Hi Kaith, I’m glad you found my post supportive.

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“I’m curious though are they (emotional manipulators) bad people? Are there bad people at all?”

That depends on what bad is for you. I’m sure a fly would call the spider a bad guy indeed. But the spider has to set his traps in order to live, he is like any other spider and he is not bad among his species. Yet he is a creature of nature animated by simple instincts deprived of the concept of bad and good.

As animal have their ways, also we, as humans, we learn skills and we find our way to cope with the needs of life. Some of us could appreciate some principle of fairness and respect (through empathy or logic) and developed enough self-discipline to abide to it. Maybe they were lucky and were born in a comfortable environment where people were mostly fair among them and did not have to watch their back to spot others who were not respectful of their feelings. Maybe they followed a more complex path of personal growth. On the other hand, some other of us could find no use for such a principle but making it a cover to be accepted in certain contexts. Maybe they had to fight in life like it was a jungle and they had to rely only on themselves. Maybe they realized riding on someone else shoulders was the quickest and safest route. Maybe they were not taught any other skill and had to resort to lying. Maybe they learned that giving the fault to others is the only way to feel better when they fail at something, because nobody encouraged them to persist or appreciated them.

Nevertheless, even when people accept some principle of fairness, they may have different ideas about it and look bad one to the other. For example, a manipulator may think he is fair, he may say that everybody else is completely selfish and just using their principles to cover their own selfishness (because after all they do better when they follow them), actually he may say that the other are trying to manipulate him with their principles. He is just taking care of himself like everybody else. The manipulator may not be a bad person, but you cannot defeat that thought alone, everything you say or do may be interpreted as a way to manipulate him, a way that needs to be defeated.

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“I used to think we might behave bad towards someone because of our own troubles and weaknesses. But can it be that people might happen to be simply bad?”

If we have troubles, we fight hard to solve them. If we are weak, we try hard to develop our strengths. If someone give us a way and a hope, and we have none, we consider it. If we trust the person or we like the suggestion, we follow it. We are repeatedly rough to someone only if we think he/she is the source of our illnesses. (or maybe we want to force them out of their confort zone, so that they will help us). As I said above, a manipulator may accuse others to be the cause of his own failures. Maybe it’s easier, maybe it is automatic and he does not even think about it, maybe he has some responsibility toward them and has to find a way to not feel bad because he did let them down. In any case, he does not acknowledge the fact that he should start working on himself. It is his way to feel better with himself, although his way may not be that effective or positive for him or the persons around him.

I do not know whether you want to discuss about it, however, what manipulative behaviors does your boyfriend show?

• This reply was modified 10 years, 1 month ago by Vhanon.