The Chains of Emotions ...
Danijela Jerkovi?
Ba.Sci., CA Certified Accountant, CIA Certified Internal Auditor | Managing Director at Danijela Jerkovic's Services
How to Spot and Respond to Emotional Blackmail
What is Emotional Blackmail?
Emotional blackmail describes a style of manipulation where someone uses your feelings as a way to control your behavior or persuade you to see things their way.
Dr. Susan Forward, a therapist, author, and lecturer pioneered the term in her 1997 book, “Emotional Blackmail: When the People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation, and Guilt to Manipulate You.” Through the use of case studies, she breaks down the concept of emotional blackmail to help people better understand and overcome this type of manipulation.
Emotional blackmail could be described as being subtle and insidious. “It might appear as withholding of affection, disappointment, or even a slight shift in?body language”
How it works
Like typical blackmail, emotional blackmail involves someone trying to get what they want from you.
But instead of holding secrets against you, they manipulate you with your?emotions.
According to forwarding, emotional blackmail progresses through six specific stages:
1. Demand
The first stage of emotional blackmail involves a demand.
2. Resistance
If you don’t want to do what they want, they’ll probably push back.
3. Pressure
If you don’t want to do what they want, they’ll probably push back.
4. Threats
People still state needs and desires in?a healthy relationship.
In a normal relationship, once you express resistance, the other person generally responds by dropping the issue or making an effort to find a solution together.
5. Compliance
Emotional blackmail can involve direct or indirect threats.
6. Repetition
Of course, you don’t want them to make good on their threats, so you give up and give in. You might wonder if their “request” even warranted your resistance.
Compliance can be an eventual process, as they wear you down over time with pressure and threats. Once you give in, turmoil gives way to peace. They have what they want, so they might seem particularly kind and loving — at least for the moment.
The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.
~ Ayn Rand
When you show the other person you’ll eventually concede, they know exactly how to play similar situations in the future.
Over time, the process of emotional blackmail teaches you that it’s easier to comply than face persistent pressure and threats. You may come to accept that their love is conditional and something they’ll withhold until you agree with them.
They may even learn that a particular kind of threat will get the job done faster. As a result, this pattern will probably continue.
No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.
~ Stefan Zweig
Shame is soal eating emotion.
~ Stefan Zweig
Success is your duty, obligation and responsibility.
~ Grant Cardone
Your only obligation in your lifetime is to be true to yourself!
~Richard Bach
Fear kills more dreams than failure it ever will.
F. False
E. Evidence
A . Appears
R. Real
Punishers
Someone using punishment tactics will say what they want and then tell you what will happen if you don’t comply.
This often means direct threats, but punishers also use aggression, anger, or?silent treatment?to manipulate.
Self-punishers
This type of emotional blackmail also involves threats. Instead of threatening you, however, self-punishers explain how your resistance will hurt?them.
People using self-punishment tactics may spin the situation to make it seem as if their difficulties are your fault in order to make you feel more inclined to take responsibility and help them.
Sufferers
A sufferer will often convey their feelings without words.
If they believe you’ve slighted them or want you to do something for them, they may say nothing and show their unhappiness with expressions of:
That said, they might also give you a full rundown of everything contributing to their misery.
Tantalizers
Some types of emotional blackmail seem more like-kind gestures.
A tantalizer holds rewards over your head in order to get something from you, offering praise and encouragement. But each time you pass one hurdle, there’s another waiting. You can’t keep up.
How to respond to it
If you suspect you’re on the receiving end of emotional blackmail, there are a few things you can do to respond in a productive way.
Some people learn blackmail tactics (like guilt trips) from parents, siblings, or past partners. These behaviors become a consistent way of getting needs met.
That said, others might intentionally use emotional blackmail. If you don’t feel safe confronting the person, you may want to skip these.
Rauf & Faik - Can't Buy Me Loving / La La La ( Lyrics )
First, recognize what isn’t emotional blackmail
When a loved one’s needs or?boundaries?trigger frustration or discomfort, you may want to resist.
However, everyone has the right to express and restate boundaries when necessary. It’s only emotional blackmail when it involves pressure, threats, and attempts to control you.
Projecting?feelings and memories of past experiences can make a present situation?seem?like blackmail.
If we respond to someone out of fear or insecurity — believing that saying no or holding a boundary will lead to?rejection?— this can feel like emotional blackmail. However, that might be an inaccurate projection of what would actually happen.
Keep calm and stall
A person trying to manipulate you may push you to answer immediately. When you’re upset and afraid, you might give in before fully considering other possibilities.
They may keep pressuring you to decide immediately but don’t back down (or rise to threats). Calmly repeat that you need time.
Start a conversation
The time you buy yourself can help you develop a strategy.
Your approach may depend on the circumstances, including the behavior and the demand.
Many blackmailers know exactly what they’re doing. They want their needs met and don’t care what this costs you.
Others simply see their behavior as a strategy that achieves their goals and don’t realize how it’s affecting them. Here, a conversation can help increase their awareness.
Express how their words or behaviors make you feel!
