Have you ever been manipulated before? Everyone has been manipulated before. And have you ever manipulated someone? I suppose I can say we have ever been a manipulator once in our lifetime either consciously or unconsciously. Let me jump right to the meaning of manipulation, ‘these are words or actions that attempt to control how another person feels, thinks, and behaves.’ When people use mind games to seek control or power over you. A lot of manipulation comes from relationships, either friendships, intimate, or even parent-child relationships. Manipulation is not healthy, and when you notice it early in your relationship, it is better to avoid the aftermath such as lack of trust, insecurity, miscommunication, misunderstandings, low self-esteem, impact on safety, and negative communication, after all, they say prevention is better than cure.
Some examples of manipulation are; meeting someone at their place of choice, visiting them at their home or favorite place, creates an imbalance of power, for example, if you are dating someone, and your boyfriend likes to stay at home, but your girlfriend likes adventures like taking long walks, or going for hikes, having picnics, and dates, window shopping, swimming and all those, but you end up always meeting at their home, maybe they have work to do, maybe they have the assignment to finish, but you are too afraid to start complaining, because apparently when you complain a lot to someone they get tired, so you have to do something for them so that you do not feel like you are inconveniencing them, but when boyfriend/girlfriend realizes that you are doing this, they take advantage of your feelings and convince you to always meet them at their comfortable or favorite place.
When you open up your innermost feelings to someone, you reveal your weakness, and these weaknesses may be used against you. A weakness you may have is overthinking a lot, your partner may have told you they overthink a lot, so they need a lot of assurance, when you go a whole day without talking to them, the overthinking partner may have already thought that you are cheating or doing something bad, so they keep on being insecure, but they have already notified you about this, and the only job you need to do is reassure them that you are not, instead of understanding your partner’s weakness and help them overcome it, you use it against them, one may say “wewe huwa unapenda kunishuku sana juu unapenda ku over-think.” Instead of reassuring them, you are only adding fear to your partner, and they will feel they don’t have a right to overthink because if they do, it will earn them bad points.
They make you feel like they are doing too many favors for you, for example, you might complain to your friends that they rarely do something good for you, and they counterattack by telling you, “Ai! Si sisi hushinda tumeskiza hizi heartbreak stories zako kila saa.” It is like they are doing a favor for you, and you wonder if you never wanted to hear my boring heartbreak stories, you should not even listen to them in the first place. Or when you tell your partner that you don’t do a lot of things for me these days, and they hit you with, “si mimi hukutext kila asubuhi good morning, what more do you want?” and you sit back and wonder it is a given that you have to greet me as my partner, it is what is called the bare minimum, but they make it seem like it is a huge favor, and you have no right to complain. Because you do not know what to do, you stop complaining just to accept that bare minimum.
Many manipulators play the victim card, they always act the innocent victim, while you become the bad person, by always making you feel like you are at fault or you were the one who made a mistake, while they are the ones you got affected by it. If a friend kept a secret from you for a long time, maybe they went behind your back and told someone something bad about you and you find out later, they expect you not to be mad about it because it happened a long time ago and so to them, they have already forgotten about it, so it has no effect on them, but to you who only received the news much later, you have to process disrespect and the duration of the kept secret, so whenever you bring it up to ask why they did what they did, they start telling you that you are condoning them for something they did in the past, and you should not hold on because it makes them look bad.
Ultimatums are a regular thing. An ultimatum is a final demand or statement of terms, the rejection of which will result in a breakdown of relationships like threatening to leave and thrive on having the upper hand of the relationship, making it feel like one is walking on eggshells. If someone is always threatening to leave a relationship, you have to look at what is at cost, maybe the person has found someone better, or maybe you are not making this person feel like they are at home, I have once been in a relationship where this person kept on repeating the same mistakes they had promised not to make, it felt like I was teaching this person how to love me while I was loving them at the same time, so at times it used to take a toll on me, and considering all my life I never got support when things went wrong for me I fell into isolation and I want to solve things for myself, so when it was not convenient for me I always threatened to leave, of course sometimes it was unintentional, I wanted to make whatever I felt stop or go away, so it was either you change your behaviors or we break up, and until I researched about this, I did not realize that I was a manipulator.
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