Emotional Blackmail: When the People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation, and Guilt to Manipulate You

Yet if there's one thing I know with absolute certainty, both personally and professionally, it is this: Nothing will change in our lives until we change our own behavior. Insight won't do it. Understanding why we do the self-defeating things we do won't make us stop doing them. Nagging and pleading with the other person to change won't do it. We have to act. We have to take the first step down a new road.

I take a stand for what I believe in. I don’t let fear run my life. I confront people who have injured me. I define who I am rather then being defined by other people. I keep the promises I make to myself. I protect my physical and emotional health. I don’t betray other people. I tell the truth.

Punishers don’t see themselves as punishing, but rather as maintaining order or keeping a firm hand on things or doing “what’s right” or letting us know they can’t be pushed around. They see themselves as strong and in charge. If their behavior hurts us, so be it. The end justifies the means.

When dealing with emotional blackmailers: __I tell myself that giving in is no big deal. __I tell myself that giving in is worth it if it gets the other person to shut up. __I tell myself that what I want is wrong. __I tell myself it’s not worth the battle. __I give in now because I’ll take a stand later. __I tell myself it’s better to give in than to hurt their feelings. __I don’t stand up for myself. __I give away my power. __I do things to please other people and get confused about what I want. __I acquiesce. __I give up people and activities that I care about to please the blackmailer.

When I give in to someone who’s pressuring me, I do it because: I’m afraid of their disapproval. I’m afraid of their anger. I’m afraid they won’t like/love me anymore and may even leave me. I owe it to them. They’ve done so much for me, I can’t say no. It’s my duty. I’ll feel too guilty if I don’t. I’ll feel selfish/unloving/greedy/mean if I don’t. I won’t be a good person if I don’t. You’ll notice that the first three statements relate to fear, the second three to obligation and the last three to guilt.

Guilt is an essential part of being a feeling, responsible person. It’s a tool of the conscience that, in its undistorted form, registers discomfort and self-reproach if we’ve done something to violate our personal or social code of ethics. Guilt helps to keep our moral compass working, and because it feels so painful, it dominates our attention until we do something to relieve it. To avoid guilt, we try to avoid doing harm to someone else.

Many times we capitulate and compromise our integrity, losing our ability to remember how it feels to be whole. What does integrity feel like? Take a moment to look at the following list—you might want to read it aloud—and imagine that each of the statements is true for you most of the time. I take a stand for what I believe in. I don’t let fear run my life. I confront people who have injured me. I define who I am rather then being defined by other people. I keep the promises I make to myself. I protect my physical and emotional health. I don’t betray other people. I tell the truth.

Fear of Disapproval This fear may sound insignificant, but believe me, for many people it is excruciating. The fear of disapproval is much deeper than cringing if someone goes “Tsk-tsk” over something you’ve said or done. It is interwoven with our basic sense of self-worth. If we allow other people’s approval or disapproval to define us, we set ourselves up to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with us whenever we incur displeasure. We all love approval and praise from others, and it can sometimes seem like an absolute essential.

Dealing effectively with fear involves training ourselves to put aside our obsessive worst-case scenarios and develop positive options. You’ve been letting your imagination work against you. Now let it work for you.

Blackmailers never hesitate to put our sense of obligation to the test, emphasizing how much they’ve given up, how much they’ve done for their targets, how much we owe them. They may even use reinforcements from religion and social traditions to emphasize how much their targets should feel indebted to them.

The events and feelings we experienced as children are alive within us and often reappear when there is turmoil and stress. Though the adult part of ourselves may know that these things took place decades ago, to the part inside all of us that is not adult, it’s as though they happened yesterday. 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.

I asked her three questions: What are you afraid of? What’s the worst thing that could happen? What’s your fantasy of what could happen?

Fear of Abandonment The fear of abandonment might be the mother of all fears. Some experts believe it’s encoded in our genes and is the endpoint of all our relationship fears, including the fear of disapproval and the fear of anger. I really don’t think it matters whether it’s an instinctive or learned fear or a combination of the two. The bottom line is that we all feel it. Some people manage it pretty well, but for others, this fear is profound. When the fear of abandonment causes us to capitulate repeatedly in a self-defeating way, it’s as if we were saying “I’ll do anything—just don’t leave me.

these labels are not the truth. They are someone else’s opinions

For many of us, this emotion seems so dangerous that we’re afraid of it in any form, and we fear not only other people’s anger but our own. Over the years, I’ve heard thousands of people express their fears that if they get angry they’ll hurt someone, lose control or fall into a million pieces. Just the hint of anger in another person’s voice frequently sparks fears of rejection, disapproval or abandonment and, in the extreme, visions of violence or harm.

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