Give them an opportunity to change those behaviors!
Identify your triggers
Someone trying to manipulate you generally has a pretty good idea of how to push your buttons.
If you dislike arguing in public, for example, maybe they threaten to make a scene.
Increasing your understanding of the fears or beliefs that give the blackmailer power can provide an opportunity to take that power back. This will make it much harder for the other person to use them against you.
In this same example, maybe that means knowing that public arguments are a sore spot for you and coming up with a standard response to this threat.
Enlist them in compromise
When you offer the other person the chance to help you find an alternative solution, your refusal may seem less like one.
If you need help now
If you experience consistent manipulation or emotional abuse, it may be best to avoid confronting the person.
The bottom line
Sarcasm, relationship “tests,” undeserved blame, implied threats, and the fear, obligation, and guilt they generate in you are hallmarks of emotional blackmail.
Giving in can seem like the best way to maintain peace, but complying often leads to further manipulation.
In some cases, you may be able to reason with the person, but in others, it might be best to end the relationship or seek help from a trained therapist.
Emotional Blackmail
When the people in your life use fear, obligation, and guilt to manipulate you
Susan Forward, PhD
with Donna Fraizer
Generally, it’s one particular person—a partner, a parent, a sibling, a friend —who manipulates us so consistently that we seem to forget everything we know about being effective adults. Though we may be skilled and successful in other parts of our lives, with these people we feel bewildered, powerless. They’ve got us wrapped around their little fingers.?
In such relationships, we keep our focus on the other person’s needs at the expense of our own, and we relax into the temporary illusion of safety we’ve created for ourselves by giving in. We’ve avoided conflict, confrontation—and the chance of a healthy relationship.
The very sharpness of the word helps us pierce the denial and confusion that cloud so many relationships, and doing that brings us to clarity. Let me reassure you: Just because there’s emotional blackmail in a close relationship doesn’t mean it’s doomed. It simply means that we need to honestly acknowledge and correct the behavior that’s causing us pain, putting these relationships back on a more solid foundation.
What Is Emotional Blackmail?
The very sharpness of the word helps us pierce the denial and confusion that cloud so many relationships, and doing that brings us to clarity.
Let me reassure you: Just because there’s emotional blackmail in a close relationship doesn’t mean it’s doomed. It simply means that we need to honestly acknowledge and correct the behavior that’s causing us pain, putting these relationships back on a more solid foundation.
Knowing that we want to love or approval, our blackmailers threaten to withhold it or take it away altogether or make us feel we must earn it.
Knowing that we want to love or approval, our blackmailers threaten to withhold it or take it away altogether or make us feel we must earn it.
How do so many smart, capable people find themselves groping to understand behavior that seems so obvious? One key reason is that our blackmailers make it nearly impossible to see how they’re manipulating us, because they lay down a thick fog that obscures their actions.?
FOG is a shorthand way of referring to Fear, Obligation, and Guilt, the tools of the blackmailer’s trade.?
Because it’s so tough to cut through this FOG to recognize emotional blackmail when it’s happening to you—or even in retrospect—I’ve devised the following checklist to help you determine if you are a blackmailer’s target.
Do important people in your life:
If you answered yes to even one of these questions, you are being emotionally blackmailed. But I want to assure you that there are many changes you can put into practice immediately to improve your situation and the way you feel.?
If you answered yes to even one of these questions, you are being emotionally blackmailed. But I want to assure you that there are many changes you can put into practice immediately to improve your situation and the way you feel.?
If you answered yes to even one of these questions, you are being emotionally blackmailed. But I want to assure you that there are many changes you can put into practice immediately to improve your situation and the way you feel.?
We feel confused, disoriented and resentful. But we’re not alone. Emotional blackmail is a dilemma affecting millions of people.?
Blackmail Takes Two
Fear of loss, fear of change, fear of rejection, fear of losing power—is a common ground stretching beneath those who become blackmailers.
And I’ll show how triggering events such as rejection by a lover, the loss of a job, divorce, retirement, or illness can easily turn someone close to us into a blackmailer. The people close to us who use emotional blackmail are rare individuals who wake up every morning saying “How can I destroy my victim?” Rather, they are people for whom blackmail is the ticket to feeling safe and in charge.
No matter how confident they look on the outside, blackmailers are operating out of high degrees of anxiety.?
The Role We Play
Without our help, however, blackmail can’t take root.
Remember: Blackmail takes two—this is a transaction—and our next step will be to see what we as blackmail targets contribute.?
Emotional blackmail can only operate when we let people know they’ve found our hot buttons and that we’ll jump when they push them.
The Price We Pay
Many of the people who use emotional blackmail are friends, colleagues and family members with whom we have close ties that we want to preserve and strengthen.
The price we pay when we repeatedly give in to emotional blackmail is enormous. The blackmailer’s comments and behavior keep us feeling off-balance, ashamed and guilt-ridden. We know we need to change the situation, and we repeatedly vow that we will, only to find ourselves outwitted or outmaneuvered or ambushed again.?
