PERSONALITY DISORDERS
Manipulation Tactics of Abusers
How to not get manipulated by an abuser
Abuse is almost entirely about control. It is often a primitive and immature reaction to life’s circumstances in which the abuser, in his childhood, was rendered helpless. — Sam Vaknin
People with personality disorders use a variety of strategies in order to establish control in their relationships. These are applied to not just the victim but also the people around the victim, including their family and friends. The reason behind this is that the abuser wants things to be done their way and to achieve this goal they need to conceal the abuse for the most part. This is where gaslighting comes in — the victim is often made to believe that they are the abusive party or that they are crazy. The people around the victim usually feel the same way. The abuser smears the victim to turn everyone in their life against them to keep the victim with no support system and therefore dependent on him.
Here are some of the tactics used by abusers:
1- “Help me — I’m a victim.”
The abuser often poses as a victim to encourage people to get angry at the actual victim. He will tell everyone that the victim is mistreating them in some way and that’s why his abusive behaviour is justified. For instance, he could lie saying the victim cheated on him many times to get people to report to him if they see the victim in the vicinity of another man. The real reason for this is not that the victim is immoral, a slut, a liar and can’t be trusted. It is not even that they cheated. It is because the abuser is so insecure that the victim might leave, he wants to track her every movement and people around the victim to help with this.
Another example is when the abuser blames the victim for his own dysfunctions. For instance, I dated a guy who claimed that I had addicted him to myself and therefore it was my fault that he was stalking me. His argument was that because I wouldn’t talk to him 24/7 a day, this meant that I was dismissive and making him insecure. Even though he had engaged in similar behaviour in past relationships, he blamed the women he stalked without ever taking responsibility himself. He vehemently believed that his extreme abandonment issues were women’s fault and therefore he had a right to stalk them.
2- “Help the victim” (e.g. Listen to my advice on how to help the victim even though you know that I’m her abuser).
Another common tactic that is used is when the abuser starts giving advice to people around the victim on how to help. He often wants people to perceive the victim in distress and believe that they are in a bad place in need of help. He can then step in and try to guide the people around him, yet the advice given by him is only aimed at placing the victim in a worse situation.
For example, the abuser might say the victim is a sex addict and therefore she should be monitored around men. He then might proceed to ask everyone to report to him if they see her with a guy. The issue here is not whether the victim is a sex addict or not. Let’s imagine for a second that the victim is a sex addict. This doesn’t give anyone the right to violate their privacy. If someone is in a relationship with a sex addict who often cheats on them, making them feel bad, the right thing to do is to walk away from that relationship.
You can’t force people to behave a certain way. Only the victim can decide whether they want to change their behaviour or not. Not to mention, in most cases, the victim will not be a sex addict. It is a smear campaign led by the abuser to make people think that so he can get others to help track her whereabouts. The main issue here is control; the abuser wants to control the victim and wants other people to help with that. He is happy to come up with any lie to achieve this goal.
Another example could be when the abuser tells people that the victim is irresponsible financially and therefore should not be trusted with money. They might try to portray the victim as a shopaholic or an addict of some sort in order to have an excuse to limit the amount of money she has access to. They may be controlling the victim’s bank accounts and the money they earned from work and want to justify this to others. They may also try to prevent the victim from accessing other financial resources.
3- “She doesn’t appreciate your help. Do you not think she’s bad?”
Abusers love to turn people against one another so they can maintain control. The goal is to anger people around the victim by claiming that the victim is mistreating them somehow or doesn’t appreciate them. One example of this by getting those around the victim to do something bad by manipulating them into thinking that what they did is helpful to the victim. When the victim has a bad reaction to this, the abuser will tell the manipulated party that the victim is selfish and ungrateful. This will very quickly cause people around the victim to either become hostile or unsympathetic to her, as they feel that she doesn’t acknowledge their efforts.
Anger will cause people to become defensive and abusive behaviour will cause people to become angry. The goal of the abuser is to covertly manipulate those around the victim the engage in abusive conduct so the victim becomes angry and to use that anger to isolate her from everyone. Once the victim is left alone with no support system it becomes easier to abuse her. If the victim is fired from her job because of the abuser’s smear campaign, this means the victim has nowhere to go even if she wants to leave the relationship —she can’t afford to move out and has no choice but to stay with the abuser. If the victim has a bad relationship with friends and family she can become depressed and become less likely to get a job or do much else in her life other than being with the abuser.
