Recently I came across someone in a group asking how to not get manipulated again as they just got out of a relationship with a manipulative partner.
As someone who got manipulated a few times, I believe I’ve wised up a bit. I still get manipulated from time to time but much less than when I was younger.
Coupled with a recent discussion about my disagreement with a friend’s view on how to deal with a manipulator, I’m inspired to share what I’ve known and observed about manipulation and share some tips on how to avoid getting manipulated.
What is Manipulation?
Manipulation happens when a person takes advantage of someone’s vulnerability without being honest about it and/or without giving anything meaningful in return.
Whether it’s short or long term, intentional or unintentional, manipulation can leave the victims feeling disoriented or even traumatised. Depending on their emotional strength, a victim may need years to heal from the damage caused by manipulation.
Why Do People Manipulate?
There are various reasons why people manipulate. These include (but are not limited to):
Personality Disorder
Many, not all, people with ASPD (Antisocial Personality Disorder), Psychopathy, and NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) prioritise their own pleasure and disregard others’ feelings. If they’re not aware of their condition, they will do so uncontrollably, hurting other people disregarding any limit. Many of them are driven by greed, fear, and laziness as explained below. Note that not all greedy, fearful, lazy people have personality disorders.
Greed
Greed, especially in sexual encounters, is closely linked to low self-esteem. They have the need to conquer more and more preys as that’s the only way they define themselves as ‘worthy’.
The number of preys is their accolade. They’ll put their love ‘achievement’ such as memories, poems, etc on the walls, sometimes framed, just like people frame their school certificates.
Their main technique is faux honesty, letting their prey know they mean no harm and that they’re not interested in a committed relationship. While not necessarily harmful, their misleading behaviour (overly romantic and sexual) can create certain expectations. And when it’s time to conquer the next prey, since they have to be smart with their time, they have to ignore the current prey. When questioned, they’d blame them for expecting something they never said.
This type of manipulation is a form of gaslighting, where the person whom they manipulate will get confused and question their reality. When they find out what really happened, that they’re just another prey, they’re likely to experience emotional pains. In a way, this type of manipulator is honest with their words, but not honest with their actions.
Fear of Commitment
There are various reasons why some people are afraid of commitment, especially the monogamous one. Many of them are those who have unresolved childhood trauma. Some others are still traumatised by the previous relationship(s).
While craving emotional and sexual connection but also afraid to trust and afraid of not being able to express themselves freely, they’re likely to choose uncommitted connection. The typical justification would be like, “why do we need labels”, or “do you know that monogamy is not natural?”
On a side note, just because monogamy is not natural doesn’t mean it can’t or shouldn’t be practised. Besides, what’s natural is not necessarily useful. Fear is natural but it’s not useful when we let it control us.
The lack of commitment inevitably entices them to always keep an eye out for a better one. As soon as they find a better one, they’ll let go of whatever and whoever stops them from going for the better one. When questioned, they’ll say, “I never promised anything to you.”
On another side note, we should all be free to end a relationship if the interaction is no longer emotionally beneficial. But having an uncommitted connection while at the same time making the other person think they’re in a committed relationship is manipulative.
Fear of Losing
This closely links to low self-worth. When someone is so afraid of losing the person they love, not believing that they’re loveable, they often take shortcuts which can be counterintuitive. For example, by controlling the other person through money, guilt, threat, or showering the person with excessive love to the point of suffocation.
Laziness
The easiest example is children manipulating their parents. Some children can be smart enough to manipulate their parents to do homework for them simply by pretending it’s too difficult for them while the real reason is just that they’re lazy.
Competition
When someone is obsessed with winning, they’re likely to relentlessly manipulate whoever they find important enough to manipulate to get what they want. An example would be an actor/actress manipulating the directors by sleeping with them for roles.
Money
Money is the most common reason for people to manipulate others. A salesman selling a low-quality product at a ridiculous price epitomises this. On a large scale, this can be a big company fooling a large number of people to buy their not-so-good products at a high price through attractive ads.
Status
Those who are not happy with their sociological and educational background tend to manipulate people whom they perceive as superior by befriending or dating them. Superior here means those whose sociological and educational background can help enhance their image, and therefore, enhance their status.
Power
In a democratic country, politicians can be a perfect example of this. They’d usually manipulate people through the media on how good they look despite the fact that they’re not really good. The aim is to gain support from people so they can get to the power position.
