articles
China Elevator Stories
Emotional Blackmail (by Dr. Susan Forward)
How can you spot emotional blackmail in relationships?
19/09/2024
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
About five years ago, I came across a book that finally helped me put a name to a pattern I had repeatedly experienced in my relationships, particularly with my ex-husband and former Chinese mother-in-law. The book, Emotional Blackmail by Susan Forward, made me realize that I had been subjected to emotional blackmail, both by my ex-husband and my former mother-in-law. Once I had a term and explanation for this form of manipulation, I could easily identify it in situations where an abuser would try to control me.
According to an article on Healthline, “emotional blackmail describes a style of manipulation where someone uses your feelings as a way to control your behavior or persuade you to see things their way.” Emotional blackmail can be subtle and hard to detect, but there are a few key components that make it easier to distinguish it from normal behavior.
Identifying emotional blackmail
Susan Forward explains how to differentiate between someone genuinely trying to resolve a conflict and someone more focused on winning. She offers this perspective:
“How can we know if someone is more interested in winning or in resolving the problem? They’re not going to tell us. They’re certainly not going to come out and say ‘I don’t care what you want, I’m only trying to get my way’. In an emotionally intense situation, our perceptions get clouded, a condition that gets worse when we’re feeling pressured. The following list will help you diagnose emotional blackmail by allowing you to clarify the intentions and goals behind the other person’s behavior. If people genuinely want to resolve a conflict with you in a fair and caring way, they will:
- Talk openly about the conflict with you
- Find out about your feelings and concerns
- Find out why you are resisting what they want
- Accept responsibility for their part of the conflict
If someone’s primary goal is to win, he or she will:
– Try to control you
– Ignore your protests
– Insist that his or her character and motives are superior to yours
– Avoid taking any responsibility for the problems between you
When you see that other people are trying to get their way regardless of the cost to you, you’re looking at the bottom line behavior of the emotional blackmailer.”
The complexity of emotional blackmail
Susan Forward explains that emotional blackmail can be difficult to detect because it often hides behind mixed signals. She writes:
“The world of emotional blackmail is confusing. While some emotional blackmailers are clear in their threats, others may send us mixed signals, acting kindly much of the time and resorting to blackmail only occasionally. All this makes it difficult to see when a pattern of manipulation is developing in a relationship.”
I’ve found that emotional blackmail is widespread, and the most severe cases I’ve encountered came from narcissists.
Susan Forward describes it in this way: “When we’re talking about emotional blackmail, we’re automatically talking about conflict, power and rights. When one person wants something and the other doesn’t, how hard can each reasonably push? When does another person’s pressure go too far?”
In its worst form, emotional blackmail infringes on another person’s free will, sometimes to the point of endangering their life. A blackmailer disregards the feelings and rights of the other person, imposing their will in harmful ways.
My personal experience with emotional blackmail
I encountered this firsthand with a stalker who tried to coerce me into a relationship with him. When I told him I wasn’t interested, he became unhinged, projecting his feelings onto me and insisting that I was the one who needed to be in a relationship with him. In his eyes, a woman, especially a single woman was inferior, and he believed he could intimidate me into accepting him as my boyfriend. When I refused, he unleashed emotional punishments, trying to break my boundaries and dominate my life.
He used strong emotions to manipulate me, claiming that my feelings about the situation were wrong, and that I needed to feel his emotions instead. This is a clear example of emotional blackmail. While he called it “non-violent communication,” what he was doing was the opposite. True non-violent communication is a tool to resolve conflict and foster understanding. It’s meant to be used only if the other person consents and should never be used as a method of control or manipulation.
In contrast, this stalker was using the concept of non-violent communication to try and force me to engage in conversation with him, repeatedly violating my boundaries. When a person persists in forcing communication after boundaries have been clearly set, it shows they don’t respect another person’s boundaries.
Non-violent communication and boundaries
Healthy communication, including non-violent communication, requires consent. It’s important that the other person respects your boundaries and doesn’t use communication as a way to manipulate or control you. Unfortunately, this stalker’s behavior crossed that line.
When I set boundaries with him, he accused me of giving him the “silent treatment” and labeled me as uncommunicative, because I refused to engage in what he called “non-violent communication” with him. I eventually realized that this tactic was a tool of emotional blackmail and control, rather than a genuine attempt to resolve conflict.
