Thread by @glitchedpuppet

i think i want to talk about "manipulation" today, because i think there's always bad connotations associated with the word, because it implies getting someone to do something unconsciously. i've been wanting to write about my feelings on this for a while now, so here goes

in my head, manipulation is a good storytelling tool. you have to know what story beats or emotions lead different people down different paths, and everyone is different, so you're always gonna run into people who slightly misinterpret your intentions, if you're not clear with em

i've been making a lot of floraverse vns lately about "emotional manipulation" and how different emotions get invoked. i've been scrupulously going through all the different ways that past friends and my exes have manipulated me, knowing or unknowing, and learning from it

i've been trying to think about "manipulation" as a tool of understanding. can you put the right pieces in the right places so that someone else understands where you're coming from? how honest and full is the story you're telling? can you stand by the full picture?

recently, in my latest VN, i mentioned a time i manipulated someone out of fear of them. i try very hard in general to be 100% honest with people, except in circumstances of fear that they will actively harm me, I will put forth only the information needed to get them to stop

in general it feels gross to interact with people in this way. i enjoy being able to fully state my feelings and not have it be an issue. but in cases where someone else cannot handle their own feelings correctly and manipulates others with their bad moods constantly, it's needed

the person i did it to was someone i had invited to my house for a gathering. they declined. in the interim between the invite and the meeting, they asked to come again, after noticing someone [who they had been emotionally abusing] decided to join. this felt really gross.

i was too scared of this person's gaslighting/emotionally abusive reactions to say "no you can't come" directly, so i had to find a reason that they wouldnt want to come on their own. so all i had to do was say that we would be discussing times we'd hurt each other& they declined

i knew this person was allergic to candidly discussing ways they had hurt others, like me and the rest of the group liked to do. all i had to do was be honest about a fact that i knew would make the trip miserable for them & i was able to get them to stop. this is manipulation

another form of manipulation is, say, releasing a little snippet of something someone has said, without context. it's the same thing - a tiny snippet of a "truth". people who are not able to exist on their own or who cannot pursue questions are more easily manipulated this way

when you act on pure reactions to something outrageous, that's a way of being manipulated. it's about [someone] tying your emotions to particular inputs or outputs and triggering those in you at later points. there's a lot abt this phenomenon i want to discuss bc its fascinating

manipulation has a lot of means of working. especially with isolation. when people feel like they are the "only one" to go through something, and a manipulator knows otherwise, then it's easy to influence those emotions in the isolated person. this is how many abuse tactics work

there's also very much such a thing as unconscious manipulation, or, someone who cannot manage their bad emotions, using those emotions in order to influence others to meet unstated or non-understood wants. this leaks out all the time in isolated lonely people in hate groups

oftentimes, people don't really understand their hate, and it's based on flimsy logic that denies trying to understand others. so if you hate people, you're going to be manipulated by your own hate, and manipulating others based on that same hate. endless loop until you learn.

more recently, there was someone who would not stop manipulating conversations with me. I wanted them to acknowledge and address how they had hurt like a dozen people in my server, and i got tired of their lack of caring about the hurt they caused, so i removed them.

this person used highly specific isolation tactics, and interpreted everything that anyone said as validation to do the thing they wanted - without stating their own wants. in this person's case, their unstated desires were driving them, and causing them to hurt others.

they wanted to be part of the community again, so they tried a couple things to show this. i did not want them around. they ended up lying about me in egregious ways to simply garner attention, but through subtle manipulation. i'll give an example of the simple tactic used:

this person had a group chat dedicated to trying to help them work through issues before i removed them. they implied this group chat was a PHYSICAL location where they were left in isolation... to their friend who survived a cult which actually did put them in an isolation box.

