In her book Emotional Blackmail: When People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation and Guilt to Manipulate You, Susan Forward explains the concept of emotional blackmail. In the first three blogs of this series, I outlined the signs that you may be a target of this type of manipulation, the styles of emotional blackmail, and how blackmailers play on your emotions by engaging you in an emotional FOG. In this post, I will outline Forward’s explanation of strategies that blackmailers use to get their way. The tools of the trade, so to speak.
Strategies that blackmailers use to manipulate:
The spin- Blackmailers are skilled at manipulating their targets by spinning the story. In the simplest terms, the blackmailer and the compliant target are the “good guy”, but if their target offers any resistance, they’re labeled the “bad guy”. They reinforce these roles by ascribing positive labels to themselves and their ideas and use negative labels to describe their targets. They often do this by challenging the character, motives and worth of their targets.
Pathologizing- Pathology is the science of determining the root causes of a disease. To pathologize someone means to label them as sick. Blackmailers will often engage in this behavior by suggesting, either directly or indirectly, that the reason you aren’t going along with their requests is because there is something wrong with you. For targets of blackmailers, this can be particularly hurtful because they will often use vulnerable information that you have shared with them (such as a history with depression, areas of personal insecurity or perceived weaknesses) to skew the facts and reinforce their position. If this persists, this type of accusation can often make us question our own judgment and sanity.
Enlisting allies- When blackmailers feel that they aren’t able to successfully get their way on their own, they may call on others to support their argument. As master manipulators, they are often able to convince others to see their perspective, and may enlist friends and family members to support their case and create additional pressure on their target. This tactic can become increasingly effective when blackmailers take it a step further to gather support from authority figures or a higher power, such as a therapist, a religious figure or a religious script.
Negative comparisons- Blackmailers will often play in to our feelings of self-doubt by comparing their targets to someone else, making statements like “why can’t you be more like…?”. They will identify an ideal model for behavior and then point out all of the ways that their target doesn’t measure up to this person. This type of manipulation causes us to feel deficient and creates pressure to adjust our values and behavior to be more like someone else who the blackmailers has deemed to be more desirable.
In the next edition in this blog series, I’ll explore the traits that make us most vulnerable to blackmailers.
For more on this topic, I recommend picking up a copy of Emotional Blackmail: When People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation and Guilt to Manipulate You by Susan Forward, Ph.D. (1998).
If you think you may be experiencing emotional blackmail or may benefit from assistance setting healthy boundaries in your relationships, set up an appointment with me today. I can help.