Although emotional blackmail is not heavy-duty abuse, don’t think for a moment that the stakes aren’t high. When we live with emotional blackmail, it eats away at us and escalates until it puts our most important relationships and our whole sense of self-respect in jeopardy.?
A New Vocabulary Of Choices
Though we often operate with a constricted view of the choices available to us, we generally have far more options than we realize. And having a choice empowers us.?
Though we often operate with a constricted view of the choices available to us, we generally have far more options than we realize. And having a choice empowers us.?
Equally important, I will guide you through the vitally important ethical, moral and psychological questions we all struggle within the face of emotional blackmail, questions like:
When we finally gain the understanding and behavioral skills that can free us from the deadening cycle of emotional blackmail, we release incredible excitement and energy.?
Alexander Rybak - "Leave Me Alone" (Official Music Video)
It takes real courage to confront emotional blackmail.
I. Part One:
Understanding Emotional Blackmail
Diagnosis: Emotional Blackmail
The world of emotional blackmail is confusing. While some emotional blackmailers are clear in their threats, others may send us mixed signals, acting kindly much of the time and resorting to blackmail only occasionally. All this makes it difficult to see when a pattern of manipulation is developing in a relationship.
Before we can label anyone’s behavior emotional blackmail, it has to have certain components. We can make the diagnosis much as a doctor would determine that a person has a physical ailment: by looking at the symptoms.
ROXEN - Amnesia - Romania ???? - Official Music Video - Eurovision 2021
The Six Deadly Symptoms
1: A Demand
2: Resistance
3: Pressure.
4: Threats.
5: Compliance.
6: Repetition.
These six characteristics are at the heart of the emotional blackmail syndrome.
Albina - Tick-Tock
Many forms of manipulation aren’t troublesome at all. We all manipulate one another at times, and we all get manipulated.
Letting people know what we want in a direct and clear way is something few of us do. We’re afraid to put ourselves on the line by telling the other person what we want or how we’re feeling. What if we end up feeling angry—or worse yet, rejected? If we don’t actually ask, then if the other person says no, it’s not really a no, right? We can explain away any discomfort.?
We can also avoid appearing too aggressive or too needy if we don’t make an outright request.
But there is a clear point where everyday manipulation turns into something far more harmful. Manipulation becomes emotional blackmail when it is used repeatedly to coerce us into complying with the blackmailer’s demands, at the expense of our own wishes and well-being.
The Right to Set Limits
Lena - Boundaries (Official Video)
When we’re talking about emotional blackmail, we’re automatically talking about conflict, power and rights. When one person wants something and the other doesn’t, how hard can each reasonably push? When does another person’s pressure go too far? This is fuzzy territory since we now put so much emphasis on expressing feelings and setting limits. Remember, it’s important that we not label every conflict or expression of strong feelings or especially instances of healthy limit-setting as emotional blackmail.
All of us have the right to let others know when their actions are unacceptable to us.
We all have a basic right not to live with poison in our relationships, whether it’s dishonesty or addictions, or any form of abuse. If someone confronts us fairly about something we’ve done, the words and feelings may be strong, but if there are no threats and no pressure, there is no blackmail. Appropriate limit-setting isn’t about coercion, pressure or repeatedly characterizing the other person as flawed. It’s a statement of what kind of behavior we will and won’t allow into our lives.
Shakira - Objection (Tango) (Official HD Video)
A crisis such as an affair can be an experience full of both danger and opportunity. It’s also one of those complex life situations that’s rife with the potential for blackmail.
The possibilities for hurt or healing exist in any situation in which we’ve chosen to maintain a relationship after a serious transgression: a betrayal by a colleague, a damaging rift in a family, a discovery that we’ve been deceived by a friend.
But if both parties are coming from a position of goodwill and truly want to resolve whatever crisis is impairing the relationship, there is no place for emotional blackmail.
In an emotionally intense situation, our perceptions get clouded, a condition that gets worse when we’re feeling pressured.
The following list will help you diagnose emotional blackmail by allowing you to clarify the intentions and goals behind the other person’s behavior.?
If people genuinely want to resolve a conflict with you in a fair and caring way, they will:
When you see that other people are trying to get their way regardless of the cost to you, you’re looking at the bottom-line behavior of the emotional blackmailer.?
Threats and pressure become a regular part of our everyday interactions?!
When the willingness to compromise begins to disappear, the status quo becomes the template for the future. It’s as though we’re not allowed to change or move away from a role that may not always fit. We’re frozen.?
Eurythmics - Sweet dreams ( Lyrics 2020)
Emotional blackmail is a lot like freeze tag, but it’s not a game anymore. Once blackmail has touched a relationship, it becomes rigid, stuck in patterns of demands and capitulation. We’re not allowed to adjust our stances or change positions.?
Once you discern the symptoms of emotional blackmail in any relationship, you may feel as though a rug’s been pulled out from under you. Suddenly you realize you don’t really know your lover, or your parent, or your brother, or your boss, or your friend. Something’s been lost. There’s little room for compromise or flexibility. There’s no balance of power, no sense that one of you gets your way one time, the other the next. Where no “payment” was previously required for love and respect, being in the good graces of blackmailers increasingly depends on giving them their way
When we look closely at emotional blackmail, what seems to be one kind of behavior splits into four varieties - punishes, self-punishers, sufferers, and tantalizers, distinct as the bands of color that appear when you pass a beam of light through a prism.