How People Manipulate
People manipulate through various means, such as power, status, money, fear, guilt, charm, and/or pity.
As my experience in getting manipulated is often through power and charm, in this post I will only focus on how to deal with people who manipulate using their power and charm.
Avoiding Manipulation: The Basics
The principle of manipulation starts with weakness. It always does. This means, if you want to avoid getting manipulated, you first need to be aware of and embrace your weaknesses.
External Validation
The most common weakness is needing external validation.
For example, if you often seek external validation by asking people: “Am I pretty?”, you can easily be a delicious target for manipulators.
When deep inside you know you’re not ‘that pretty’, you have at least two choices:
- you can suppress your insecurity by pretending you’re ‘that’ beautiful; OR
- you can embrace your not-so-pretty face by changing your perception of beauty, and start focusing on your strengths that have nothing to do with being pretty.
When you’re trying to suppress your insecurity it will leak. Manipulators can easily see it and play from there. Therefore, embrace it, not suppress it.
How to Find Out if You Seek External Validation
Do you post a lot of selfies on your social media and count all the ‘likes’ you receive as if your life depends on it?
Unless you’re a model who posts selfies for expanding your portfolio, you should try your best to be aware of why you post selfies and pay attention to how you really feel when there are fewer ‘likes’ on your selfies.
If you feel bad when there are fewer ‘likes’ on your selfies, you can safely assume that you’re a person who seeks external validation. Don’t feel ashamed, it’s natural. But just because it’s natural, doesn’t mean it’s good for you. Just because it’s natural, doesn’t mean it can’t be managed. You need to first be aware of it.
The best way to reduce the need for external validation is to embrace your insecurity. When you do this well (it needs a lot of practice), nobody can use it against you. When nothing can be used against you, you’re immune to manipulation.
How to Change Your Own Perception
One of the most effective ways to embrace your insecurity is by changing your perception. This is, of course, not easy.
The first step is to recognise its downside and then question it. The next step is to treat this perception (that you want to change) as a 5-year-old and try your best to place yourself as someone who is ‘wiser’ than this 5-year-old kid.
I will use the same example mentioned above, i.e. a person who struggles with their not-so-pretty face.
If this 5-year-old complains that they’re not pretty, you can tell them (in a loving way, don’t yell! Be nice!) that:
- to you, they’re pretty. And they should pay more attention to which parts of the face/body they like instead of the parts they don’t like;
- they should give people the freedom to agree or disagree if they’re pretty and should never beg or force anyone to change their mind if they disagree about their prettiness;
- being pretty is not everything. In the end, personality and brain count more than just being pretty. Beauty fades. Again, they should never beg or force anyone to have the same belief.
Be Aware of Your Fears and Desires
Note that weakness also includes fears and desires. When you’re aware of – and embrace – your fears and desires, believing that you’ll be OK no matter how bad an outcome may get, nobody can control you.
Be Aware of Your Fake Bravery
Embracing your fears doesn’t mean you suddenly become fearless. Fear is not to be ashamed of, nor repressed or suppressed. Fear is to be felt and questioned within yourself. Nobody (except professional therapists and trusted people) should interfere with this process. Nobody should tell you what and when to fear. Ultimately you should have total freedom to decide, to process what you can. Only you know what you’re capable of.
For example, someone persuades you to join them to climb a dangerous mountain without proper gear. You say no as you know it’s not safe. But then they say YOLO: you only live once and you should embrace your fear and enjoy life.
When faced with this type of situation, you have at least three choices:
- join their stupidity and pretend to have no fear, at the risk of breaking your limbs or losing your life.
- be controlled by your fear and not climb mountains at all, missing the beauty of the experience, the mountain and the views.
- get the proper gear, embrace your fear, and join the mountain climbing safely.
Have Boundaries and Stick to Them
Another way to avoid being manipulated is by having boundaries and sticking to them.
As described in the other post, having boundaries means knowing what we want and what we don’t want. We know our own rules of conduct when interacting with other people and how people should treat us.
Having boundaries means knowing our values and not letting anyone persuade us to downplay or even remove our values to accommodate the other person’s values and convenience.
When you have strong boundaries, you can feel it when someone is trying to make you do things that are not aligned with your values. You should say no without being afraid of being seen negatively. That’s how you stick to your boundaries.
Maintain Your Financial Independence
Don’t just focus on the intangible weakness, but also on the tangible one: money.
