Break Free from Emotional Manipulation
Infants use intense emotional expression (crying) to get their needs met. As adults we often resort to the same strategy: using emotional intensity to manipulate others. This behavior is instinctive and hard to grow out of.
Example 1
Brandon asks Jessica to have sex with him, and she turns him down. Brandon responds by sulking for three hours.
What’s going on here?
Brandon’s instinctive response is to use emotional intensity to try to control Jessica. This happens subconsciously, and Brandon doesn’t even know he’s doing it. He thinks his feelings just happen to him.
What Happens Next?
Jessica tells Brandon “It seems like you sulked for a few hours after I turned you down yesterday. I think you’re trying to control me with your emotions.” At this point, Brandon can either double down on his strategy by responding with more emotional intensity, or he can take a look at himself and start to become more capable of having a mature adult relationship.
Example 2
David asks Melissa to listen to an episode of his favorite relationship podcast. Melissa agrees but doesn't follow through. When David confronts her about it, Melissa gets angry.
What’s going on here?
Melissa’s anger is a control mechanism that punishes David for confronting her, warns him not to do it again, and prevents them from discussing David’s concern.
Melissa thinks that her anger is something that happens to her, not something she does. She doesn’t realize that she deploys anger to manipulate people all the time.
What Happens Next?
David calms himself down, waits a few hours, and then confronts Melissa about her emotionality. She gets angry again, and he points out that she’s doing it again. Melissa gets up and leaves the room.
At this point, Melissa gets to make her own choice about how to behave in her relationship. There’s no reason for David to pursue the issue further; he’s already done everything he can.
How do I stop using my emotions to manipulate others?
You can’t change what you can’t see.
Most of us grew up believing that emotions are just something that happens to us, not something we do. As children, we used emotions to manipulate others because we didn’t have adult capacity for communication, self-calming, reasoning, and getting help. As adults, there are always better ways to get what we want. Emotional intensity is an effective tool for infants and toddlers, and an ineffective tool for adults.
Feel more, act less.
Children have limited emotional capacity, so they have to do something about their feelings rather than just feeling their feelings. Adults are capable of feeling all of the emotional intensity that life throws at us. That means we don’t have to do anything about it, we can just allow the body to feel what it needs to feel.
Identify physical sensations.
Every emotion has a physical sensation attached to it. When you feel an intense emotion, figure out where it shows up in your body. Usually these sensations are somewhere it the chest or abdomen. There might be tightness, heaviness, or even physical pain associated with your intense emotions.
Practice kindness to physical sensations
As children, we learned to dissociate from physical sensations that were too intense to manage. As adults, we no longer need to dissociate because we can handle feeling whatever it is our body needs to feel. When you feel intense emotions, follow these steps:
Where do you feel it in your body
Can it be OK for your body to feel what it is feeling?
Can you be kind to the uncomfortable sensation in your body?
These three steps help us move past our instinctive need to get rid of uncomfortable emotional/physical sensations.
What do I do if someone is controlling me with their emotions?
Emotional control is a two-player game. As children, we learned to yield to our parent’s use of emotional control mechanisms because we had very little power in the parent/child relationship. As adults, we have more power in our intimate relationships, but we still revert back to the parent/child dynamic when our partners use emotional control mechanisms against us. Just realize that you don’t have to be controlled by your partner’s emotions. If you can learn to feel what you need to feel, even when it’s uncomfortable, you can make choices based on your own wisdom, not on your fear of your partner’s emotional reactions. As a child, your parents’ emotional reactivity was actually a survival-level threat to you; you actually did need your parents to love you and care for you. As an adult, those things are not true. You can care for yourself, and you can even love yourself. We all want to have someone treat us well, but we don’t actually need that the way a child does.
Recommended reading
Already Free by Bruce Tift
The Courage to Be Disliked and The Courage to Be Happy by Ichiro Kishimi
Passionate Marriage by David Schnarch
❤️ 💪 Get more ideas for a happier relationship: Each week, I send out a newsletter with simple, practical tips for building strong, resilient relationships. Join here for free →
