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So many of us have lived with a Sex Addict’s manipulation and gaslighting for so long that many of us have accepted those behaviors as our new normal.
Then, when Discovery hits and we start to dissect the corpse of our relationship we realize that we were just like the frog that was placed in a pot of cold water and set on the stove to slowly and ever so subtly boil to death.
Many of you have recognized the process and feel stupid for allowing it to happen. Also, many of you have asked ‘How will I know if a new man is manipulating me?’
So, here is your venue for sharing your thoughts on recognizing manipulation, gaslighting and other traits that people use to suck the energy right out of our souls.
I am not just talking about our SA’s, although that is a great way to start, but eventually we must learn how to recognize these traits in others, like family members, co workers, bosses, sales people and friends.
So, what are your thoughts on manipulation? How do you recognize it? How do you deal with it? What are your boundaries? ~ JoAnn
JoAnn,
Man, I wish I’d been better at this sooner. i guess i have my H to thank for helping me hone my skills here.
I think people have visual “tells” like in poker. For example, my H gets a certain look in his eye that has proven to be his “lying eye.” It also seems to be the only time he’s 100% invested in the conversation, instead do having that glazed-over, checked out look.
Some liars do just the opposite – toss the lie out casually so as not to arouse suspicion. I’ll be really curious to see the other answers here, particularly around dealing with it and boundaries. I’m not very god at that part of it – doormat.
Thanks!
If you have a lot of if/then in your emotional give and take, ESPECIALLY if it is unspoken, you are probably looking at manipulation. Not from textbooks, my own experience.
It’s so funny (in the ironic sense) how we characterize ourselves. In all your posts MO, I have never once thought of you as a doormat!
They admit to only what they know you can prove, and maybe just a little more, which makes them look like they’re confessing when in fact they’re continuing to lie by ommission.
Have you ever walked away from confronting him about something feeling guilty YOURSELF?
Hmmm…how did THAT happen?… *RED FLAG*
That’s a tough question, JoAnn. After years of being manipulated and not realizing it, for a while I went to the opposite extreme and didn’t trust *anything.* I spoke to my therapist about this, and she said that a way to learn to trust your gut was to get into the habit of going with your ‘best guess’ at any point in time. Accepting that your guess might be wrong, but that it was important to get into the habit if you’d spent a lifetime..as I had.. of second-guessing yourself. It’s hard. One wants to give people the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes there’s a nagging feeling that something isn’t right. So I guess rather than ignore that feeling..or go the opposite extreme of harsh judgment of them.. one needs to look more closely at that feeling to try to figure out what’s going on and why. xoxo
That’s funny Daisy – I do feel like, with my H, I came out swinging and I feel safe to talk about that here with you all. But, in my 46 years, I’ve let a lot of toxic people walk all over me. Maybe H is where I’m drawing the line around all of it. Hmmmm…?
I love the phrase “dissecting the corpse of our relationship..” because that’s exactly what I’m doing as I try to move on and trust another man before I die. I have a couple of axioms that I always touch back to…then fit to the situation.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them. (I know in hindsight there were lots of signs he barely had a conscience and would say anything to anyone get what he needed … it just wasn’t overtly towards me at first, so while it bothered me I let it go.)
Don’t believe everything you think. (Do believe damn near everything you feel…there’s a huge difference. Ya, we let our default thoughts run away with us from time to time, but if the red flag is still fluttering in the breeze a day later, it’s needs to be heeded.)
It’s a gut feeling with me that something is “off”. Before I found SA and the behaviors associated with it, I did not know the technical names for the actions. I usually had the feeling around casual acquaintances so I didn’t care enough to explore it too deeply. I just knew if I had that little warning bell then a close relationship was probably a bad idea. it worked great for me in every aspect of my life except with my damn husband. I dropped the ball there big time. I honestly could name all his faults and knew all his weaknesses and could tell you how he would or would not react in every instance BUT I had NO idea he was leading a whole separate life. I have concrete proof and his admission and I still have trouble making it real. What I can make real is the way he manipulated, gaslighted, lied and in general emotionally abused me. It started slowly in summer of 2010. I saw he was going thru something and I didn’t know what. I felt that he was mid life crises and had suppressed a lot of childhood stuff ( I knew all about his family). I knew he had never dealt with it in any healthy way so I thought he needed therapy. I left him that summer and went to my parents and only returned with the stipulation that he see a therapist. He started going. I never prodded into his therapy. As time progressed, he started saying his therapist thought I was depressed. I never did understand that. He started acting more strange. He left me all kinds of clues and I never picked up on them. He drug me to marriage counseling and by the time he had finished with me in counseling I had come to believe that I was truly crazy. I got my own therapist who worked with me to show me I wasn’t crazy. My H came to me before Christmas of 2011 and announced that our marriage was “unhealthy”. I knew something was so wrong and STILL didn’t put the pieces together. I cried, I begged, I pleaded, I curled up in a fetal position and cried……all to try to get him to talk to me. I asked him point blank to his face if there was another woman….anyway, you get the point. My brother and a good friend and my therapist started me on the road to detective. I had already fund the letter from Holiday in for a stay that there was no excuse for. …the rest is history …
My biggest lesson from everything that has happened is that I will never doubt myself again. I won’t be manipulated, made to feel guilty, used, gaslighted, or emotionally blackmailed ever by anyone for any reason. Now, those actions don’t send off a warning bell, they send off an entire 5 alarm fire. I run, not walk, away. I don’t bother to dissect it. I don’t second guess myself. I don’t question it for one second.
