How to Coach Yourself and Others Beware of Manipulation | Page 16

1. Manipulation: What, Why, Who, How?
Personal Growth - The Manipulation Trap: Are you a victim? - by Anita Anand
http://www.lifepositive.com/Mind/Personal_Growth/The_Manipulation_Trap92010.asp
Do you find yourself doing things that you do not really want to? When someone close to you or in a
situation of power suggests that you do something against your will, how do you feel? Probably not
good. How often do you experience or hear of people who seem to have been blackmailed into
accepting life-changing decisions (such as choice of education, career, and marriage partner), because
their parents, partners, bosses, best friends, or children thought it was best for them.
Everybody who wants something from somebody else is a potential manipulator. Especially when the
feeling is that they can get what they want more easily in a covert way than in open and rational ways.
Manipulation often is about power. Manipulators want the power to dominate you, to force you to give
them whatever it is they are after to feel important, safe, comfortable, valued, loved, …: obedience,
loyalty, cooperation, support, vote, silence, energy, time, work, money, attention, companionship,
friendship, love, sex, … your Chinese Vases … really anything.
No wonder that manipulators come in all kinds, as we will see in the next chapters. All salesmen are
trained in “sales techniques”, many of which are in fact “manipulation techniques”. Important
however is to realize that everybody will try to manipulate others every now and then. Though
ethically never a good solution, in the real world we will all sometimes use manipulation to win time,
because the favour required is not important, to prevent a mayor bad, to avoid arguments and frictions,
“because this is for a real noble cause”, etc…
Manipulation becomes a problem only when the manipulator advances his own interests at the expense
of this victim’s and causes mental, physical, financial or other harm.
According to clinical psychologist Dr George Simon, often, manipulators in many ways are
dysfunctional people who conceal aggressive intentions and behaviours; know the psychological
vulnerabilities of the victim to determine what tactics are likely to be the most effective, and have a
sufficient level of ruthlessness to have no qualms about causing harm to the victim if necessary.
Manipulators also need to advance their own purposes and their own gain, even at virtually any cost to
others. They need to attain feelings of power, and superiority in relationships with others and need to
feel in control.
Dr Richard Paul and Dr Linda Elker write: “The human mind has no natural guide to the truth, nor
does it naturally love the truth. What the human mind loves, is itself: what serves it, what flatters it,
what gives it what it wants, and what strikes down and destroys whatever threatens it”.
Manipulators know this very well. They shrewdly focus on pursuing their own interest, without respect
to how that pursuit affect others. They know how to use the established structure of power to advance
their interests. They have a great command of the rhetoric of persuasion and are more sophisticated,
more verbal and generally have more schooling, greater status and achieve more success than uncritical
persons. They are accustomed to playing the dominant role in relationships.
They cannot effectively manipulate others if they appear to them to be invalidating their beliefs. That
is why they are rarely rebels or critics of society. In fact, since they are fundamentally concerned, not
with advancing rational values, but with getting what they want, they are careful to present themselves
as sharing the values of those they manipulate. For the same reason, they strive to appear before others
in a way that associates themselves with power, authority and conventional morality. Their goal is

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