How do People Control you by Making you Feel Guilty?
Have you ever experienced a situation in any relationship when the next person uses your mistakes to make you feel worse? And using this guilt feeling to get away from their responsibilities and work?
Guilt trips are a passive-aggressive way to control the emotions and actions of other people. Before talking about it, I want to mention that only a person who is not emotionally mature plays it in any relationship.
It is the time to realize this behavior and other people’s intentions.
It is human nature that when we are in any relationship, it can be partners, siblings, colleagues, class fellows, or friends; we tend to care for another person. We like to do such actions and talks to make others happy.
However, this basic effort can take you to your worst guilt trip.
Let’s try to understand it with a simple example. Suppose two friends or partners are sharing an apartment, and it is your partner or friend’s turn to do the dishes or wash clothes or anything else, but they want to do something other than work.
Instead of honestly communicating the situation, I cannot do this work today. Or help me today, and I will compensate you the other day.
They come and try to manipulate you with guilt-tripping. They would start to bring up some old mistake of yours or an event where they lost something, making you feel so bad about that.
“You were not good to me that day; you hurt my feelings badly. I was not expecting this from you.”
Instead of asking for help, they sent on that emotional roller coaster where you start to feel guilty and ashamed and want to compensate them by doing their work.
We all have been in this situation sometimes.
By doing this guilt trip, they make you feel that you need to do better. You began to develop a feeling that you would mess up things again. This game would work better if you care about this relationship.
What is a guilt trip?
Liza Gold, who is the director of Gold Therapy NYC, defined the guilt trip as
“A guilt trip is best defined as the intentional manipulation of another person’s emotions to induce feelings of guilt.”
It mostly happens in close relationships like friends, families, and romantic relationships. When other people believe you care for them and their feelings, they will start to manipulate these feelings.
Guilt trip is passive aggression. Other people put double pressure on you. One is by repeatedly making you feel bad about the same things, and the second is by asking for extra effort and work from you to carry the relationship.
Sings to identify game of guilt tripping
Here are some signs that you can use to identify the narcissist efforts of a person who tries to use this mind game with you,
1. Continuously reminding you of their efforts and saying, “I do so much for you, I am suffering so much for you, so it is your turn.”
2. Reminding you of mistakes again and again and making you feel bad about them
3. Taking your efforts for granted by claiming that they are doing so much more for you
4. Showing you anger and being distant but are not ready to talk and resolve it
5. I was continuously reminding you that you “owe” them.
6. Bringing up the silent treatment and leaving you to feel bad without communicating the problem
We often tend to get trapped in this mind game easily because this mind game has been used on us from childhood. Gold explained parents often use this technique to teach children about good and bad.
For example, parents say, “You should not hit your friend; look, he is hurt now.” You start to feel bad about your friend and not hit him again.
However, the parent’s intent was good here, but this can only be the case sometimes.
It is a type of emotional abuse where your boundaries have been continuously violated, you have been put under extra pressure, and you have to do extra effort or work.
The worst thing is that after making all these efforts, your partner or the person who is habitual of using your feelings
I will not accept your apologies
Will never let go of your mistakes
It will make you feel that you cannot do anything right
Makes you think that you would mess up and tear apart your self-confidence
How to deal with it?
Identifying such behavior and taking immediate steps to stop it is important.
- Remind yourself that love and care are not greater than your boundaries.
- You should set ethical and reasonable boundaries and never allow anyone to violate those boundaries.
- It becomes very complicated in romantic relationships. Try to have clear and loud communication in this case. You should have fair contact about your feelings and settle things once.
- Listen and validate the victim’s feelings of other person but remind them of their set of responsibilities, too.
Remember, confronting the person who has been using this mind game of guilt-tripping on you for a very long time can be very complicated and emotionally disturbing. Try to define your position, boundaries, and responsibilities with time to break out from this mind game.
Have you experienced any thing like this in your relation? and how you tackle the situation? I would live to hear your reviews and experiences…