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I’ve already done an extensive amount of content on how to manage manipulation and prevent people from harming you, such as:
- Boundaries & Confrontations course
- Managing Manipulation to prevent emotional abuse
- Advanced Manipulation Techniques
- The Darkness That Comes Before: Managing the Manipulation from Your Own Mind
- Dealing with manipulation podcast interview
And I’ve even covered how to manipulate others in an ethical and helpful way that benefits their lives as well as your own:
But in this piece, I wanted to reflect on exactly what manipulation is, because I can clearly see that most people don’t seem to notice it happening and therefore allow it to affect them, or they know it’s happening but believe they’re powerless to stop it.
There’s no point in learning how to counter malicious manipulation if you can’t first recognise that it’s taking place or see that you are in control!
What does “manipulation” mean?
The simplest definition is to control or influence something or someone.
At it’s core, manipulation is neither evil nor benign. In the same way a car is ethically neutral, it’s just a form of transport to move something from one place to another.
The question of ethics comes into it only after we see the intention of the person using it, and the outcomes for the person it’s used on.
If a teacher manipulates a willing student into becoming wiser, we would call that “good” manipulation, while if someone intentionally uses intimidation tactics to isolate their partner away from the support of their own family, we’d call that “evil” manipulation.
The intent and outcome are also separate. If someone wishes me all the best and yet manipulates me into a harmful outcome, I’m still harmed even if they meant well. And if a malevolent person tries to harm me with manipulation but their tactic backfires and works out in my favour, then I benefit from their manipulation even though they wanted to harm me.
It’s also possible to be manipulated by someone who has no intent at all. If I’m intimidated by the loud person at my office because I have a pre-existing anxiety condition, and this causes me to avoid team meetings where that person is present, I’m manipulated by them without any intent on their part to do so. They weren’t trying to change my decisions. They didn’t even know they’d affected me. They may not even know I exist.
How do I know if I’m being manipulated?
Ironically, this is the easiest question in the world to answer, yet people think it’s the hardest. The answer is simple:
Manipulation is happening ALL THE TIME.
There really is no such thing as an interaction between people that has no manipulation involved. That’s not to say all people are always intentionally manipulative, more that it’s impossible to avoid being affected by your interactions with people.
As soon as you observe someone or hear them speak, your brain reacts. It categorises, makes predictions, fires off neural pathways, collates relevant data and memories, and makes a decision on how to respond to what you’ve seen or heard… all in a matter of nanoseconds! That is to say: the mere observation of another person instantly manipulates you – i.e. changes your brain’s behaviour – without any intention on their part, and without any ability to prevent it from happening on your part.
By the time you realise that someone is influencing you, it’s already done.
Once you understand and accept that the very functioning of your brain guarantees you will always be affected by everyone all the time, it’s not so difficult to figure out whether it’s happening. That’s been answered already.
The real question, as we’ll get to soon, is: what affect is the manipulation having on you and how should you respond?
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Should we try to discover their intent?
The next question most people have after concluding that they are indeed being influenced, is to ask why? What’s this person’s intentions in doing this to me?
People spend inordinate amounts of time trying to unravel a person’s intent, hoping to thereby judge the manipulation as evil or helpful. But there are some significant problems with this endeavour.
We can never truly know a person’s intent. Humans are such fantastic actors that it’s impossible to know for certain what a person was really trying to do. And even if they are a completely transparently honest person, and there was some way to verify they are (and there isn’t!), we still can’t be sure they even know their own motives. Our true intentions come from our subconscious, and who knows what’s really going on behind the curtain?
Maybe a person thinks they wish to harm us, but even deeper down they are being tricked by their own mind into being helpful. Yes, that does happen! Some people feel guilty about being kind and so have to manipulate themselves into thinking they aren’t in order to achieve kind behaviour.
And of course, we all know of someone who thinks they were trying to be helpful but are simply unwilling or unable to admit they just want to control everything for their own gains (e.g. the overbearing parent).