Each type of blackmailer operates with a different vocabulary, and each gives a peculiar spin to the demands, pressure, threats, and negative judgments that go into blackmail. These differences can make blackmail difficult to detect, even when you think you’re savvy enough to recognize it. If you think all birds look like eagles, you might be shocked when someone tells you the swan that just floated by was a bird, too. The same kind of cognitive dissonance occurs when an unexpected form of emotional blackmail appears in your life.
Whatever Works
There are no firm boundaries between the styles of blackmail, and as you’ve seen, many blackmailers combine them or use more than one.
Every style of emotional blackmail wreaks havoc with our well-being. It’s easiest to pay attention to the punishers, whose tactics seem the most destructive. But don’t for a minute discount the corrosive effects of the quieter types, the ones who are more like termites than tornadoes. Silent or dramatic, both can bring the house down.?
A Blinding FOG
Emotional blackmail flourishes in a fog that spreads just below the surface of our understanding, like a bank of clouds under an airplane. As we descend into the blackmail zone, a thick mist of emotions swirls around us, and we lose our ability to think clearly about what the blackmailer is doing, or what we are doing in response. Our judgment becomes hazy.
If you feel that strongly about something, you have an obligation to try and change my mind.”
~ Aaron Sorkin
Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.
~Voltaire
FOG is an acronym for fear, obligation, and guilt, the three feeling states that all blackmailers, no matter what their style, work to intensify in us.
I think it’s an apt metaphor for the atmosphere that surrounds all emotional blackmail.
FOG is penetrating, disorienting, and it obscures everything but the pounding discomfort it produces.
In the midst of FOG we’re desperate to know: How did I get into this? How do I get out? How do I make these difficult feelings stop?
FOG sets in motion an elaborate, unseen chain reaction, and before we can interrupt it, we need to understand how it works. The best way to begin is to look closely at FOG’s component parts.
Blackmailers build their conscious and unconscious strategies on the information we give them about what we fear. They notice what we run away from, see what makes us nervous, observe when our bodies go rigid in response to something we’re experiencing. It’s not that they’re taking notes and actively filing them away for later use against us—we all absorb this knowledge about the people we’re close to.?
The terms they offer are tailor-made for us: do things my way and I won’t ...
In fact, one of the most painful parts of emotional blackmail is that it violates the trust that has allowed us to reveal ourselves and develop a more than a superficial relationship with the blackmailer.
Fear moves us into black-and-white—even catastrophic—thinking.
Fear of Anger
James F. Byrnes:
Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.
Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.
It’s not uncommon for two people in any relationship to change roles, alternately playing both target and blackmailer. One person may blackmail more than the other, but rarely is blackmail completely one-sided.
We may be the target of blackmail in one relationship and turn right around to become the blackmailer in another.
The obligation is a particularly tough feeling to keep in proportion in our lives.?
Guilt is an essential part of being a feeling, responsible person. It’s a tool of the conscience that, in its undistorted form, registers discomfort and self-reproach if we’ve done something to violate our personal or social code of ethics.
Guilt helps to keep our moral compass working, and because it feels so painful, it dominates our attention until we do something to relieve it. To avoid guilt, we try to avoid doing harm to someone else.?
Sometimes, our feelings of guilt are a natural, appropriate response to having done something hurtful, illegal, cruel, abusive or dishonest.
Guilty feelings are woven through our lives if we have a conscience.
It’s impossible to separate the emotions that form the FOG within us as emotional blackmailers set the stage for manipulation.?
Where you find one element of the FOG, the others are almost certainly close by.
Even if the guilt we feel is appropriate, an emotional blackmailer will not let us forget what we’ve done or allow our guilt to serve its function of helping to correct our behavior and serving as a teacher for the future.
Guilt is the blackmailer’s neutron bomb. It can leave relationships standing, but it wears away the trust and intimacy that make us want to be in them.?
We can’t have emotional stability if FOG controls our lives.
Blackmailers see our conflicts with them as reflections of how misguided and off-base we are, while they describe themselves as wise and well-intentioned.
The Inner World of Blackmailer
Emotional blackmailers hate to lose.
They take the old adage “It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, it’s how you play the game” and turn it on its head to read “It doesn’t matter how you play the game as long as you do not lose.”
To an emotional blackmailer, keeping your trust doesn’t count, respecting your feelings doesn’t count, being fair doesn’t count.
The ground rules that allow for healthy give-and-take go out the window. In the midst of what we thought was a solid relationship it’s as though someone yelled “Everyone for himself!” and the other person jumped to take advantage of us while our guard was down.
The Frustration Connection
As we struggle to understand what turns the people close to us into emotional bullies, we need to return to the place the blackmail began—the moment when the blackmailer wanted something from us and our words or actions said no.?
