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Are you being manipulated?


Claire.

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On ‎28‎/‎04‎/‎2017 at 1:18 AM, Claire. said:

Are You Being Manipulated?

We all want to get our needs met, but manipulators use underhanded methods. Manipulation is a way to covertly influence someone with indirect, deceptive, or abusive tactics. Manipulation may seem benign or even friendly or flattering, as if the person has your highest concern in mind, but in reality it’s to achieve an ulterior motive. Other times, it’s veiled hostility, and when abusive methods are used, the objective is merely power. You may not realize that you’re being unconsciously intimidated.

Read more: Psychology Today

 

Dont be eager to please others, make friends, or enter into relationships with people that you`ve only just met. Be indifferent to their needs for your attention, admiration or love. Dont agree with things they say but assert your own opinions, be confident in yourself, and do your own thing even if they dont like it.

All of that makes nutters hate and avoid you.

 

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2 hours ago, RabidMongoose said:

 

All of that makes nutters hate and avoid you.

 

LOL! I think you may be onto something there.

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9 hours ago, Lilly said:

Quite frankly, you can get more than just "burned occasionally" if you choose to simply trust everyone. You can become the victim of a robbery or sexual assault. You can end up married to someone who is not at all what they seemed to be. Your entire life and the life of your children can be very negatively affected. And sadly, you can even lose your life entirely by becoming yet another death statistic.

No thanks, I trust no one until I really know their character. I'm not saying that I'm unfriendly, impolite or rude mind you, I'm just not naïve.

As I said it might be because of my environment and the people i chose to surround myself with.  It is very rare to be let down for me and its never cost me more than a reasonably small monetary sum Maybe that means i dont trust some people either and only trust all those i chose to connect with . We've cared for young drug addicts and other homeless people. I just made it clear there were two or three simple rules for staying free at out home.  eg no violence, including threats of violence,  no drugs at home, and respect for all  No one even let me down, although one or two left, rather than meet those rules.

Maybe being a bloke and able to defend myself  also makes a difference, but a large part is the environment and community i  deliberately choose to live in .  PS i was engaged for 5 years before we married because i was still at uni when we met and wanted to establish a job and home before getting married. . In general i wouldn't marry someone until i had a good idea of their character, their family background, and the sort of peole their family was.  Maybe that  means i don't trust either, although i dont see it that way. It is certainly easier to trust in the little things like money, than the big things like love.

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9 hours ago, White Unicorn said:

It depends on where you live. I lived in a farm town. People there had high ethics and morals, you could trust them easily.

Cities and suburbs were more like Lilly said. Trust no one until they earn it! I saw more dog eat dog attitudes and manipulator personalities in those enviroments of materialism. 

As i replied to Lily, I think that's got a lot to do with it. We live in a similar community. We leave our doors unlocked a t night ( both the car and the home).and  only lock the house up when we leave, for insurance validation. 

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10 hours ago, Lilly said:

LOL! I think you may be onto something there.

Of course I am. Go through the cluster B personality disorders. I`ve just told you how to torture and repel them. Its usually people with these disorders (or who meet quite a lot of the criteria for them) which manipulate others.

If you want to drive a narcissist, borderline, histrionic, sociopath, or psychopath up the wall to get rid of them its quite easy. Just sit there and frequently start smiling as well as openly laughing to yourself. These self-absorbed lunatics think everything that occurs in the universe is about them including your smiling and laughing. And they are all hyper-sensitive to people mocking them too. They wont be able to cope with it and will obsess over what you`re doing. It takes about 2 weeks of frequently doing this to send one of them off on the sick with stress.

And if they have the nerve to complain you can very easily worm your way out of it with your boss - 'come on, its obvious he/she has got mental health problems going on. Its not my fault he/she is totally self-obsessed thinking everything is about them. I was actually laughing at some of the things I got up to with my friends at the weekend'

And also its good to study the manipulation tactics these people use including passive aggressive abuse, love bombing and gas lighting. Once you understand the games then they dont work on you anymore. Dont let on you know what the games are as then you can use them (particularly the gas lighting) back to destroy them.

Regardless of what Custer B`s claim them all feel stress and wired their brains up through obsessive thinking to not only be more prone to stress but to feel it more severally too. So treat them to some chronic stress to get rid of them.

Edited by RabidMongoose
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I guess if you're stuck working with a character disordered person tossing a bit back at them might be a viable option. However, for me the choice I've found is to simply go 'no contact' and write them out of my life entirely. I've also used the 'go totally bland' technique where you become so damn boring that they can't get a kick out of picking at you so they go find another target. This works well when the difficult person is someone you only see infrequently. I'm also very aware of psychological manipulation techniques and just don't go 'out onto the dance floor' (engage with) such people to begin with.