At best, we can guess at someone’s motives, or assess their likely motives based on patterns of how they react to outcomes over time, or we can believe them when they tell us their motives. Doesn’t matter. In the end, we really can’t ever be 100% sure of a person’s intent. And getting it wrong could lead us to make disastrous decisions, like trusting an evil person or rejecting a loved one.
And if we can’t be certain, then perhaps even trying to figure it out is a waste of time. Sure, it’s good to know if someone means to harm us, but if we focus on ensuring we protect ourselves from harm – regardless of the person’s intentions – then the threat of malevolent people is minimized anyway.
Luckily, we don’t need to be certain about their intent in order to protect ourselves.
Manipulation is a subjective experience
As I mentioned, what really matters most in the case of being manipulated is how the receiver is affected.
If the person being manipulated ends up experiencing a higher quality of life and beneficial outcomes as a result of the manipulation, then it must be “good” – no matter the manipulator’s intentions. And if the receiver is harmed, then the manipulation was “bad” – at least it was for them – even if the manipulator thought he was trying to help.
So, hopefully you can see the key truth you must understand about manipulation: it happens INSIDE you!
Manipulation is not what others to do you, or their intentions for what they do to you, it is how you RESPOND that decides the effect on you.
Imagine if a psychopath tried to manipulate me using his best skills and techniques… but spoke in Chinese instead of English. The only effect he would have on me is some mild confusion, like, “Why is this random Chinese guy talking to me?” Despite his intent to manipulate me, he is completely powerless if I don’t understand his message.
A blind person cannot be influenced by body language. A deaf person cannot be influenced by volume. The manipulation only occurs inside the recipient’s brain – if it doesn’t happen there, it doesn’t happen, period.
And if I can ensure that the end result of someone manipulating me is that I improve my quality of life, then I don’t need to worry about what they’re trying to do. I just make the most of every experience and stay safe that way.
If manipulation is subjective, then WHERE does it really happen?
If I am well trained in managing my reaction to people, both cognitively and emotionally, then it becomes nearly impossible for a manipulative person to have their desired effect on me. It’s similar to me being blind and deaf – their tricks hit a wall of resistance and don’t come to bear. Sure, my brain is still affected by them, but my BEHAVIOUR doesn’t change in the way they hope.
On the other hand, if I’m particularly sensitive, empathetic, and suffering from low self-worth, then nearly everything other people do changes my behaviour; whether they mean to or not, whether they even know I exist. A socially anxious person will cross the street to avoid a large stranger walking towards them, without the stranger even knowing this has occurred. So I can be manipulated “all on my own” you might say, without anyone else even being consciously involved even though it’s in reaction to them.
So where does manipulation happen? Inside the receiver!
It is not the other person who manipulates you. Even if they’re trying to, the decision to change your behaviour is ultimately out of their reach. They cannot actually enter your mind and make choices for you, no matter how skilled they are.
In the end, for manipulation to fully take place – that is, for you to change your originally planned behaviour in favour of what they prefer – YOU must decide to OBEY their suggestions.
Manipulation, therefore, is the decision for the receiver to change their behaviour in reaction to another person. If they don’t decide to obey, the best the manipulator can do is physically force them by overpowering them, which we wouldn’t count as “being manipulated” psychologically. There’s no other way to exert control.
In other words, if they didn’t force you physically, then it was your choice to be manipulated. Even if you didn’t notice yourself making that choice, it was still your mind that made it.
Being manipulated is a choice?
This can be a horrible truth to accept. And it doesn’t mean that you knew you had a choice and that you also had the willpower to resist. It just means that somewhere inside the decision-making process within your mind, you changed course away from your original or preferred destination. They didn’t do this to you directly.
Why would we make such a choice, particularly in the case of being maliciously manipulated into an outcome that hurts us?
It’s as simple as it is devastating: to avoid emotional discomfort.
It’s not that we decide to allow ourselves to be manipulated, it’s that the manipulation makes us believe we must change our behaviour to avoid a painful emotional experience (or in some cases, to seek a more pleasurable experience, which is the same thing really).
It’s not the words that manipulate you, it’s the words’ implication that this situation will become more fearful, awkward, confusing, embarrassing, lonely, and so on. Clever manipulators understand that in order to move someone, you must make the place you want them to go more emotionally appealing than where you don’t want them to go. They must make disobedience emotionally painful, and obedience rewarding and relieving.