There’s nothing wrong with wanting. It’s fine to want, to ask, and to try to figure out how to get what you want. It’s OK to plead or reason and even to beg and whine a little—as long as we let a firm no mean no. Accepting no as an answer may not be easy, and the other person may get upset or angry for a time, but if the relationship is working, the storm will pass and we’ll try to negotiate a resolution or compromise.?
Blackmailers cannot tolerate frustration. It’s hard to understand why they make such a big deal of this. After all, many of us have faced plenty of disappointments without becoming bullies to feel better.
We accept disappointment as a temporary setback, and we go on.
But in the psyche of blackmailers, frustration symbolizes something far beyond being blocked or disappointed, and when they encounter it they can’t just regroup or shift gears. To the blackmailer, frustration is connected to deep, resonant fears of loss and deprivation, and they experience it as a warning that unless they take immediate action they’ll face intolerable consequences.?
On the surface, blackmailers appear to be just like everybody else, and they’re often highly effective in many areas of their lives.
Emotional blackmailers—no matter what their style or preferred tools— operate from a similar sort of deprivation mentality, but we may not glimpse it until something happens to shake their sense of stability and stimulate their fear of deprivation.
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Shirley & Co - Shame Shame Shame
Emotional Blackmail:
A MIX OF CAUSES?
Blaming, threatening, negative comparisons, and other tools we’ve seen are obviously not what drew us into our close relationships, and they’re not what’s kept us there. These are people who share our lives, our work, our feelings, and our secrets.
Yet when emotional blackmail comes in, we quickly encounter some unappealing aspects of their personality—self-centeredness, overreaction, an insistence on short-term gains even if they result in long-term losses, and a need to win, no matter what.?
WINNING THE BATTLE, LOSING THE WAR
Blackmailers frequently win with tactics that create an insurmountable rift in the relationship. Yet the short-term victory often appears to be enough of a triumph —as if there were no future to consider.
Most blackmailers operate from an I-want-what-I-want-when-I-want-it?mindset.
They seem to have a childlike inability to connect behavior to consequences, and they don’t appear to give any thought to what they will be left with once they’ve gotten the target’s compliance.
One obvious reason is the difference between what blackmailers tell themselves about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it—the “spin¨—and the actual effect of their behavior on us. Punishers don’t see themselves as punishing, but rather as maintaining order or keeping a firm hand on things or doing “what’s right” or letting us know they can’t be pushed around.
They see themselves as strong and in charge. If their behavior hurts us, so be it. The end justifies the means.
Emotional Blackmail Is Powerful!
Punishment also allows blackmailers to take an active, aggressive stance that makes them feel powerful and invulnerable. This is an extremely effective way for them to calm any perceived threat of deprivation and head it off at the pass. After all, if someone is yelling, threatening, slamming doors, or refusing to speak to you, there’s not much spare time to deal with feelings.?
Robin Thicke - Teach U a Lesson
Blackmail takes two. It’s a duet, not a solo performance, and it cannot work without the target’s active participation.
When faced with blackmailers’ pressure do you:
If you answered yes to even one of these questions, your responses to pressure are helping to create an ideal climate for blackmail.?
Why is it that some people, no matter how smart or together they are, seem to be so vulnerable to emotional blackmail, while others can brush it off? The answer lies in our hot buttons, the sensitive bundles of emotional nerves that form inside all of us.
Each hot button is like a power cell charged with our unfinished psychological business—stored-up resentments, guilt, insecurities, and vulnerabilities. These are our soft spots, shaped by our basic temperament and sensitivities along with our experiences from the time we were little. Each spot, if probed, would reveal vivid layers of our personal history—how we were treated, what self-image we carry inside, and how we’ve been marked by impressions from our past.
The feelings and memories stored in our hot buttons can be searing, and when events in our current lives remind us of something we’ve kept buried inside, they can bring up reactions that override thought or logic, tapping pure emotion that has been stored and gaining power for a long time. We may not always remember the incidents that led to the formation of our hot buttons, and when it comes to the complexities of why we do the things we do, cause and effect can be elusive. But if you’ve ever wondered where “stuffed” feelings and experiences go, your hot buttons are a good place to look.
THE TRAITS THAT MAKE US VULNERABLE TO BLACKMAIL?
“Protective” qualities that open us up to emotional blackmail.
They are:
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Francesca Michielin, Fedez - CHIAMAMI PER NOME (Official Video - Sanremo 2021)
The Voice of Reason
None of us likes anger, but if we believe that it’s always up to us to avoid it, or to squelch it to keep peace at any price, the range of actions available to us is about as wide as a tightrope: we can back down, give in, placate—all the things that tell blackmailers how to get what they want from us.?
Blame-Taker
People should be encouraged to take responsibility for what they do.
The Atlas Syndrome
People with the Atlas syndrome believe that they alone must solve every problem, putting their own needs last.
Like Atlas, who carried the world on his shoulders, they weigh themselves down with the burden of fixing everyone else’s feelings and actions, hoping to atone for past or future transgressions.
