5 Traits in Common That Manipulators Have

Don’t let them make a fool out of you.

The dangerous thing about manipulative people is that they don’t usually have any kind of scruples. When they detect a potential victim, they immediately look for their vulnerabilities to exploit them and take advantage of them through emotional manipulation.

For there to be a manipulator, there must also be a manipulated victim. If you allow a manipulator to recreate his tricks on you, he will have fertile ground to cast his nets.

1. They pay attention only to what interests them, to what leads them to achieve their objectives, even at the expense of others.

They do not usually attend to the needs of others, and not because they do not detect them or do not know how to act in the face of certain demands, but because of lack of interest and selfishness.

2. They hide their real intentions, manipulating the environment so that they end up doing what they want in an indirect way, through manipulative arguments so that the other person convinces himself to do what the manipulator has in mind.

3. They make you doubt yourself, By manipulating your ideas and feelings, manipulative people manage to generate that feeling of doubt regarding your own decisions. They manage to make you doubt your own intuition and make the manipulated person vulnerable.

Victimization, feigning pain, and pitying are some of the strategies they use to make you feel bad about yourself and make you rethink whether the ideas you defend are correct.

4. They detect your weaknesses and insecurities.

Once the vulnerabilities are detected, they have the power to decide to test you and see to what extent they can convince you of what they want.

In these situations, many manipulated people assume that the manipulator is hurting them, but the victimization causes them to be given the benefit of the doubt.

5. They are experts in the art of denial.

When manipulated victims realize that they have been harmed, they sometimes tell the manipulator as a sign of anger or reprimand. Their reaction is to deny what happened in order to reconsider their complaints and feel guilty.

7. They use subtle sarcasm to embarrass.

When the victim is already in the process of doubting herself, it is the moment when she is most vulnerable. This is when the manipulator, through comments full of sarcasm, but in a friendly tone, tries to finish undermining her self-esteem.

They are witty and apparently innocent comments that, when given within a group, usually generate laughter; In addition, in these contexts, the discomfort they cause in the victim is not given importance.