A metaphor I’ve started using to describe being manipulated might help you see this better:
Imagine you’re in a room. There’s a door on the right-hand wall, and another on the left.
A man enters from the left-hand door. He then sets fire to the left-hand wall of the room. You, standing in the middle, start to feel the heat from the fire, and it keeps increasing to the point of being painfully unbearable.
You look around, and notice the right-hand door is wide open and there appears to be a beautiful garden outside. What do you do? Of course, you race will all haste to exist the room out the right door.
The man setting the fire has “caused” you to leave the room via the right-hand door. He didn’t tell you to leave. He didn’t even mention the other door. He just set the fire, and then YOU decided to leave.
You never investigated the fire to see if it was real or an illusion. You didn’t stick around in the burning room to see how much heat you could actually handle. You just took the nearest available exist as soon as you became uncomfortable.
That, was your choice.
How do I prevent myself choosing manipulation?
Let’s redefine manipulation so that you’re better able to prevent it from negatively affecting you (remember, you can’t prevent it from affecting you at all, but you can have a say over the outcomes).
Manipulation is: when you start to experience or anticipate an emotional state you find uncomfortable and then change your behaviour to try prevent or reduce that uncomfortable state.
A man yells at you, you feel afraid and worry about violence, so to relieve yourself from this fear you agree with him to calm him down.
A women starts frowning and shaking her head as you are explaining yourself, and you start to feel embarrassed and unsure of yourself, and so to get back to feeling more certain you start lying to make your story more convincing.
A child says “I love you” whenever you give them a treat, causing you to assume you can’t get their love without “buying” it, and so to increase the warm feeling of being loved, you start giving him treats more often.
Those parts I’ve formatted in bold are where the manipulation occurred. It is in the attempt to change your emotional state by changing your behaviour that manipulation becomes real. Before that, it was merely a suggestion.
Once you accept this definition, managing it becomes pretty straightforward. Simple, but not easy.
Managing manipulation means walking into the fire, or at least standing still as it burns you. It means refusing to walk towards the right-hand door and out into the garden. It means realising that prior to being influenced by this other person, you had an original intention for your behaviour, and so long as you stick with that then you can reassure yourself they did not control you.
If you’re sure you did the right thing, then don’t say sorry just because someone is angry. Just keep doing it the same way you would usually do it.
If you find out that the loud extrovert who makes you feel small is going to the meeting, go to the meeting anyway.
If someone says you’re wrong but doesn’t provide counter-evidence to your argument, then continue as if they’d agreed with you.
If someone threatens to take away their presence or privileges if you don’t do what they want, just take the risk, call their bluff, and do whatever it was you were going to do before they started threatening.
But what if they hurt me?
While you can prevent yourself from being manipulated – i.e. you can choose NOT to change your behaviour in reaction to others’ influence – there is nothing you can do to control the behaviour of others. Yes, some people may react badly to not getting what they want from you.
However, this is not a good reason to give in to their manipulation.
The most obvious argument here is this: if you give in to them, you’ll be harmed for certain. Either the outcome will favour them and hurt you in an obvious way, or at the very least you’ll suffer the degradation and self-loathing that comes from allowing another person to control you.
All those nights lying awake, wishing you’d just said SOMETHING. All that self-doubt. All the fear and intimidation around certain people. THAT is harm!
You have to ask yourself truthfully: is it really better overall to let people push me around than it is to endure the occasional bad reaction?
And yes, reactions can be bad. You might lose your job (that job probably sucked anyway). You might have your partner walk out on you (she isn’t The One if she can’t accept you). You might have the whole room laugh at you (it’s just noise, you’ll survive).
One time, a total stranger at a nightclub started punching me in the head for not letting her steal a chair from my table. I’m not saying that your fear is totally illegitimate.
But it’s rarely correct.
I can tell you as someone who practices confrontations with manipulative people often, most of the time the worst thing that actually happens is a bit of awkwardness. The great tragedy about manipulation is that most people completely lose control of themselves and the quality of their lives simply because they don’t believe they can handle things being awkward for a few minutes.
