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Blackmailers build their conscious and unconscious strategies on the information we give them about what we fear.
fear works a transformation on the blackmailer,
Fear moves us into black-and-white—even catastrophic—thinking.
Anger seems to magnetize fear, pulling it quickly to the surface and activating the fight/flight reaction in our bodies.
Emotional memory can keep us locked into old ways of fearful acting and reacting, even when there’s nothing in our current reality to justify the fear.
Even if a reconciliation has taken place, the traumatic event is not forgotten.
For Josh, all it took was an angry look from Paul. He quickly settled on his best course of action: He’d lie. He’d keep seeing Beth but pretend to his father that he’d broken up with her.
The price for Josh? His own self-respect and the physical and emotional costs of letting anger build, both within him and in his relationship with his father.
Our bodies and the primitive parts of our brains read it as a reason to run away, and often that’s what we do, avoiding what we fear because deep inside we believe that’s the only way to survive. In fact, as you will see, our emotional well-being depends on doing just the opposite—facing and confronting what we fear the most.
We go overboard for the sake of duty.
Blackmailers never hesitate to put our sense of obligation to the test, emphasizing how much they’ve given up,
It’s not uncommon for two people in any relationship to change roles, alternately playing both target and blackmailer.
undeserved guilt,
remorse we feel has little to do with identifying and correcting harmful behavior.
layered with blame, accusations and paralyzing self-flagellation.
Undeserved guilt may have nothing at all to do with our harming someone else, but it has everything to do with believing that we did.
blackmailers to create undeserved guilt is to use blame, actively attributing whatever upset or problems they’re having to their targets.
Once blackmailers see that their target’s guilt can serve them, time becomes irrelevant.
FOG bypasses our thought processes and goes straight for our emotional reflexes.
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.
Any resistance on our parts is transformed from an indication of our needs to evidence of our flaws.
When the spin is effective, it confuses us about what’s harmful or healthful and makes us question what we see going on between ourself and the blackmailer.
We want to trust the other person instead of acknowledging that he or she is manipulating us
She didn’t want to admit to herself that she’d made a mistake about him.
It was less painful for her to buy Cal’s version of reality than to confront the uncomfortable truths about him and their relationship.
In addition to discrediting the perceptions of their targets, many blackmailers turn up the pressure by challenging our character, motives and worth.
There’s nothing “wrong” with you just because you don’t want someone as much as they want you.
Painful life events—divorces, child custody battles, abortions—that we have described at intimate moments are all used as proof of our instability.
we may be willing to give in to blackmailers to prove that they’re wrong about us.
“It doesn’t matter how you play the game as long as you do not lose.”
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.
Emotional blackmailers—no matter what their style or preferred tools—operate from a similar sort of deprivation mentality,
blackmailers believe they haven’t got a chance of prevailing—unless they play hardball.
We revert to those old patterns because they’re familiar, and even though they may cause us pain, they provide reassuring structure and predictability.
They believe they can compensate for some of the frustrations of the past by changing the current reality.
she struck back through punishing emotional blackmail, the one way she felt she could regain control over the emotional chaos inside her.
Often blackmailers’ self-centeredness springs from a belief that the supply of attention and affection available to them is finite—and shrinking fast. Elliot is so
The ferocity of their desire only makes sense when you realize that they are not reacting to the current situation but rather to what that situation symbolizes to them from the past.
many punishers see themselves as victims. In fact, the more abusive the blackmailers, the more they twist reality. Their extreme sensitivity and self-centeredness magnify the hurts they feel and help them justify retaliating against us for what they see as deliberate attempts to thwart them.
If he could make her less desirable, less valuable, then he wasn’t losing so much, and his deprivation would be considerably alleviated. After all, damaged goods are easier to part with.
they give their targets confusing double messages. It’s as if they were saying “You’re no good, but I’ll do everything in my power to hold on to you”—a further illustration of how desperate they’re feeling.
Blackmailers can live with almost anything if they can make their targets seem like dunces.
punishment keeps a blackmailer in a strong emotional connection with you.
creating a highly charged atmosphere, blackmailers know they are activating the target’s feelings for them, and even if the feelings are negative, they’ve created a tight bond.
You may resent or even hate the blackmailer, but as long as your focus is on them, they haven’t been abandoned or discarded with indifference. Punishment keeps a lot of...
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emotional blackmail sounds like it’s all about you and feels like it’s all about you, but for the most part it’s not about you at all. Instead, it flows from and tries to stabilize some fairly insecure places inside the blackmailer.
emotional blackmail has more to do with the past than with the present,
more concerned with filling the blackmailer’s needs than with anything the blackmailer says we did or didn’t do.
it couldn’t happen without our compliance.
asking for it. But approval junkies need a constant supply, and judge that they’ve failed if they can’t get it. They believe they’re not OK unless someone else says they are, and their sense of security depends almost entirely on outside validation.