As an introvert, I understand that silence can be healing. Constantly talking or having to listen to someone else dominate the conversation—while others don’t get a chance to speak—is neither healthy nor something anyone should be forced to endure regularly. Being forced to listen to someone talk incessantly, shout, project their emotions onto you, or punish you for not engaging with them constantly is yet another unhealthy behavior that this stalker has tried to make me tolerate.
He has also been trying to use methods of dark psychology onto me, that reminded me of methods the Nazis used on the Jews during WWII. As far as I know, he is a life coach or has a similar kind of profession.
Healing yourself is certainly always a good idea, but trying to heal another person when you are not healthy yourself is turning the other person into the ‘identified patient’. The ‘identified patient’ is the person an unhealthy person has decided needs to heal so that the person who is actually unhealthy doesn’t need to heal or look at their own issues and can project those issues onto the ‘identified patient’.
I grew up in the countryside, far from other people but surrounded by many siblings, so I’m familiar with both introverts and extroverts. My father, who passed away on 8 March 2021 after having suffered a heart attack a few months before his death, was an introvert. Other family members were extroverts, and I’ve experienced both behavior patterns as normal. Interestingly, the stalker’s father is also an introvert, which makes it even more perplexing that he would try to push me into becoming an extrovert, as if introversion were an illness that needed to be “cured”.
The way he communicates is not how non-violent communication is meant to be used.
The dynamics of stalking and emotional blackmail
Stalking often involves coercive attempts to maintain communication, and when boundaries are repeatedly ignored, the situation can escalate into emotional abuse. In many cases, stalkers refuse to leave their victims alone, continuing their harassment through various means, including constant attempts to contact them. A stalker may claim that you are obligated to communicate with them, which is a clear violation of healthy boundaries.
When I tried using non-violent communication to see if it would help the stalker understand my feelings and respect my boundaries, it became clear that he had a double standard and wasn’t accepting non-violent communication as a way to resolve conflict but was rather using it as a tool to blackmail others. With certain individuals, particularly those with narcissistic or sociopathic tendencies, these communication methods can actually be used to manipulate. When a person repeatedly invalidates your emotions or tries to twist them to suit their own agenda, you’re dealing with emotional blackmail.
Emotional blackmail in romantic relationships
I’ve also experienced emotional blackmail in romantic relationships, such as with the German singer I was dating. Throughout our relationship, he tried to make me feel guilty, shame me, and punish me for asserting my boundaries, including when I tried to resolve issues around his infidelity. He cheated and then tried to manipulate me. He tried to make me accept his behavior while not allowing me to end the relationship.
The German singer would tell me that I had no right to care about his cheating and that I wasn’t allowed to break up with him, even though he wasn’t contributing to the relationship in any way. When I ended the relationship, he resorted to threats, including saying that if I left him, he would kill me. He never accepted that the relationship was over and has kept me in a perpetual limbo of not being allowed to live in the here and in the now, where according to me, the relationship is over, but he still intimidates me and tries to coerce me so I will say it’s not. He also tried to gaslight me into believing I was inferior to a model he was involved with, among many other women he used to make me feel inferior to.
His emotional blackmail was subtle at times, comparing me to other women to undermine my self-worth almost daily; but in reality, he was the one lacking the qualities that are needed if you want to have a relationship. The emotional toll of his manipulations was significant, as was his denying me help when he was the one who had a responsibility to help.
He was also raging at me frequently in aggressive and violent ways, suggested I had no right to ask him to stop, and then told me I needed to do anger therapy. When I said I didn’t want to do anger therapy, he only raged at me more, violated even more boundaries, and tried to make me out to be the bad person for not wanting to do anger therapy (screaming out all my anger at home, because certainly a person displacing all their anger and hatred onto you will eventually make you feel angry). When I told him that he was the violent and aggressive person who wasn’t being responsible, he started forming alliances with others to make me appear as though I was crazy.
Conclusion: The importance of recognizing emotional blackmail
Emotional blackmail can take many forms, but its underlying feature is an attempt to control another person’s behavior by using their emotions against them. As Susan Forward explains, the willingness to compromise is key to healthy relationships, and when this disappears, emotional blackmail often takes its place.
At the end of the day, emotional blackmail is about coercion. It’s an attempt to manipulate or control someone, often without their consent. Recognizing these tactics in relationships is the first step in protecting yourself from this form of abuse.
Have you ever experienced emotional blackmail?