I have been coaching for more than a decade, and studying applied psychology for nearly 2 decades. Not once have I seen an easily manipulated person have a more enjoyable life than a strongly assertive person. Not once.
You CAN handle it. You don’t even need to do anything. Just stay there until it’s over.
How do I win?!
One thing I always remind myself, after I learned how to manage violent and psychotic criminal offenders, is I can simply OUTLAST them.
At some point, this person trying to manipulate is going to move on with their life. They have to drink water. They’ll eventually need to use the toilet. They must sleep sometime, right? They can’t spend the rest of their life trying to make you feel guilty.
If you can hold strong and not be moved longer than they can keep trying to manipulate you, then you win!
But, you say, what if they keep coming back and doing it again?
Yes, some people are relentless and persistent. But manipulative people generally aren’t looking for a challenge. There’s a good reason why people who are skilled at fighting – with words or with fists – rarely have others trying to push them around. It’s simply too hard.
Malevolent people who want to harm others are looking for an easy win, not certain defeat. Movies often portray evil people as bold and persistent, but having worked with actual real-life evil people, I’ve always found them to be rather lazy and cowardly. They often have an undefeated record for a reason: they pick their victims carefully, ensuring certain victory.
I’ve found the single most effective tactic to protect yourself from manipulation is to make it a HASSLE to try!
Manipulating you simply should not be worth the effort. Make it too hard!
You don’t need to be smart, or well-spoken, or a good negotiator. You just need endurance, which requires no natural talent.
Techniques
Basic resistance is one way to do this: never change your behaviour on the basis of someone else’s suggestion or due to the emotions you feel in their presence. Act at all times as if you’re being supported and encouraged and feeling comfortable with your original plan. I don’t mean you should resist good advice; just make sure it’s advice you actually asked for!
Another way is relentless and suspicious curiosity. Question them and their motives. Ask, “What’s your intention behind saying that?” and “What are you up to?” This is particularly effective when there are witnesses, because you put the manipulator on trial. And even if they’re good at talking their way out of it (e.g. the jocks who claim their bullying is just “banter” and get everyone to mock you for being “sensitive”), you can hassle them even further with the next technique:
CALL. IT. OUT. Face your shame about being manipulated and just admit that it’s happened. This isn’t even really an accusation to the other person – remember, they might not be doing this intentionally. Just admit that you feel uncomfortable and feel pushed towards a change in behaviour, and it’s something you want to bring out into the open so that nothing bad happens to you. It’s a pretty big hassle to the manipulator if you say, in front of everyone, something like, “When you say that I feel really intimidated, as if you’re trying to scare me into doing something that benefits you and hurts me.”
And even if they deny it or mock you, you can say, “Even if I’m wrong, I’m going to trust my instincts and be very careful about you. I think you’re up to something and I need to protect myself from you,” or “You’re the only one I feel this way around, so my radar says there’s something off about you,” or even, “I’d rather be wrong and embarrassed than not trust myself and end up getting pushed around by you.”
Remember, the point is not to win the battle. A good manipulator may even turn this into an argument that makes you look bad. That’s fine. Just so long as you’re RELENTLESS.
It should always be a high-effort hassle to mess with you. It should always be met with uncomfortable resistance, long confrontations, accusations openly made, HR reports filed, screenshots taken and shared, other people brought in for verification, facts checked, and most importantly, everything out in the spotlight where there’s nowhere to hide.
Manipulation dies in the sunlight.
This doesn’t mean you treat everyone as if they have malicious intentions. If you often feel uncomfortable around people, then there’s a good chance you “get” manipulated without anyone even trying. That doesn’t make them bad people. There is such a thing as being too sensitive – that is, to be frequently affected by people who aren’t trying to affect you.
But be shameless about how sensitive and easily manipulated you are, and call it out to protect yourself. Over time, people will learn to take care around you, while you will simultaneously build assertiveness and thereby become less affected by others.
How you can make massive progress in just a few months!
You can do all this on your own.
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Thanks for reading
Hope to speak to you soon
Dan Munro