May 13, 2009
February 23, 2009
Emotional Blackmail (Final)
TURNING UNDERSTANDING INTO ACTION
To change, we need to know what we have to do and then act on it. If we’re willing to take action now and let your feelings of confidence and competence catch up with you, emotional blackmail can end.
The1st Step:
Three simple tools:
- A contract
- A power statement: I CAN STAND IT
- A set of self-affirming phrases
Step One -: Stop
You don’t make a decision about how to respond the moment a demand is made. Give yourself time to think.
Step Two: Become an Observer
Gather the information needed to respond to the blackmailer.
Understand what really happening:
- What am I thinking
- What am I feeling
- What are the flashpoints
Keep observing until we begin to make connections between our beliefs, feelings, and behavior.
A Time for decision
There are three categories of demands:
- The demand is no big deal
- The demand involves important issues and our integrity is on the line.
- The demand involves a major life issues and/or by giving in would be harmful to you or others. Stretch out the decision making process, carefully considering how much each option will affect our life and integrity.
When we make decisions based on criteria that are our own rather than the blackmailers, we have dealt with the crippling blow of emotional blackmail cycle.
Strategy
Don’t do it alone if the relationship is physically abusive.
Strategy 1: Non-defensive communication
Do not defend or explain your decision/yourself in response to pressure. Use phrases like: ‘I’m sorry that you are so upset’, ‘Really, I can understand how you might see it that way’. Without fuel from the target, the blackmail attempts that worked so well in the past fizzle.
Choose time and place carefully. Lay down conditions for the meeting; announce the decision and STAND BY IT. Offer a suggestion that they can respond immediately.
Anticipate their answers. Practice or role play.
Below are some of the possible responses:
- Catastrophic predictions and threats
- Name-calling, labeling and negative judgments.
- The deadly whys and how, demanding explanations and a rationale for your decision.
For silent angry people, stay non-defensive.
Strategy 2: Enlisting the blackmailer as an ally
When emotional blackmail reaches an impasse, it’s often helpful to shift the conversation by involving the other person in your problem-solving process. Approach with curiosity and a willingness to learn. Use the ‘wonder tool’. ‘I wonder what would happen if’?
Strategy 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. It’s win/win. It enables resentments to be put to one side.
Strategy 4: Using Humor
In a relationship that is basically good, humor can be an effective tool for pointing out to the other person how their behavior looks to you.
END….
February 22, 2009
Emotional Blackmail (3)
THE INNER WORLD OF THE BLACKMAILER
Emotional blackmailers hate to lose and can’t tolerate frustration. 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. These convictions may be rooted in a lengthy history of feeling anxious and insecure. Complementing and reinforcing possible genetic factors are powerful messages from our caretakers and society about whom we are and how we are supposed to behave. Blackmailers believe that they can compensate for some of the frustrations of the past by changing the current reality.
The potential for blackmail rises dramatically during such crises as a separation or divorce, loss of a job, illness and retirement, which undermine blackmailers’ sense of themselves as valuable people. Often people who have had everything and have been overprotected and indulged have had little opportunity to develop confidence in their ability to handle any kind of loss. At the first hint that they might be deprived, they panic, and shore themselves up with blackmail.
Usually blackmailers focus totally on their needs, their desires; they don’t seem to be the least bit interested in our needs or how their pressure is affecting us. They often behave as though each disagreement is the make-or-break factor in the relationship.
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’ mind-set. Any logic or ability to see the consequences of their actions is obscured by the urgency blackmailers feel to hold on to what they have.
The most important thing to take away from the tour of a blackmailer’s psyche is that emotional blackmailer sounds and feels like it’s all about you BUT in actual fact it is NOT about you and many times all these are flowing out from the blackmailer’s insecurities and has more to do with the past than the present. They are more concerned with filling their needs.
It takes two
Blackmail cannot work without the target’s active participation. The target has given permission for it to occur. You may be aware of the blackmail but feel as though you can’t resist it because the blackmailer’s pressure sets off an almost programmed responses in you and your reaction is automatic or out of impulse.