so sometimes, manipulation is as simple as KNOWING someone else will misinterpret what you're saying so that it reads more charitably for you, or so that you'll receive more sympathy. this person did it nonstop to me and my friends & got us to believe many lies by omission

this person recentlyish went out of their way to lie publicly about things that happened when they came for a group visit, as a means of extracting attention from me. in private, they'd say they liked resolving things 1 on 1. when i insisted they resolve it with me, they declined

so i said: if you don't resolve it with me, then i will bring the ways you have hurt the server to the public. and they called this blackmail. they would not renege on this point. eventually i decided i did not want to deal with this person accusing me of blackmailing them.

i came up with all sorts of ways to get them to stop trying to make it out like "talk to me about the lies you're perpetrating" was unreasonable. i talked to my whole server about "what's a way i can manipulate them into stopping" and spent a couple days in a frenzy over it.

then eventually eevee was annoyed because it was like i was getting sucked back up into that person's endless trap of lies. so i decided: the best way to play the game of someone manipulating words, is to not play it at all. so i dropped the idea

they were upset i stopped talking to them and started blaming my friend. they were upset, and blamed my friend, despite them going on about how it was manipulation. you can maybe see how this is a little fucked up - they didn't want to talk, but then did when /i/ stopped?

it was just a little taste of their unconscious wants (talking to me) conflicting with their desire to always paint my actions as wrong and not in line with theirs.

part 1 of my huge fuckin thread about experiences with manipulation

PART 2 - unconscious manipulation

from my experience, a lot of unconscious manipulation i've been around has tended to be around people who either can't be honest with themselves, or who don't at all know how to manage their own emotions. it leaks out in strange ways

i think my exhusband is a great example of this. he would act out in horrible moods if i did something he didn't like. i don't think he had any way to process i.e. jealousy or grief or anything. i tried helping him but he always wanted me to give up on what made me happy.

i wouldn't do this, so it caused us grief for the first few years of our marriage. he didn't like that i was poly, and i wasn't going to deny that part of my identity. rather than be mature and talk it through with me, he guilted me and acted suicidal for years if i acted unhappy

so i had to learn to stop showing him that i was unhappy. nothing i tried worked, and he didn't seem to want to fix the issue. he used his bad feelings as weapons. i know he genuinely felt awful about it but he never actually tried to fix the problem with me. background radiation

it became noise. it became the new normal. unchanging awful emotions = something you come to accept. i came to accept i could never make him happy in certain ways. he ended up keeping a ton of secrets from me as a result, some of which were i guess continued zoo & minor interest

he kept me in the dark on this. that's definitely conscious manipulation. he used my name as a Pokemon artist to lure in unsuspecting minors. i think he was incredibly lonely, but also very good at only seeking out validation that /he/ wanted to hear. manipulative

i spoke with pengo recently abt marl (my ex). i had a couple days of shock at some of the logs pengo showed me. i slept all day, trying to understand it. he had lied directly to pengo about what i said and how i felt, and DIRECTLY contributed to us not talking after + the blowup

it was direct manipulation. which leads me to another story, about a way i unconsciously manipulated the situation at that time. i had stopped talking to pengo because i didn't feel heard by him, and marl would not stop talking about wanting to visit pengo to presumably fuck.

this made me really angry. no matter what i did, marl wouldn't stop. no matter what i said, or how i felt, he was trying to do this. pengo did not want that. pengo expressed not wanting that, to marl. i didn't THINK pengo would want that, even when i stopped talking to him

I had no way to verbalize my feelings about it to anyone, so i ended up writing a big ass vent post about feelings i had felt marl/pengo were ignoring. this was kind of an act of desperation, to get marl to stop. it's like i ONLY understood subconsciously how marl was hurting me

it leaked out in this weird way. that vent post? an act of manipulation, to get marl to stop trying to put me and pengo in a weird and gross situation. but because i couldn't just be consciously honest about my feelings about it being gross, it resulted in that blowup 6 years ago

so no matter what, your feelings are going to find a way to manifest, if you can't be honest about what they are and what you want. when you're straightforward about it and someone else refuses to acknowledge your feelings, that's a big red flag. it can cause you to bury them

buried feelings will resurface somehow, often in destructive ways if it's an intensely negative feeling. that's why it's important to be mindful of yourself & your actions+ to understand the ways you might be unconsciously manipulating yourself, your friends, and your environment

after all, manipulation is simply about trying to change your environment. if you aren't aware of how you're hurting others, you're going to have a more difficult time enacting desired change that doesn't result in harm to others. so it's in your best interest to understand it

people generally don't like being around hurt. I've been subjecting myself to it on purpose in my friend server in the form of candid talks about the impact of my actions, and wanting to hear when it seems like i'm hurting people. then i have long conversations about how not to.