4- “She thinks you’re bad.”
Stirrers cause trouble between others on purpose by spreading rumours and gossip. They are more than happy to lie about the victim’s beliefs and thoughts to get others to think that she is bad and therefore deserving of abuse. In order to do this, at first the abuser established himself as someone who knows the victim very well. He wants people to trust his opinion and judgement of the victim. He may share some truths about the victim, to begin with and then start mixing the truths with lies.
I experienced an extreme example of this when I dated a guy who hacked all my devices. He then proceeded to contact everyone in my life to inform them of what he did. One of the first people he contacted was my best friend and I didn’t know until a few months later as she was scared to tell me as she felt that she might get hacked herself. He then started spreading misinformation about me to isolate me from my friends. They did not think that he might be lying and everyone trusted what he said because they thought he knew a lot about me because he had hacked me. It was nearly a year after I got hacked that people suspected that he might be lying and demanded to see my hacked phone. It was only then people realised he had made up many lies about me — he told my friends that I thought badly of them, would gossip about them and talk behind their backs when messaging to others and there was no such evidence on my phone.
5- “She thinks you’re ‘X’. Act in such and such way and you will see that I’m telling the truth.”
Abusers are good at turning people against each other through gossip. The abuser may tell you that the victim thinks you are jealous of them. Then he may say you should act like you are jealous of her and you will know that I’m not lying. Or they may say the victim thinks you might steal from her and you should act like you may be taking something from the victim’s house (without actually doing so) to see if it’s true or not.
Here is the problem that lies with this — if you act like you are doing something or feeling a certain way it is completely natural for the other person to think that it’s what is actually happening. If you feign jealousy and the victim thinks you’re jealous, it was only because you were acting that way — in most likelihood, the victim never thought that you were jealous until you behaved in such a way. Similarly, the chances are the victim never thought you would steal from them until you acted in a way that made them feel suspicious.
What the abuser wants is for you to feel offended by the victim’s reaction even though you caused the reaction by acting in a certain way because you were manipulated by the abuser. Once you are made to feel that the victim thinks negatively of you, you are more likely to think negatively of them, turn hostile against them or end the relationship, which is the end goal of the abuser, to isolate the victim.
The abuser might do similar things themselves to portray the victim in a negative manner to the public. I dated a guy once who acted as if he was jealous of my friends because he wanted me to tell everyone that he was jealous. His goal was for people to think that I’m a narcissist (because narcissists often believe people are envious of them when they are not) and then either make fun of me or turn hostile against me because he then could argue that being a narcissist makes me a bad person and an abuser.
6- Indirect threats and inducing anxiety
Abusers threaten people indirectly to get them to do what they want. Manipulation is much more effective if you are not direct. In most cases, abusers don’t want you to know that they are threatening you as this might cause reactance. Instead, they use subtle hints to get you to think a certain way. For instance, I dated a guy in the past who felt anxious when I was late to a date and decided that he did not want me to do that again. He started the date by telling me a story of how he dumped his ex who was often late when meeting up with him. He said that he had no tolerance for that kind of behaviour.
What he wanted, essentially, was to induce anxiety in me to modify my behaviour. If he had directly said he would break up with me if I was late again I might have gotten very angry. Instead, he told me a story of how he did that before to someone else, without saying anything about me, because he wanted me to think that he might do the same to me on my own. If I had abandonment issues and felt afraid of him leaving me, changing my behaviour as a result, I would have done so by feeling like it was my own idea to do so due to the indirect nature of the manipulation, even though the abuser had forced me in that direction.
Another example of this is when the abuser gets you to do something bad and uses your anxiety when you realise there might be consequences to your actions to keep getting you to do things that are worse. For instance, they may tell you to have a day off from your job by calling off sick even though you’re not to spend time with him. It might not seem like a really bad thing to do but then they might say that someone in the workplace saw you (because they took you to a place where a coworker was) and you should take a few more days off by lying and calling off sick again, because, according to the abuser, this will make the workplace less suspicious of you. Once you have a few more days off, they might tell you that your boss will ask for a sick note, which you don’t have as you were never sick and being exposed as a liar is unprofessional and bad. They might then try to get you to quit on your own or proceed to call your boss or workplace to draw attention to what you did and get them to think negatively of you.
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