The Bleeding Heart
Compassion and empathy inspire kindness, even noble deeds, and we have little respect for people who lack them. It’s hard to imagine how these traits could be troublesome. But compassion can turn to a sense of pity so overwhelming that it moves us to renounce our own well-being for the sake of another person.?
There are big payoffs for being a bleeding heart, the one who can bring happiness to a poor suffering soul. You escort the other person from the depths of despair back to the land of the living, an almost mythological journey. The joy of “helping” often blinds us to the fact that so much pity-evoking behavior is manipulative: Give the sufferers what they want and voilà! they’re cured.
The Good Girl Syndrom
The Self-Doubter
Knowing that we’re not perfect and that we’re capable of making mistakes is healthy. But healthy self-evaluation can easily become self-deprecation. In the face of criticism from someone else, we may disagree at first, then come to believe that our sensors and gauges are faulty.
Don't Speak - No Doubt (Lyrics)
If we assign wisdom and intelligence to another person, which we’re bound to do if we don’t trust ourselves, it’s simple for them to keep our self-doubt active. They know best, and what’s more, they know what’s best for us.
A Matter of Balance
All of the behavioral styles we’ve seen are survival mechanisms that we’ve chosen to keep ourselves safe.
The problem is, most of them are antiquated, and we’ve never stopped to review and update them. When kept in balance and alternated with other behavior, none of these styles dooms you to the status of “preferred target” of an emotional blackmailer.
Avoiding conflict, making peace,?even feeling a little self-doubt won’t hurt you—as long as you don’t make them the armor that’s supposed to protect you from feelings you think you can’t stand. If you’re a peacemaker but don’t compromise when you feel strongly that you cannot do what another person asks—no problem.
But if you consistently let these traits run the show, you’re holding on to a tow rope that will pull you straight into a sea of emotional blackmail.?
Blue - All Rise
It Starts with the Little Things
What many of us don’t realize is that emotional blackmail is built on a series of tests. If it works on a small scale, we’ll see it again in a more significant arena. When we give in to pressure or discomfort, we’re providing positive reinforcement, a reward for bad behavior. The hard truth is that every time we let someone undercut our dignity and integrity, we are colluding—helping them hurt us.?
Backstreet Boys - Quit Playing Games (With My Heart) (Official HD Video)
How often do we deprive ourselves of something that’s reasonable and well within our means simply because we fear another person’s reaction?
We shelve our dreams and plans because we’re “sure” someone will object—though we’ve never tried bringing up our ideas. We want something, we resist, we pressure ourselves by making up the negative consequences, and we keep ourselves from doing what we want to do. We create our own FOG. That’s self-blackmail.?
The Impact of Blackmail
Emotional blackmail may not be life-threatening, but it robs us of one of our most precious possessions—our integrity.
Integrity is that place inside where our values and our moral compass reside, clarifying what’s right and wrong for us.?
Most of us would have no problem listing the do’s and don’ts or “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not”s that guide us. But weaving those beliefs into the fabric of our lives, and defending them under the pressure of emotional blackmail, is far more difficult. Many times we capitulate and compromise our integrity, losing our ability to remember how it feels to be whole.?
What does integrity feel like?
These are powerful, liberating statements to apply to ourselves, and when they genuinely reflect our way of being in the world, they give us a balance?point, a sure sense of equilibrium that keeps us from being pushed off-center by the stresses and pressures that are constantly coming at us.
When we give in to emotional blackmail, we cross off the items on this list, one by one, by forgetting what’s right for us. And each time we do, we sacrifice a little bit more of our wholeness. When we violate this essential sense of ourselves, we lose one of the clearest guiding forces in our lives. We’re set adrift.??
The Impact on Our Self-Respect
There’s no need to be inflexible or to beat yourself up if you give in to someone over relatively minor issues. Most of us realize that we often have to bend a little and make compromises, and there are plenty of times when giving in to pressure doesn’t mean that much.
But falling into patterns of giving in to things that aren’t good for you takes its toll on your self-image. There is always a bottom line, a point at which to give in is to violate our most important principles and beliefs.
It takes a lot of mental and emotional energy to persuade ourselves that we can accept something that’s not OK for us.
No matter how confused, self-doubting or ambivalent we are about what’s happening in our interactions with other people, we can never entirely silence that inner voice that always tells us the truth. We may not like the sound of the truth, and we often let it murmur just outside our consciousness, not stopping long enough to listen. But when we pay attention to it, it leads us toward wisdom, health, and clarity. That voice is the guardian of our integrity.?
The Impact on Our Well-Being
Emotional blackmail leaves us full of unexpressed smoldering feelings.
Most blackmail targets tend to stuff these feelings, only to have them surface in all kinds of distressing forms: depression, anxiety, overeating, headaches—an entire spectrum of physical and emotional manifestations that take the place of directly?expressing the way we feel.