sometimes i ask to be hurt in certain ways in the conversation so that i'll recognize it when I face that kind of feeling later, and I'll be able to approach it more rationally. this is a kind of emotional training to be able to deal with difficult things while in the moment

it seems like a variant on CBT, with a slight cross with the concept of "scenes" in BDSM. get someone to act out being a hurtful person with ideas they know aren't right, and i get to work through the emotions of it and process them ahead of time, when actual disaster strikes

yesterday i felt a tinge for .2 seconds of dread at what happened, but then i sat down and got to work extracting the mole from the server. it isn't very hard to figure things out if you can be objective BUT ALSO listen to your feelings and what they FACTUALLY tell you abt people

when you're aware of the skews in your own emotions, your own biases, you can correct for that and more easily view others' motivations - because it involves simply viewing it through a different lens of understanding. feelings are data we have to unskew for best accuracy

gaslighting is a tactic to dislodge all of someone's feelings from reality. it's a way to erase all of someone else's pain, so that they aren't able to tell whether or not you're really hurting them. this involves repeatedly denying someone else's feeling - not acknowledging it

unconscious manipulation can be stopped in its tracks by acknowledging the correct things that are driving someone to act like they are. acknowledging the unspoken wants. unconscious manipulation is at the root of many emotional spirals / breakdowns

when people are full of feelings they do not understand, but that they cannot process or even really name, they will be unconsciously manipulated by themselves. the epitome of this is an emotional spiral, where you "spiral in on" an idea until you crash into the "meaning".

for instance, someone in a self-destructive spiral may circle in on the idea of "I am a terrible person" and positive validation doesn't help bc too many blocks are in the way. bc they can't find resolution, they might try to "rush" the solution, and act out horribly, to prove it

the idea there is, the "unknown" factor of "am i bad or not" is too great to bear, so someone will act out horrible things in order to hear "yes, you are bad, actually", which lets them proceed to the next feeling to process. sometimes it's more spiraling, sometimes it's not

all right. there's another chunk of tweets. i have still way way more to say, and honestly every tweet feels like it could go off into its own tangent. this is an incredibly complex and nuanced topic

PART 3
~conscious manipulation~
this is the dreaded thing a lot of people are scared of. "is someone just playing me? is someone using me for their own gain and not telling me about it? is someone trying to get me to act in ways i'll feel bad about later?"

what makes this difficult, is that feelings can seem genuine for a long time before someone decides to manipulate you for their own gain, or to hurt you. if someone is unable to acknowledge their direct responsibilities to hurt they cause, this is a red flag re: manipulation

if someone consciously acknowledges hurt and causes and their own responsibility to it and consistently acts in line with solving their problems so they don't hurt others? they're probably at less risk of being someone who would consciously manipulate you out of malice

however, if someone is shifting the rules so that it's okay to hurt someone for no reason sometimes, then they're more at risk for being someone who would consciously manipulate others. "no reason" becomes "I can justify hurting you" when called on it w/ conscious manipulation

this isn't always even a bad thing - it's just that reasons themselves can be bad, or not honest. if you can't admit you don't like someone bc everyone else likes them, you might resort to bullying them for things that are invisible to the rest of the group. i watched this happen

someone visited during a group visit, and they were constantly bullying one of my friends over things that were mean for no reason. shutting him down just because they wanted to, but not doing it to anyone else. every time they were confronted they had flimsy reasons or no reason

when someone is confronted over and over about their destructive behavior towards someone else, and it's unsolvable, then there comes a point where you have to act like it's on purpose & set hard boundaries. "sorry, but you can't interact with me except on my conditions"