I am generally a “live and let live” type person. I don’t judge in a fashion that makes the other party the bad guy. I just know when a person is unhealthy for me. It took me long enough and by damn, I learned the hardest way possible. I figure the lesson was pretty important.
Sorry this is so long. The whole thing with Deb sent me reeling and when it became about her daughter then I really had a reaction. I knew she was codependent and I realized she manipulated the “facts” to suit her. I figured “no harm no foul”. Until she was willing to use her daughter to defend her emotinal drama then I hit the roof. When she blamed us …..that was all I could take. I only have a finite amount that I can give. I was willing to give when someone is in true pain or when a child is being hurt. She wasn’t ready or willing to listen and I wasn’t going to be a part of saying it’s okay to let your daughter suffer. I wasn’t going to be blamed for it either. And I was not going to be made to feel crazy as deb changed her story around ever so slightly to fit whatever outcome she was hoping for.
I do hope and pray that it is a wake up call for her. I don’t think we do people favors by enabling.
Oh yeah…a huge red flag. When you begin a conversation with a clear goal and objective. You proceed to explain your position and the conversation ends up about nothing you intended. You are left feeling crazy and thinking ” I didn’t say that…I didn’t mean that…Did I say that?…”
I think I’m much better at recognizing it than I used to be – and that’s mainly b/c I don’t believe an f’n word that comes out of H.’s mouth. What I do struggle with is I have this tendency to think the best of people – I guess I view them from the lens of my own values and I wouldn’t lie or try to manipulate people – so I probably don’t recognize it in others as readily as I should. That being said, I can’t think of any particular instance (outside of my SAH) when it’s caused me harm but I guess if I didn’t recognize it, I may not have recognized that I was played! 😉 Learning how to handle the gaslighting and minimizing with H is a continual struggle. I talk a good game and wish that I had a “zero tolerance” policy but faced with an H who as my therapist calls, a “Master Manipulator”, it’s difficult for me to not get sucked into his recovery and to not feel guilty for wanting a separation.
If he is manipulating you to feel guilty about his ‘recovery’ then he is not in ‘recovery’. He is still lying. Recovery does not look like that. The major focus of any recovery is the ‘addict’ ….he should have nothing to say to you except ” I am sorry and I will understand any decision that you make “.
My MIL is a classic manipulator and narc. She kept her mentally handicapped brother home with her (sitting home alone all day while she went to work) after their mother was placed in a nursing home rather than putting him in the same home with his Mom as he wanted because she was more concerned about “what people would say” than his happiness. I saw her keep her mother and brother on life support long past the point of reasonableness because she LOVED all the attention SHE got “dealing with such trauma.” It was absolutely sickening. When I told her that my Dad was suffering from early onset dementia, she did not have one word of sympathy for my Dad or my Mom who was struggling to keep him at home at the time. She just stared at me for a few seconds and then said, “my friend Betsy has dementia and she just relies on me so much because I’m such a good person blah, blah, blah.” It was all about her and her “pain.” She has absolutely no room in her heart for anyone else.
To me, the red flag I’ve learned to watch for is people who seem to relish the attention they get from their particular “trauma.” People like my MIL will find a new drama anytime they sense the attention is slipping away from them to someone else. They are not interested in fixing the situation, or changing for the better because then they will be “normal” and all that lovely sympathy and attention will be focused somewhere else. I particularly dislike seeing that sort of behavior here on SOS where there are so many of us that genuinely want better lives for ourselves and our families. I understand that we all need to move at our own pace. I totally get that. But there is a difference between moving at a slow pace and refusing to budge from a place of chaos because you enjoy the attention.
