Lisa O
Abuse isn’t always obvious at first glance, but its impact can be deep and long-lasting. Manipulation is one of the most common ways abusers maintain control, and it often happens in subtle, confusing ways. Recognizing the signs is the first step toward breaking free. Here are 15 manipulation tactics abusers use.
Gaslighting
Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse where someone messes with your mind, making you question your sanity, memories, or how you see things. They might tell you you’re overreacting, even when you know something’s off. If you’re dealing with gaslighting, it can leave you feeling confused, anxious, and unsure of yourself, like you can’t trust your own thoughts anymore.
Projection
Projection is when someone takes their own feelings, traits, or desires and puts them onto someone else. For example, a manipulator might say, “You’re so controlling,” when the victim simply suggests doing something different or standing up for themselves. It’s like the manipulator takes what they’re feeling or want and flips it, blaming the other person instead of dealing with their own emotions.
Controlling Your Decisions
The main goal of manipulation is control. But it’s not just about how you feel or act—they’ll also try to control other parts of your life. This might mean messing with your finances (financial abuse), stopping you from going after your education, or even deciding who you can and can’t hang out with.
Triangulation
Triangulation happens when two people are at odds, and someone else gets pulled in to take sides. The manipulator uses this to make sure they “win” the argument, sometimes by picking a third person they know will agree with them or giving them only one side of the story. It’s a way to make the victim question the manipulator less, and eventually, stop questioning them altogether.
Calling You Names
A manipulator loves to label your personality or actions with negative terms. The goal here is to make you feel small and convince you that you’re not worth better treatment. It usually starts with small digs, but over time, it goes up. Eventually, the name-calling becomes more frequent, and you start to believe it, thinking it’s just who you are now.
Overgeneralizing Your Actions
Generalizations happen when someone takes one trait of a person and lumps it onto an entire group. For example, a manipulative person might say, “All women are more focused on themselves than on their partners.” This makes the victim feel like they have to act a certain way to fit into the manipulator’s view, even if it’s not how they truly feel.
Love Bombing
Love bombing is when someone floods you with affection, intense feelings, and all their time and energy. They might shower you with gifts, make big declarations of love, and focus all their attention on pleasing you. The manipulator uses this to quickly build trust and closeness. It creates an ideal situation where you feel special and wanted.
Using Threats or Coercion
Any time someone uses threats to get you to do something, that’s emotional manipulation. This might look like threatening to leave you or take away something important if you don’t do what they want. They might even threaten to hurt themselves. While they might not actually go through with it, it’s crucial always to take threats of self-harm seriously. Report such threats ASAP.
Moving the Goal Posts
This is when someone changes the rules halfway through to make sure the other person doesn’t succeed. It could mean adding extra requirements for you to meet or pointing out things that disqualify you from winning. A manipulator uses this to keep you chasing their approval, never feeling like you can quite get there no matter how hard you try.
Passive-Aggressiveness
Passive-aggressive communication is when someone hints at what they mean without saying it outright. This keeps the victim stuck in a cycle of trying to figure out what the manipulator wants, constantly adjusting to their moods. In the end, it keeps the focus—and the power—on the manipulator, leaving the victim little time or space to think about their feelings in the relationship.
Changing the Topics
Topic changes are totally normal in conversations, but when a manipulator does it, it’s a passive-aggressive move to make you feel worthless or punished. If you make a valid point or get a compliment from someone else, they’ll switch the topic to stop you from feeling good about yourself. It’s all about making sure you feel like no one can praise you except them.
Playing on Insecurities
Unfortunately, emotional manipulators are good at spotting your insecurities and worsening them. At the heart of this, they target your sense of shame, which is that deep feeling of not being good enough. Since shame is such a painful emotion that most people try to avoid, triggering it gets them to comply with the manipulator just to avoid feeling that way again.
Being Dismissive
When their victim shares something valid in a group or has success, a manipulator might respond with a dismissive comment to keep control. They’ll try to downplay the success, giving reasons why it wasn’t earned or brush off the victim’s valid point, making it seem unworthy of attention. It’s all about shutting them down so the manipulator stays in charge of the conversation and the situation.
Giving You the Silent Treatment
It’s totally normal for someone to emotionally and verbally shut down when they’re feeling overwhelmed (also called “emotional flooding”). However, manipulators can use this shutdown intentionally to control and punish. They’ll give you the silent treatment, pulling away affection, communication, and intimacy to make you feel ignored or rejected.
Treating You Like a Child
A manipulator “infantilizes” their victim by treating them like they’re younger or less capable or even outright treating them like a child. It’s a form of gaslighting aimed at making the victim lose trust in their ability to handle responsibility. This might look like talking down to them like they’re not smart enough or stepping in and taking over a task they’re perfectly capable of doing themselves.