We all know that money is a powerful tool to get things we need and want. So make sure you have your own money and don’t let anyone take control of it. This way, you’ll lessen the risk of getting manipulated.
Discover Your Life’s Purpose
This is one of the areas that not many people talk about as they’re too busy numbing their emptiness by glorifying happiness as the be-all-end-all goal in life.
I’m not against happiness. I see happiness as a tool, not an end. Happiness is an indicator of whether we’re aligned with our life’s purpose. To those of you who still don’t know your life’s purpose, here is a post that may help you discover your life’s purpose.
When you know, or at least are working on discovering your life’s purpose, you’re likely to focus on it instead of wasting time with unproductive (and often damaging) activities, such as addiction to gambling, drugs, sex, or food. Having no addiction lessens the risk of being manipulated. It also lessens your need for manipulating others.
Be Aware of Your Own Tendency to Manipulate Others
When you’re aware of your own weaknesses, including fears and desires, you’ll naturally recognise other people’s weaknesses, fears and desires. It’s not a projection. Projection is when you unconsciously attribute your unwanted emotions or traits you don’t like about yourself to someone else. Embracing your weaknesses means you accept things you don’t like about yourself and can empathise with people who have a similar experience. Therefore, it’s not a projection when you naturally recognise others’ weaknesses this way.
When you have an understanding of your own weaknesses, you are instinctively trained to have an understanding of others’ weaknesses. This is a superpower. You can use it to help people improve their situation or you can manipulate them to your advantage.
If you can’t help manipulating them, be an ethical manipulator, where the outcome of manipulating them also benefits them the same way they benefit you. How to know it’s ‘the same way’? By discussing with them openly what you want from them and ask them what they need from you and meet their needs. That’s called “I scratch your back and you scratch mine.” In a way, it’s no longer called ‘manipulation’.
In a way, the world would be a better place when people just let others know what they want and what they’ll give in return.
Don’t Take Things Personally
Try not to take things personally. Don’t assume that you’re the cause of someone’s behaviour. Most of the time someone’s behaviour towards you, especially the negative ones, is due to their own internal state.
When you think people manipulate you because you’re unloveable and people only see you as a doormat, you need to take accountability. Instead of whining, work on yourself. Learn how to self-love. Here is a post about how to do it.
Generally, people want to manipulate you because they perceive you have what they want and they often don’t know (or choose to ignore) how to give something equally beneficial to pay you back.
Have compassion when possible. Try to understand where they stand and how they perceive their world. Manipulators are often just those with irresponsible (sometimes also wounded) little kids inside them who want to get what they want without having to do much effort.
Perhaps, it’s best to investigate what they really want from you. If you need something from them, tell them what you need and see if you both can come up with a win-win outcome.
If you don’t need anything from them, or you need something but can sort of estimate that the outcome is likely to be win-lose you can politely decline to interact further with them.
Having Said That
The aim of this post is to introduce you to the basic concept of manipulation. It’s not designed to hate manipulators (as all of us can be potential manipulators), but rather to understand why they are what they are, do what they do, and how they operate.
As this is only a blog post, not a book, it may appear that I’ve been oversimplifying the topic of manipulation.
The win-win outcome, for example, can be perceived differently depending on how the ‘calculation’ is done. And we all know that some outcomes are intangible and calculating the intangibles can be challenging.
The other challenging issue on how to deal with manipulators is when their charm is so magnetic that we can’t help but fall in love with them.
However, despite the potential challenges, this post is written to give you the basic information that may help you avoid getting manipulated and avoid manipulating people, intentionally or unintentionally. Embracing your weaknesses, fears and desires is imperative. Mastering it needs a lot of practice and knowledge.
Practice means exploring yourself, questioning, feeling all the emotions you’re having. Journaling is the best way for such exploration.
However, journaling itself is not enough. You still need to read books to enrich your understanding of why you are what you are, and why people are what they are, including emotions, strengths, weaknesses, values, and tendencies.
Here are some books I recommend you to read:
Will I Ever be Good Enough? by Karyl McBride, Phd
The Four Agreement by Don Miguel Ruiz
Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment by George Leonard
The Law of Human Nature by Robert Greene
Everything is F*cked by Mark Manson
Let Me Know Your Thoughts/Story
Have you been badly manipulated? Have you manipulated people? Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts or experiences in the comment box below.