All this is part and parcel of why one needs to really know another person before trusting them. Sadly, there are many who are simply wolves in sheep's clothing...and some of these wolves are very good at impersonating sheep.

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It wasn't until recently that I realized my mother is a master manipulator.  She has learned that she can guilt me into doing whatever she wants.   She is very passive/aggressive and won't come right out and say things unless she is having a major mood swing (she's bipolar) and then it's very mean and vindictive.  I found out through counseling that her manipulation is a trigger for my own anxiety and depression.   Therefore, I have learned to keep my distance from her.  It makes me sad sometimes but I cannot allow her to interfere in my life like that.  

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On 4/28/2017 at 3:42 AM, Imaginarynumber1 said:

No no it's cool. You can totally trust me.

To rustle someone's jimmies.:lol:

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I think the one thing that none of us have acknowledged yet is our own manipulation of others. Because we've all done it. Be it through subtle or not so subtle suggestion, emotional manipulation, even sexual suggestion. Do as I ask for some reward be whatever it may be. I find it funny with the rash of post here lately. One about love and this one about manipulation, they go hand in hand actually.:lol:

 

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11 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

To rustle someone's jimmies.:lol:

jimmies-rustled-gif.gif

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14 minutes ago, tcgram said:

It wasn't until recently that I realized my mother is a master manipulator.  She has learned that she can guilt me into doing whatever she wants.   She is very passive/aggressive and won't come right out and say things unless she is having a major mood swing (she's bipolar) and then it's very mean and vindictive.  I found out through counseling that her manipulation is a trigger for my own anxiety and depression.   Therefore, I have learned to keep my distance from her.  It makes me sad sometimes but I cannot allow her to interfere in my life like that.  

My mother was very narcissistic and quite manipulative as well. The worst thing my mother did was to dictate reality and her notion of reality was quite far removed from objective reality. Consequently, I ventured into life easily manipulated and accepting of others dictating to me rather than being able to analyze what was actually happening. It took me a long time to manage to get the psychological 'software updates' I needed in order to function as a mentally strong person. At this point in my life I look back and wonder how I could have ever been so naïve as to have not seen what was going on.

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My dad used to use strong arm and ultimatum manipulation to get his way, my mother on the other hand is all about that guilt trip. Plus she loves making every problem (even the one's that are not about her) about her. How the hell did I survive this long???

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12 minutes ago, Lilly said:

My mother was very narcissistic and quite manipulative as well. The worst thing my mother did was to dictate reality and her notion of reality was quite far removed from objective reality. Consequently, I ventured into life easily manipulated and accepting of others dictating to me rather than being able to analyze what was actually happening. It took me a long time to manage to get the psychological 'software updates' I needed in order to function as a mentally strong person. At this point in my life I look back and wonder how I could have ever been so naïve as to have not seen what was going on.

You cannot blame yourself though because as a child you weren't born with knowledge of what disordered people are like. You were an innocent that was being moulded and shaped by someone who wanted you to be a perfect source of supply to them. Regardless of your rights or well being.

Ignoring or being boring does work (although it wont fix them) and to be able to ignore a narcissist or other disordered personality the work you need to do on yourself is very beneficial. It equips you with a skill set that comes in use in many other areas of life. Funnily enough, the work you have to do on yourself equips you with a skillset that many religions such as Buddhism give to their followers. It makes me look at religion differently and as something useful.

We get taught to move on by letting things go, not to dwell on the past, not to dwell on the future, not to try to change the person, and to accept that they cannot be changed. We have to learn to override our urge to want to react, get even, and get revenge. We have to stop analysing why they are treating us poorly and stop trying to correct how they treat us.

In essence, we need to not only disengage from them but disengage from what our mind likes to do in response to them.

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25 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

... How the hell did I survive this long???

Because deep down you probably always knew that what your parents were doing wasn't quite right. Now comes the really tricky part, you need to learn to do better yourself. You need to somehow develop the psychological 'software updates' your parents didn't provide. Anyone who has grown up in a dysfunctional situation has to do this, it's not easy but it most certainly can be done.

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1 minute ago, RabidMongoose said:

You cannot blame yourself though because as a child you weren't born with knowledge of what disordered people are like....

There was a point in time where I did sort of blame myself...but that was a long time ago and I'm a very different person now.