FC, i don’t know your story, but i do know in my case the way my parents raised me prepared me in some ways, not to choose DW (i don’t buy that shit that i was looking for an SA), but to not walk away sooner. i wasn’t raised to have a voice or trust my feelings. it just wasn’t safe in my family for a child to say how she/he feels about something. i was also constantly looking outside myself, gauging how other people’s moods or wants to keep myself safe. because my parents are narcissistic, like children, really. someone with a healthy family would have walked out on DW in the first few months. (this guy is kinda weird, i’m out of here). i didn’t see it, he was just like my folks.
it is a way that i can explain to myself that i allowed him to mistreat me for so long. it took many months after d day to see how my parents gaslighted me. they are good people who didn’t harm me intentionally. but harm me they did.
so recognizing my familiar (familyer haha) dysfunction has really helped me understand that i grew up with a faulty ruler.
now as an adult, i can use a new one. and it is much more accurate! i’ve learned that many people’s motivation, even if they are unaware of it, isn’t pure. i see through behaviour now, because i reserve judgement until i take careful note of behaviour. and i watch people now. i watch them closely.
i find that seeing how someone behaves with people with whom they have nothing to gain from is an excellent marker.
that’s when the charm is often turned off, and you see the real person. sometimes i notice how truly generous and kind people are. other people i notice are motivated by self gain, then i take a step back. doesn’t mean i blame them or cut them off, just create whatever amount of distance between myself and them to keep myself safe.
this means pulling away from many people. but it also means allowing certain people to come close.
i find i’m much more courageous, because i know no one can hurt me more than i’ve already been hurt. every other relationship in my life is easy now.
oh and my MIL is also a classic manipulator and narc. and the whole family enables her. (i’ve cut her out except for ‘newsy’ communication) she’s truly scary. and DW treated her like shit when i met him. and was nice to me. then i got pregnant, and he started treating me like shit and being nice to her. lovely.
this is a very important topic but very difficult too,,,I am like FC had tendency in the past to think the best of people
now I realize that was a very child like behavior and that I had to grow and mature into seeing the world and people for what they are,,,
after that life changing experience I now know that there are a lot of people out there who lie, big lies small lies, all kind of lies, who manipulate who uses all kind of techniques to get what they want from you,
I feel I am starting sometimes to see these patterns, but I realize it is such new skill that i have to keep working on it,,
like Annie, said if i am with someone and I walk feeling bad I know that this person had done something that sucked energy out of me and I try to look back and see what happened in that encounter.Lisa, that switch in attitude between you and his mother is just weird. Not sure what to make of that. My H is an only child so there is no one else to either “get” this situation or to enable her further so she has resorted to cousins and other outlying family members for sympathy and attention. I have no doubt that she has painted my H and I as the villains in the relationship – there has been a noticeable coldness toward us by all these people. She gave her pages and pages of instructions for her funeral to her god daughter because she didn’t trust us to follow her wishes. Rightfully so. I will NOT be manipulated from beyond the grave. She has effectively disinherited her only child and her only granddaughter in favor of my son because for some reason, she has focused on him as the object of all her love and attention. Again don’t care other than feeling sad for my H that his mother is such an awful person.
Ok, last time I will address this but it’s just got to come out:
I suggested the daughter go to friends because it would get her out of a family situation her mother is obviously invested in maintaining. They could be on either side of the continent, while the mother is there spewing this stuff there’s no relief for the daughter. And honestly, God knows I don’t want to say this, but leaving a 13 year old girl with emotional issues with a sex addict, of undisclosed escalation level, while you fly across the country is asking for disaster. The girl calls screaming for you, and you DON’T take her to a doctor immediately. Hello!?! There is no way in hell that “gaping wound” would go without examination. I’d be wondering if he assaulted her. I’d require that she have a full physical exam if my daughter did that. There’s no way she could deny cutting, or anything else. But, Deb supposedly takes a denial from her daughter that anything happened and closes the chapter? That’s just bizarre. I’m telling you, this cutting is not news to her. The “found a letter in the drawer”. So since when does her SA clean drawers? Really?
The “that would make me sad” response floored me. WTF!!! You have a potential to save your daughter that you haven’t considered yet, and your first response is “that would make me sad?” As opposed to your daughter’s screaming pain? Give me a freaking break.
Then the “all I have to do is distract her with a boy” comment. If that doesn’t scream objectification, manipulation, and sheer ignorance while looking in a direct mirror at codependency I don’t know what does. How long did she say she’d been in counseling for co-dependency? She’s right there on step 1 with her husband. Denial. That’s setting her daughter right up on the tracks beside her. If you can’t see what pouring all your life into a man has done to YOU, you want to set up your 13 year old daughter, screaming for recognition and hope, to place all her happiness in a boy?
Then to everyone trying to talk sense, “I won’t hear you unless you are supportive.” No, no, no, not THAT kind of supportive, that requires something of ME. Not at all what I had in mind.
Then to everyone actually scared for her daughter, “I won’t tell you she’s ok, unless you come right down into my little web and grovel and adore me.”
Fuck that
Manipulator and totally self absorbed
Probably wouldn’t dream of harming a fly
Dangerous
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