Blackmailers may be aware of our weakness. When faced with resistance, their fear of deprivation kicks in and they will use all information (weakness) they know about us to use against us to ensure that they prevail. Some weakness that open us up to emotional blackmail are:
- An excessive need for approval
- An intense fear of anger
- A need for peace at any price
- A tendency to take too much responsibility for other people’s lives
- A high level of self-doubt
When above are kept in balance and alternated with other behavior, none of these styles dooms you to the status of ‘preferred target’ of an emotional blackmailer. Emotional blackmailing takes training and practice. Emotional blackmailers take their cues from our responses and learn from both what we do and what we don’t do.
The Impact of Blackmail
Emotional blackmail may not be life threatening but it robs us of our integrity. Integrity is that place inside where our values and moral compass reside, clarifying what right and wrong for us.
- We let ourselves down
- A vicious cycle ensues
- Rationalizing and justifying
The impact on our well being:
- Mental health
- Physical pain as a warning
We may betray others to placate the blackmailer. It sucks the safety out of the relationship. We may shut down and constrict emotional generosity.
To be continued….
February 21, 2009
Emotional Blackmail (2)
UNDERSTANDING THE BLACKMAIL TRANSACTION
Diagnosis: Emotional blackmail
The issues may differ but tactics and actions are the same and easily recognized.
- A demand: it may be direct or indirect and may not even sound like a demand until the blackmailer is set in the course of action and is not willing to discuss or change it.
- Resistance from the target
- Pressure
- Threats
- Compliance
- Repetition
Manipulation becomes emotional blackmail when it is used repeatedly to coerce us into complying with blackmailers’ demands and at the expense of our own wishes and well being. When you see people trying to get their own way regardless of the cost to you; you’re looking at the bottom-line of the emotional blackmailer. There is little interest in compromise or conflict resolution.
The Four faces of Blackmail
Punisher let us know exactly what they want and the consequences we’ll face if we don’t give it to them. They may express themselves aggressively or they may smolder in silence but either way, the anger is always aimed directly at us. The closer the relationship, the higher the stakes and the more vulnerable we are to punishers. When blackmail escalates, the threatened consequences of not acceding to a punisher can be alarming. They will resolve to abandonment, emotional cutoff, withdrawal of money and other resources, direct explosive anger at us and in extreme cases, threats of physical harm.
Self-punisher turn the threats inward by threatening what the will do to themselves if they don’t get their way. High drama, hysteria and an air of crisis (precipitated by you, of course) surround self-punishers, who are often excessively needy and dependent. They often enmesh themselves with those around them and struggle with taking responsibility with their own lives. The ultimate threat self-punishers can make is frightening in the extreme of suggestion that they will kill themselves.
Sufferers are talented blamers and guilt-peddlers who make us figure out what they want and always conclude that it is up to us to ensure they get it. Sufferers take the position that if they feel miserable, sick, unhappy, or are just plain unlucky, there’s only one solution: we give them what they want even if they haven’t told us what it is. They let us know in uncertain terms, that if you don’t do what they want, they will suffer and it will be your fault. Sufferers are pre-occupied with how awful they feel and often they interpret your inability to read their mind as proof that you don’t care enough about them.
[Who on earth can read other people’s mind! (~,~”) my suggestion: BE LOGICAL]
Tantalizer put us through a series of test and hold out a promise of something wonderful if we’ll just give in to their way. They are the subtlest blackmailers. They encourage us and promise love or money or career advancement and then make it clear that unless we behave as they want us to if not we don’t get the prize. Every seductively wrapped package has a web of strings attached. Many tantalizers traffic in emotional payoffs, castles in the air full of love, acceptance, family closeness and healed wounds. Admission to this rich, unblemished fantasy requires only one thing: giving in to what the tantalizer wants.
Each type of blackmailer operates with a different vocabulary and each gives a different spin to the demands, pressure, threats and negative judgments that go into blackmail. There are no firm boundaries between the styles of blackmail as they can be combined.
A Blinding FOG
Emotional blackmail flourishes in a cloud just below the surface of our understanding. Our judgement becomes hazy. In the midst of the 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’. When blackmailers pressure us, there is practically no time between feeling discomfort and acting to get relief.
The Real F-Word: FEAR
Blackmailers build their conscious and unconscious strategies on the information we give them about what we fear. Their fear of not getting what they want becomes so intense that they become tightly focused and are able to see the outcome they want in exquisite detail; they are not capable of taking their eyes off the goal long enough to see how their actions are affecting us. All information that they had gathered about us in the course of the relationship has become ammunitions for driving home a deal that’s fed by fear. One of the most painful parts of emotional blackmail is that it violates trust.