II. Part Two: Turning Understanding Into Action
A Time for Change
A lot of us think we can solve our problems with emotional blackmail by sorting through a repertoire of familiar behavior to find an escape. We accept the blackmailers’ accusations, buy their blame, apologize and ultimately comply. There’s a certain logic to this—we know how to do it, and compliance brings immediate relief. But if we stick to our accustomed ways of responding, we’ll never lay hands on the real keys to ending emotional blackmail. They’re a mile down the road, in the self-affirming, non-defensive behaviors I will teach you in this part of the book.
Change requires using information, not just collecting it. To change, we have to know what we need to do and then we have to act. Yet for many reasons, most of us resist this step with every fiber of our being. We’re afraid we’ll try and fail. We’re afraid we’ll lose the good parts of?our relationships when we try to get rid of the bad. We, who are good at so many things in our lives, often resist changing self-defeating behavior patterns with exquisitely wrought reasons why we can’t do anything different.?
If you want to deal effectively with a blackmailer, you have to learn some very different responses and communication skills.
The words that come out of your mouth have to change, be replaced by a new style of response and expression. The emotional tone surrounding your responses has to be different.
You have to interrupt the ritualistic pattern of resistance, pressure, and capitulation by changing the reactions that have kept you on automatic pilot.?
The first, which you can start to use almost immediately, is the behavioral track. At first, you may feel as though you haven’t changed at all inside—it’s quite likely that you’ll still feel guilty or obligated or afraid when a blackmailer turns up the pressure.
But you will learn to act more effectively, and once you change your behavior, the relationship must change as well. The results you’ll see will embolden and encourage you.
At the same time, we’ll work together on the emotional track, which will take you through the somewhat longer process of changing your inner world, disconnecting old hot buttons as well as doing some work on the wounds and erroneous belief systems that have made you vulnerable to emotional blackmail.
In the past, you have behaved in automatic, predictable ways when faced with emotional blackmail. You’ve argued, tried to explain your position, offered up some active or passive resistance, and ultimately given in.
Now it’s time to replace that way of behaving with a far more self-respectful, efficient, and empowering set of techniques. With practice—the willingness to keep using these techniques until they become comfortable for you—you will put an end to blackmail.
Once you are less afraid and feel less manipulated by fear, obligation, and guilt, you’ll notice how many choices open up to you. You’ll be able to decide whom you want to be close to, how much you are responsible for other people, how you really want to use your time and love, and energy.?
Please be patient with yourself, and be persistent. Some of you may start this work feeling that your self-respect and integrity have been so profoundly violated that they are lost to you forever, but I urge you to use the word misplaced instead of lost—and then look to new behavior to help you find them. Together, we’ll do the work of rediscovering and rebuilding what emotional blackmail has worn away inside you and in your relationships with blackmailers. I applaud you for taking concrete steps to eliminate emotional blackmail from your life.?
But when it comes to making important changes in our lives, we often expect results overnight. The unavoidable truth is that learning new skills takes practice, and it may be a while before you’re comfortable using them. Just as we have to walk around in a new pair of shoes before they really fit, we have to break in new behavior. You probably won’t see immediate changes in your life the first day you make the commitment to free yourself from emotional blackmail—but you will see them soon. Remember, commitment is a promise to yourself, and it’s one well worth keeping.?
The first thing I’d like you to do is sign a contract that lists a number of promises I’d like you to make to yourself—ground rules for this process. You may have serious doubts at this point about your ability to keep promises like these, especially if you’ve tried unsuccessfully in the past to stop giving in to emotional blackmail. I’d like you to put the past aside right now and begin to take a new set of steps based on new understanding and new skills.
This contract is a powerful symbol that puts your willingness to change into tangible form and helps clarify your goals. Some people find that they get the best results from handwriting this contract on a sheet of paper. You may also want to write it on the first page of a notebook you devote specifically to the exercises I’ll be teaching you. If you want to record your observations and feelings as we go, please do. Whether you recopy the contract or simply sign it in the book, please read it aloud to yourself every day this week.
CONTRACT WITH MYSELF
I,______________, recognize myself as an adult with options and choices, and I commit myself to the process of actively getting emotional blackmail out of my relationships and out of my life.
In order to reach that goal, I make the following promises: I promise myself that I am no longer willing to let fear, obligation, and guilt control my decisions.
I promise myself that I will learn the strategies in this book and that I will put them into practice in my life. I promise myself that if I regress, fail or fall into old patterns, I will not use slips as an excuse to stop trying. I recognize that failure is not a failure if you use it as a way to learn.?
I promise to take good care of myself during this process. I promise that I will acknowledge myself for taking positive steps, no matter how small they are.
_____________ Signature
_____________ Date?
Change starts with a vision, and it’s important to give yourself a clear mental picture of what you are trying to achieve. Then, as we work, you can energize your vision with action and move steadily toward your goal.
You may want to write or repeat a statement that expresses this vision—“I stand up to emotional blackmail and feel strong, confident, proud and elated.”
What makes emotional blackmail unique is the sense of a clock constantly ticking in the background. There’s a request on the table, and at some point, you need to respond.
A lot of the blackmailer’s pressure comes from the idea that there’s no time to lose. It’s the same illusion that makes thrillers and suspense films so effective—the story is set up as a race against time. We get caught up in that drama and don’t bother to question whether it’s real. If you do step back, you’ll see that in the vast majority of cases there is no urgency, except in the mind of the blackmailer.
