If you have difficult people in your life, it is highly likely that you are dealing with some form of emotional manipulation. Emotional manipulation occurs when someone uses fear, obligation, guilt, or threats to make you act or feel a certain way that is to his/her own benefit. Some also refer to this as emotional blackmail.

Here is how you can recognize emotional manipulation:

• The person threatens to disclose your secrets.
• The person uses your fears and vulnerabilities against you by attacking your weaknesses.
• The person accuses you of being a bad daughter, friend, wife, mother, father, or Christian.
• The person threatens to do or not do something that they know you really want.
• The person constantly has to win arguments, put you down, and/or prove superiority over you.
• The person acts like a helpless victim and accuses you of victimizing them when he/she really do have choices and you really aren’t hurting them.
• The person twists your words and appears to never really understand what you mean.
• The person accuses you of doing what he/she does but refuses to recognize or admit and you know you don’t do it.
• The person brings in someone else and gets that person to side against you.
• The person is caught in repeated lies and always figures out a way to get you to doubt your perception.

Knowing what you are dealing with is the first step to being able to react differently to it. The purpose of emotional manipulation is to get you to do what the emotional manipulator wants. These people are usually very skilled at what they do and even identifying these things clearly may take some time and effort on your part.

By Karla Downing

Relationship Devotional Prayer

 
God,

Help me to walk in truth and to be wise in dealing with people who seek to use emotional manipulation against me to get what they want. I want to be able to choose what I do freely without being controlled by other people.

Relationship Devotional Challenge

• Assess your primary relationships to identify which people try to use emotional manipulation against you.
• Purpose to recognize when it is being used against you.

Scripture Meditation

 
John 2:24

“Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all men” (NIV).

1 John 4:1

“Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (NIV).