the line between conscious/unconscious manipulation becomes thin when it looks to be on purpose, but the person can't seem to stop acting that way, or finds a new group of friends to do the same old behavior to. either they don't care about hurting others, or misunderstand hurt

when someone is unable to acknowledge that the ways they were treated were wrong, they are more liable to act out the abuse they went through, creating a 'cycle'. if someone was beaten as a kid and takes it out on others via violence, it's the unresolved childhood pain surfacing

either they fear violence and it becomes an unconscious tool for manipulation around unstated wants or fears, or they wield it and become an aggressor and abusive individual. this is often the difference between someone doing it on purpose or not. "can they admit the effect?"

when i am trying to manipulate someone, i carefully lay the thought process out, because it's going to be a last-resort kind of feeling to get someone to stop hurting me. but this is also something that i've noticed pop up in people who are scared of their identities being hurt

a couple months ago, someone had to be moved out of most of the server and in a special help channel, because they had been sexually harassing people in subtle ways. /i/ had been subject to it, but didn't know how to bring it up bc the person in question rejected hearing about it

rather than cause a fuss, i wrote it off as only happening in my head. or not a big deal because i "understood" the person. these allowances are what let abuse occur. when you don't voice your discomfort with how someone directly treats you, it lets others get hurt in the dark

of course, this is very difficult when people throw tantrums or hurt your friends with their violent or extreme moods if you don't do what they want. especially if it looks like such a small thing, that you don't know how to explain the 'huge' consequences behind it.

sometimes it can look like someone is overreacting to a small thing, but it's really that they've been subject to conscious abuses over and over, and it's not visible to others. the huge feeling is there, even if they don't have words to communicate why it's a huge issue.

it's important to dig into those feelings and be honest about how interacting with someone makes you feel, but also /why/, removed of who's involved. when you can separate the feeling itself and judge for yourself what you do or don't want, you can start to address your pains

conscious manipulation involves going up against a lot of uncomfortable feelings - which is what i had to do yesterday to figure out who was endangering people in my chat. it means asking difficult questions and facing discomfort in conversations. people like avoiding it

but when someone is trying to manipulate you, they're going to be operating on their model of how you work in their head. which means, the better you know yourself and others, the less easily you'll be gullible to people lying to your face. their actions won't match their words.

the hardest to detect "manipulation" is the kind where your actions all perfectly align with your feelings. but this is also the kind where you are being perfectly blunt and honest. sneaky people expect there to be a hidden game sometimes - they don't expect honesty

so just be honest about your intentions from the start. that's honestly the most "conscious" manipulation possible. when you start obscuring your own reasons for doing things, and hiding your feelings, that's when you run into dangerous territory.

for instance, when i manipulated the person i was scared of into not visiting me, i didn't tell other people what i was doing. so no one had any idea i was scared until i revealed it weeks/months later. that person had created an atmosphere of fear in talking about their actions

so even in private, i didn't feel comfortable admitting that i did that until i was able to figure out exactly how to word my fear of them and why. it felt really bad to have no idea how to approach the topic of "i feel bad about this person but they keep taking my words of hurt"

another kind of conscious manipulation is simply cutting off people's words/actions.

this can be good! such as setting boundaries for discussion.
or bad! such as trying to control your partner's feelings and thoughts.

it's the WAY it's used that determines the hurt potential

but this is true of everything. people always want hard and fast rules for situations, but there isn't one. there never is one. there cannot be one. each situation has a thousand different forces at play, and if you aren't paying attention to the moving parts, you'll get it wrong

well. that's all i have to say for now. i'm sorry for any of the examples that are a little hard to follow. this was kind of stream of consciousness but i kind of want to do a writeup about manipulative behavior sometime, and give detailed examples about it

also: let me know if you have other thoughts or anything to add. these are all my observations based on personal experience with existing around people trying to manipulate me with their feelings, and me doing it to try to nullify dangerous-feeling situations