Let's Talk About Manipulation

Manipulation. What a loaded word these days, like so many others: "toxic," "abusive," "narcissistic."

People and relationships can indeed be severely damaged by abuse, narcissistic traits, and other toxic dynamics. These terms are often appropriate and can be helpful, even life-saving. But they've also become increasingly misused, watered down or weaponized in ways that actually detract from their true utility.

So let's start with a definition/exploration of "manipulation" that I find truly useful.

Manipulation is a natural, adaptive strategy. It becomes maladaptive later in life, but it typically originates in childhood in situations in which it was necessary to employ certain strategies (without conscious awareness) in an effort to get basic needs met by others.

A child's survival needs include food, shelter, and healthcare. But they also include love, attention, emotional attunement, and other forms of developmental nurturance.

When a caregiver is checked out, under the influence of substances or acute life stressors, or simply never received adequate emotional care growing up themselves, a child will often learn to seek (or attempt to preserve) this love and attention indirectly--through meltdowns, lying, evasion or premature independence, manufactured or exaggerated illness, or attempts to placate, please, or appease. Children are remarkably adaptive in the ways they can bend, like a tree growing sideways out of a cave--seeking the light that it needs to survive. 

Later in life, these same strategies surface in relationships, as passive-aggression, compulsive dishonesty, threats, evasion, and emotional "outbursts." Especially in partnership, these kinds of indirect efforts to seek or preserve love can leave partners feeling disrespected, confused, trapped, and coerced--in short, manipulated.

It's so important to start with the understanding that manipulation of this kind is not designed to disrespect, confuse, trap, or coerce. Not at its heart. However indirect, it is fundamentally an effort at communication. It is simply a method badly in need of better and more appropriate tools.

Most people who "manipulate" in these ways do so because their history has conditioned them not to believe that others will voluntarily meet their needs. Even when they've long outgrown the environments in which this conditioning took place, the deep emotional belief remains. 

Updating the system will require work on their part to more vulnerably and directly access and articulate their needs. And you can't do this work for them.

But if you're in relationship with someone exhibiting manipulative behaviors, you can be helpful by starting from a place of understanding that their indirectness is learned, and can be unlearned.

Take a moment when feeling upset or confused by their behavior and remind yourself that they are trying--and struggling mightily--to communicate a personal need. If you feel safe to do so (prioritize your own emotional safety first!), stay curious about this underlying need. Even if on the surface it sounds like criticism, coercion, or evasion.

Ask them directly to tell you what the underlying feeling or need is that they're trying to express or request. They may not even know at first, and they will almost certainly deflect and attempt to disown this need. Remember, they very likely did not feel safe or able to express it directly--to own it as theirs--growing up. But ask, regardless--and keep it simple and consistent. This will take repetition and patience.

If you can hold that center, it may help them to become steadier on their own feet learning how to build this skill. It doesn't excuse their behavior and there's no guarantee that they'll meet you halfway. But it sure beats feeling like the helpless victim of manipulation.