so blunt and so direct and they’re not as touchy-feely friendly anymore.” And I wrote her back and I said, “You know, I’m so sorry. I did not realize that I was doing that. I’ve been under a lot of stress, but I honestly didn’t realize that the way that I was responding was making you feel that way.” And so we worked it out and everything moved forward.
But if there was somebody who was in an emotional blackmail type of relationship, the difference would be is that the other person would want to control you in some way, or ignore your side of things or, if you were to disagree or to instill your protests, they wouldn’t understand. They would insist that something you’re doing is wrong, that there’s something wrong with your character, there’s something wrong with – that I’m superior and, for some reason, there’s something wrong with you. The emotional manipulator’s also gonna avoid taking any type of responsibility for any of the problems that you guys have. And so, in the case, say, with my friend, for example, if I would have responded back with, “I’m so sorry,” she could have been, “Well, that’s no excuse,” or “I think you’re just being selfish.” She wouldn’t have really listened to my point of view and I think, instead, she probably would have berated me, or tried to make me feel bad for being who I am or just for having a bad week or whatever that was.
Susan Forward also talks about when you think about a relationship, and you think about an emotionally manipulative relationship, she talks about something called the Six Deadly Symptoms. For one, there’s some sort of a demand in the relationship and they may not always verbalize it. Let’s say, for example, your elderly Aunt Alice calls and she tells you, “My medication, I can’t find and sort all of my medication. I have no idea how to sort all of my medication. I need you to come over and help me do this and help me sort it out.” And then you respond back to Aunt Alice and say, “You know Aunt Alice, I understand and I realize you do have your medication, but I also have to get on a bus and get my kids over to their camp because their camp starts at 9:00. And, by the time I get to your house, it would probably be 11:00 or so by the time I take the bus to your house.” So, now, if it was a healthy relationship, Aunt Alice would be like, “Oh my goodness, I totally understand. I’ll just sit tight until you get here. Maybe if you can call me before you get here just so I know when to anticipate your arrival that would be great.”
But if it was Aunt Alice decided to be an emotional manipulator, instead she would sense that you’re resisting, that you can’t get there right away, and so she’s gonna put on some kind of pressure. That’s the third symptom of emotional manipulation. “Well, I could die if I don’t have my medication. I have high blood pressure and if I don’t get my medication right away I’m gonna die.” Hence there’s this sense of pressure and there’s these threats that oh my goodness, if you don’t get here I’m gonna die right away. There’s this sense of threat and then there’s this sense of discomfort among the recipient of all of this information. You’re feeling uncomfortable and so you’re thinking, “Oh my goodness, if I’m the horrible relative who isn’t going to come over and help Aunt Alice right away, everybody’s gonna be talking about me behind my back and I’m gonna be feeling terrible.” And so you comply and you do what Aunt Alice asks you. You drop everything that you’re doing. You call a neighbor to have them take your kids to camp or whatever it is. There is just all of this discomfort to the point where you comply. And so Aunt Alice has now learned how she can manipulate you. In the future, chances are if she’s in a crisis, she knows now that you’re the one that she can manipulate to get you to do whatever it is that she wants.
Another deadly symptom of emotional blackmail is this idea of repetition, that it’s just gonna keep going, and going, and going because the recipient of this blackmail or this manipulation is going to feel guilty, is going to feel bad, is going to feel terrible about it. And here is Aunt Alice getting her way knowing very well that she probably wouldn’t die if she didn’t take her medication at 11:00. But still, knowing that she has this power, this ability to control, this ability to manipulate, that’s how this relationship, those types of relationships, work.
What Susan Forward talks about is this idea of how, when you get into these encounters with emotional manipulators, you end up getting into what she calls a FOG, F-O-G, and each of those letters stands for something. The first is fear, and fear is this, she says, it’s very disorienting. You think about when you’re walking in a fog. I know it’s hard when you may not be able to see fog, but, if you’re in a situation where you obviously can’t make your way through something, you feel uncomfortable, you feel a sense of panic. When you sense that you’re gonna have an encounter with this person, it elicits an automatic physiological response of nervousness, or anxiety, or this desire to want to avoid. Really, what’s going on is that the person who is in this sense of fog, they just want to have peace in their lives at any price. They want everything to feel settled. They want that feeling to go away. That’s the first phase that we’re talking about when we’re encountering somebody who uses this emotional blackmail.
Then there’s the sense of obligation. Susan Forward says, “It’s our attempt to weigh our responsibility to ourselves against the indebtedness we feel to others. When that falls out of balance, we go overboard for the sake of duty.” So there’s this feeling that we have to do this because we have to be responsible. We can’t do any other way because if we don’t, then the third piece is gonna go in, the G piece, which is the guilt, and it just may feel like, “Oh my goodness, if I don’t comply, I’m going to drop the ball and my sense of duty and my sense of obligation, and I’m going to feel guilty that I didn’t drop everything to go help Aunt Alice because she was in this state of panic.”
Basically, these are individuals who encourage us to take global responsibility for their complaints and unhappiness. These are folks that they want other people to be the catalysts in helping them to feel happy and helping them to feel satisfied because deep down they really don’t know how to do it themselves. They don’t know how to take that control of their own lives to be able to find their own fulfillment or find their own happiness. That’s the stem of where this all comes from.
This is an interesting quote too. It says, “All of us want to believe that we’re good people, and the guilt the blackmailers evoke attacks our sense of ourselves as loving, worthwhile people.” Clearly, that is what the bottom line is. That’s what happens is that we just get this sense that we question ourselves in so many ways. I would love to – oh, it’s interesting, somebody here says, “like walking in the snow with your cane.” That’s the fog, absolutely.
I wanted to check in with Larry and check in with you to see whether or not anybody wanted to share an example of a relationship that they have, the type of relationship they have, and, really, how you think it’s impacted who you are or how you interact with other people. What has been your experience in dealing with someone who uses emotional blackmail? I’m gonna turn the mic off and see if anybody would like to chime in.
Larry Muffett
Don’t be shy folks. Go ahead and jump in and ask some questions.
Lauri Dishman
I see here that Hanna, in the text box she says, “I would love to share a great YouTube video I have watched. Dr. Caroline Leaf, a neurosurgeon who’s studied the brain for 30 years, she talks about how to deal with external tactics and how our mind responds. Most of all, how we should react to toxic thoughts in our mind and what actually happens in the brain.” And Hanna says that this Dr. Carolyn Leaf, “she has been life-changing for me,” which I think is wonderful. Again, I’m gonna shut the mic off and see if anybody else had any–[audio cuts off 0:18:21].
Larry Muffett
Lauri, I’m sure that there’s degrees of this where there would be situations where somebody just really takes this to the nth degree, and then there’s milder forms of this, because I recognize milder forms of this with some relationships that I’m in, but I don’t really recognize what I would call – a little bit of manipulation perhaps, but nothing I would characterize as blackmail.