Walking away from character disordered people is just the first step. We all need to learn how to put up healthy personal boundaries, recognize manipulation, avoid falling into bad behaviors ourselves (drugs, alcohol, becoming an abuser too). Basically, you sort of have to grow up psychologically even though you're a physically an adult. I still mess up every now and again even at my advanced age, but in general things are pretty good. Perhaps I'm a bit more careful and reserved than most people, wounds do heal but there are still some scars. We are who we are and living through adversity isn't totally negative.

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I don't take well to being manipulated.  Usually manipulators find themselves being manipulated right out the door.   

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24 minutes ago, Lilly said:

There was a point in time where I did sort of blame myself...but that was a long time ago and I'm a very different person now.

Walking away from character disordered people is just the first step. We all need to learn how to put up healthy personal boundaries, recognize manipulation, avoid falling into bad behaviors ourselves (drugs, alcohol, becoming an abuser too). Basically, you sort of have to grow up psychologically even though you're a physically an adult. I still mess up every now and again even at my advanced age, but in general things are pretty good. Perhaps I'm a bit more careful and reserved than most people, wounds do heal but there are still some scars. We are who we are and living through adversity isn't totally negative.

Until we psychologically mature we subject our own minds to a process of entropy which degrades them over time (this is done without us realising it).

We like to win or come out on top, we want to stay that way, and we try to impose our will onto the external environment (people, society, nations, world, universe) to attain both. This of course means we dont like and actively try to resist both change and our negative emotions. Instead we want to live in a static reality where we get everything our own way making us feel good.

Reality doesnt work that way because change and chaos (non-deterministic random events) are built into its very fabric. Even worse, the more we try to impose order onto the external environment the more out of balance we become with it leading to some very harsh life lessons. The result is our minds gradually slip into the abyss.

Once we let go of our need to win or come out on top, once we let go of trying to avoid or resist or defeat our negative emotions, once we accept reality how it actually is instead of trying to impose our will onto it, then the sooner that mind entropy goes into reverse.

Edited by RabidMongoose
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Being around a few manipulators in my life, I can say that it gives you a fine tuned BS radar after a while and you cease to give into their games. They'll envy you if you can outsmart them, but there isn't crap they can do about it.

Sociopaths have one heck of a disorder that hopefully we can cure someday! 

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On April 28, 2017 at 5:11 AM, Mr Walker said:

Absolutely, but then no one can make you feel ANY feeling/emotion, without your permission or acquiescence.. 

I dunno about that...   Is fear an emotion?  If someone puts a gun to my head, have I given them "permission" to scare the crap outa me?

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4 minutes ago, lightly said:

I dunno about that...   Is fear an emotion?  If someone puts a gun to my head, have I given them "permission" to scare the crap outa me?

Yes.

You construct or create the fear in your own mind. You are letting the threat scare you. You can chose not to be afraid, and or not to comply with the threat, depending on your values and priorities in life.

 To illustrate this, think of a person who does not know what a gun is, or is capable of.  They would not be sacred.  It is only the knowledge in your mind which constructs your fear , and you can deconstruct it.    Of course a prudent person would respond to the threat sensibly, but one does not have to be afraid There is NOTHING a human being HAS to be afraid of. 

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22 hours ago, XenoFish said:

I think the one thing that none of us have acknowledged yet is our own manipulation of others. Because we've all done it. Be it through subtle or not so subtle suggestion, emotional manipulation, even sexual suggestion. Do as I ask for some reward be whatever it may be. I find it funny with the rash of post here lately. One about love and this one about manipulation, they go hand in hand actually.:lol:

 

They do.

 And I hold similar views on both.  I don't manipulate. It never even occurs to me.  

Thinking about it I suspect this is because i can, and do, meet all my emotional and material needs from within my own resources, and/ or, from what is freely offered/ made available to me, by others.

Manipulation never worked in my family as a child and indeed would have been considered dishonest and morally wrong so any hint of it was not tolerated and so i never became habitualised in its use. and i still very strongly think it is wrong to try and get something from another via  any form of manipulation.

If you cant get it through open, honest, discourse, or bargaining, don't seek it.

That goes for love as well. It is not something to be gained, or sought, through manipulation,  but through openness and honesty.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Manipulation is an art of social engineering which can be witnessed a lot here on the internet. Actually it happens if you let your emotions get the better of you and the manipulator uses that, like a weapon, against you, It's all emotional.

I don't think I have ever been manipulated but who knows, I might have been too naïve to notice. Most manipulation strategies are based off getting an individual to trust you as much as possible and using his/her trust to you get what you want or need.

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