Obligation
Often our ideas on duties and obligations are reasonable and they form an ethical and moral foundation in our life. Sometimes these are out of balance. Blackmailers never hesitate to put our sense of obligation to the test. Reluctance to break up a family keeps many people in relationships that have gone sour. Most of us have terrible time defining our boundaries and when our sense of obligation is stronger than our sense of self-respect and self-caring; blackmailers quickly learn to take advantage.
Guilt
Guilt is an essential part of being a responsible person. It’s a tool of conscience but in its distorted form, it registers discomfort and self-reproach if we’ve done something to violate our personal or social code of ethics. One of the fastest ways for blackmailers to create undeserved guilt is to use blame; actively attributing whatever upset or problems they have to their targets. Once blackmailers see that their target’s guilt can serve them, time becomes irrelevant. There is no statute of limitations. Guilt is the blackmailer’s neutron bomb. It can leave relationships standing, but it wears away the trust and intimacy that makes us want to be with them.
Tools of the Trade
The tools are consistent and run endlessly in varied scenarios of emotional blackmail. All blackmailers, no matter what’s their style use one or more of them.
The Spin
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. They let us know that they ought to win because the outcome they want is more loving, more open, and more mature. Any resistance on our parts is transformed from an indication of our needs to become evidence of our flaws. In addition to discrediting the perceptions of their targets, many blackmailers turn up the pressure by challenging their character, motives, and worth. We may be labeled heartless, worthless or selfish in any relationship with a blackmailer but those labels are especially difficult to withstand when they’re coming from a parent who can wipe out our confidence faster than anyone else.
Some blackmailers tell us that we’re resisting them only because we’re ill or crazy. This is called pathologize. The experience of being pathologized can be a devastating blow to our confidence and sense of self and is therefore an especially toxic and effective tool.
Pathologize often arises in love relationships when there’s an imbalance of desires like more love, more time, more attention and more commitment. When it’s not forthcoming, he/she questions our ability to love. Like the spin, pathologize makes us unsure about our memories, our judgments, our intelligence, and our character. With pathologize the stakes are higher, and can make us doubt our sanity.
Enlisting Allies
If single-handed attempts of blackmail are not effective, blackmailers call in reinforcements (family members, friends), to make their case for them and to prove that they are right. They may turn to a higher authority such as the bible.
Negative comparisons
Blackmailers often hold up another person as a model, a flawless ideal against which we fall short. Negative comparisons make us feel suddenly deficient. We react competitively.
e.g blackmailer said to their target “oh XXX is my BEST SISTER and she is always there when I am in need” and with this statement they abused their target and left target feeling stupid and useless after spending 10++hrs to placate her. Target being to wonder ‘why am I always the one here to attend to her and WHERE is that so call best friend? ‘
To be continued…..
February 20, 2009
Emotional Blackmail (1)
Emotional blackmail is a powerful form of manipulation in which people who are close to us threaten to either directly or indirectly punish us to get what they want.
Emotional blackmailers can be our parents or partners, bosses or coworkers, friends or lovers.They know how much we value our relationships with them, know our vulnerabilities and our deepest secrets and know about our need for love or approval. No matter how much they care about us, they will use this intimate knowledge to win our compliance by threatening to withhold it or take it away altogether, or make us feel we must earn it. If we believe the blackmailer’s threat, we could fall into a pattern of letting him/her control our decisions and behavior.
Blackmailers create a thick ‘fog ‘ that obscures their actions. FOG is a shorthand way of referring to Fear, Obligation and Guilt. Blackmailers pump up an engulfing FOG into the relationships, ensuring that we feel afraid to cross them, obligated to give them their way and terribly guilty if we don’t.
Blackmail takes two people to complete the transaction. It is easy to focus on other people’s behavior and think that if they can change, things will be fine. This is not how it works. The change has to begin with the blackmailer’s target. Our compliance rewards the blackmailer and every time we reward them for a particular action whether we realize it or not, we’re letting them know in the strongest possible terms that they can do it again. The price to pay when we repeatedly give in to emotional blackmail is enormous. It eats away at us and escalates until it puts our most important relationships and our whole sense of self-respect in jeopardy.
To be continued…….