Sending UP and SOS
You don’t need to know Morse code or wave flags around. Just remember this convenient shorthand for the first three steps in the change process. SOS:
Stop.
Observe.
Strategize.?
Don’t skip any steps—building your strategies on a strong foundation is essential.?
A Time for Decision
The Three Categories of Demands
As you look over your answers, you’ll find that most demands fall into one of three categories:
Conscious compliance is the yes you choose after thinking about what another person wants and after you have disabled the mechanisms of automatic compliance by observing and becoming aware of your thoughts, feelings, and preferences.
Used appropriately, conscious compliance can be the best way to achieve the results that are most important to you. But remember that this form?of compliance is the result of a careful reflective process.
It follows from the Stop, Observes, Explore steps.
MAJOR LIFE DECISIONS: HANDLE WITH CARE
Give yourself time to explore the blackmailer’s demands and the range of responses open to you—except when:
Give yourself time to explore the blackmailer’s demands and the range of responses open to you—except when: The other person is physically abusive or threatens to become so The other person is compulsive with alcohol, drugs, gambling, or debiting and refuses to acknowledge the problem or get treatment The other person is involved in illegal activities.
Holding Patterns: Deciding Not to Decide?
Coping on the Job
When emotional blackmail comes up on the job, especially when it involves a superior, it can feel like an insurmountable problem.
“Boss from hell” stories are legion, and all the worse because they involve such a great power imbalance.
At the back of our minds is the knowledge that our livelihood is in the hands of?our blackmailer, and we cede our power to the keeper of the paycheck.
Just as in romantic relationships, we may let instances of workplace blackmail pass unremarked on, allowing them to escalate until the only option we feel we have is to leave.?
EXPANDING YOUR OPTIONS
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
~?Mahatma Gandhi
Children?learn?as?they?play. Most importantly, in?play?children?learn?how to learn.
~ O. Fred Donaldson (martial arts master)
If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.
~ Milton Berle
Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.
~ Kurt Cobain
Good luck is when opportunity meets preparation, while bad luck is when lack of preparation meets reality.
~ Eliyahu Goldra
The most important thing is, whatever you do decide to choose, take it seriously and do your best.
~ Tom Sturridge
CALL IT STRATEGY
If your experience has shown you that you’ll probably face unacceptable consequences if you try to approach or resist your boss, then, as long as your physical and mental health are not in jeopardy, you can still choose to go along for the time being.?
As soon as you decide to derive what benefit you can from a difficult situation, you’ll notice your stress level dropping. Remember that you’re protecting your integrity by taking care of yourself and making choices that are part of a clear strategy, rather than responding out of fear
‘Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.’?
~ Jane E Ferrie
There are few things more stressful than making a major life decision. Ambivalence, uncertainty, self-doubts, and high anxiety are all perfectly normal mental and emotional states at these times.
But keep reminding yourself that you are now being proactive instead of reactive. That in itself will help diminish the stress.
All the preparation you’ve done has been leading you here, to that moment when you tell the blackmailer your decision.
I know the conflicting emotions going on inside you—the dread, the apprehension, and the anxiety that so often accompany behavioral change.
Strategy No.1: Non-defensive communication
Strategy no. 2: Enlististing The Blackmailer As An Ally?
Friends ask you questions; enemies question you.
~ Criss Jami, Healology.
Strategy No.3: Bartering
When you want another person to change his or her behavior, and at the same time you acknowledge that you need to make changes of your own, barter may be in order.?
Strategy No.4: Using Humor
If humor is part of your regular vocabulary and you’re comfortable with it, it’s a wonderful way to express yourself.
There’s no way of knowing how the other person will respond until you express your feelings and define the limits you need to set in your relationship.
As over the years I’ve worked with targets who came in for consultations with their blackmailers, I’ve often been surprised by who responded to requests for change. Often, people, I’ve expected very little from, because they seemed angry or hard or mean, we're actually quite willing to participate in making their relationships stronger. And sometimes those who seemed friendly and flexible turned out to be closed, defensive, and not at all sensitive to their targets’ needs.?
Cutting Through the FOG
Guilt
Guilt draws much of its power over us from the fact that most of us have real difficulty telling appropriate guilt from undeserved guilt. We believe that if we’re feeling guilty, it’s always because we’ve done something bad.
Guilt draws much of its power over us from the fact that most of us have real difficulty telling appropriate guilt from undeserved guilt.
We believe that if we’re feeling guilty, it’s always because we’ve done something bad.
Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.
~William Shakespeare
A guilty conscience needs no accuser.
~ Unknown
Learning by doing refers to a theory of education expounded by American philosopher John Dewey. It's a hands-on approach to learning, meaning students must interact with their environment in order to adapt and learn.
Be forward-thinking.
Be inventive, and daring.
Do the right thing.
Be honest and straightforward.
Be willing to change, to learn, to grow.
Work hard and be yourself.
Lead by example!