Emotional Manipulation: A Common Tactic For Resolving Internal Conflicts
You are probably used to hearing about emotional manipulation. You know what it looks like and know the victims it leaves in its wake. It is undoubtedly a type of behavior that is extremely harmful to the victim. What makes it so dangerous is that it is quiet and difficult to detect.
A person who uses emotional manipulation has everything perfectly mapped out in his head. He knows the weaknesses of his prey and how to get past any defense to get what he wants. Getting what he wants can mean that he looks like the victim, and the other person is the culprit. He wants the other person to admit that she is wrong and agrees with whatever the manipulator wants.
Emotional manipulators also get what they want when they can generate certain emotions in the other person to advance their own interests. The plan, as we said before, is all mapped out. They will not be in doubt about using what is necessary to bend the other’s will to get what they want.
Emotional manipulation often comes from cognitive dissonance
You probably know that emotional manipulators use what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.” Cognitive dissonance refers to an inner conflict that occurs in our head when we have two thoughts that are not consistent. Or when a thought does not fit in our belief system or with our behavior.
This inner conflict, this tension that eats up our minds, has a strange result. The brain does everything it can to avoid this cognitive alienation that we have ended up in without realizing it. This feeling of inner inconsistency disturbs us so much that we want to do what is possible to get rid of it.
We need to feel an inner connection between our thoughts and our feelings, between our beliefs and our attitudes… Between what we think and how we act. When we are at this crossroads, we will get out of it at all costs, even if it means deceiving ourselves.
Emotional manipulation is the best trick of cognitive dissonance
As we said before, people want to do what is possible to avoid spending time with this uncomfortable feeling that takes over our body. We avoid awareness of information that increases the dissonance and we turn the deaf ear to something that can destabilize us even more.
Emotional manipulators know how to act in the face of cognitive dissonance. They practice self-deception to achieve their goal. For example, there are people who are unable to end a romantic relationship, so they will do everything in their power to turn the situation around so that their partner ends the relationship instead.
Jørgen wants to leave Maria because he has just met a woman with whom he has a special “connection”. Mary, who knows nothing about this, will not leave him because she is in love with him. In this situation, Jørgen will do everything possible to get Maria to leave him, and in the end she will end the relationship. Later, he will make her feel like the only one responsible for the breakup. “No, no, you were the one who left me, I never said anything!”
Manipulators transfer guilt to the other person and feel exempt
Jørgen finds himself in an unpleasant situation that arises because what he wants to be (faithful) collides with what he is at the moment (unfaithful). To solve this problem, Jørgen chooses to emotionally manipulate Maria, so that she has to fix the situation, and she ends up as the culprit. Maria probably has no idea what’s really going on, because few of us can think of our partners behaving this way. On the other hand, it may be that Jørgen is not fully aware of his behavior.
Jørgen does not think he can end this relationship that he wants to end. Especially not now that he has met another woman. He does not want to be the culprit in the relationship, so he will do whatever it takes to protect himself and pass as the victim. In order not to accept reality or take responsibility, he will manipulate Maria until he gets results without caring too much about her suffering.
If Mary is the one who leaves him, he does not have to feel guilty for wanting to leave her for someone else. It would “look very bad” and he can catch up. If Maria leaves him, he resolves his inner conflict and ends up taking advantage of the situation.
Emotional manipulation is born of cognitive chaos. The mind will do what it can, find its way out of cognitive dissonance. It will find an executioner, a guilty party who makes the manipulator look like a victim, or will place them in a situation that justifies their thoughts or behavior.
The other person will always be the culprit. In the end, the emotional manipulators will always be the unhappy victims of their relationship.
