Why Do You Love Daffodil Girls? Or Sketches From The Life Of Emotional Blackmailers

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Children from the cradle learn the skills of various forms of emotional blackmail: from demonstrative crying to punishing their mother who has offended them by demonstrating greater love for dad or grandmother. Growing up, people gradually master a wider arsenal of manipulative techniques. But, perhaps, it is the use of emotional blackmail in relationships that is one of the main reasons for their breakup

If you come to understand that you are being emotionally blackmailed by the person you live with, then you should look around - most likely, he is using other manipulative techniques in relation to you. Usually, the efforts of such people are aimed at suppressing the will of their partner, reducing his self-esteem. It is very important for the blackmailer that the partner is in strong psychological dependence on him and, if possible, remains in the field of his power.

The above does not mean that a person who is prone to psychological blackmail does not love his partner and himself is not heavily dependent on him. Such people are capable of strong feelings, however, they tend to dramatize them and bring them to a state of exaltation. So, in this article we called emotional blackmailers "narcissists" conditionally. Although their victims often use this very term.

The first experiences of emotional blackmail

Probably, many are familiar from their own experience or have seen from the outside how a child arranges emotional terror of a mother leaving for work. He can cry, scream, squeal, roll on the floor, cling to her clothes. A child in such a situation may even show uncontrollable aggression - beat and bite his mother.

If children notice that such behavior leads to the desired results, then they already quite consciously begin to use these tantrums and scandals as a tool for blackmailing naughty and willful adults.

In terms of process engineering, adult emotional terrorists behave in a very similar way. Unless they lie less on the floor and talk and shout more than cry.

The main thing that makes a person feel the experience of using blackmail, in addition to the joy of achieving the original goal, is the intoxication of power. Imagine the feelings of a young child who suddenly realizes that he is capable of controlling powerful adults, throwing them out of psychological balance and forcing them to do what he needs to do.

In the soul of an adult blackmailer, there is also an ecstasy of power or despair that this power is inaccessible to him. In moments when the blackmailer realizes that his strategy is not working and power is slipping out of his hands, he can fall into hysterics and begin to take revenge on the victim of blackmail for daring to slip out of his sphere of influence.

If we return to our little blackmailer, then we can say that the child, by throwing tantrums, wins in any development of the situation - however, he receives different psychological prizes.

• In the first case, if the mother is forced to stay and talk to him, the child has the joy that he was able to keep her near him.
• The second scenario looks something like this: Mom starts to get nervous and even panic, she loses her temper, can break loose and shout or even spank her little tyrant. At the same time, the child receives satisfaction from the fact that he was able to influence an adult and forced him to reckon with himself.

The internal tension, pain and fear associated with the departure of the mother, for the child many times exceeds the fear of being yelled at and even beaten at. And do not forget that young children are absolutely indifferent to moral admonitions and in such a situation they cannot be imputed with a sense of shame, guilt or responsibility. With the same result, one can appeal to the responsibility and morality of adult emotional blackmailers - for them, as well as for small children, there is only the fear of losing a loved one and the pain arising in advance from the loss that has not yet occurred.

What Happens When Little Blackmailers Grow Up

If in childhood emotional blackmailers still do not understand what moral principles and ethical attitudes are, then, as adults, they willingly appeal to questions of morality. True, they use moral principles and moral prohibitions not for self-organization, but as a tool for emotional blackmail.

First, using their charm, suggestiveness, eloquence and persuasiveness, they force the victim to accept certain moral, ethical, ideological and even everyday rules. And then they begin to harshly criticize for the slightest deviations from these rules.

Psychological blackmail involves the use of strong feelings and emotions. But if young children have in their arsenal only resentment, fear, aggression and the ability to put pressure on feelings of pity and guilt, then adult blackmailers, thanks to the ability to rely on moral and ethical prohibitions, become available to such a powerful tool as "righteous anger."

The strategy they use to blackmail their loved ones turns out to be quite effective. First, they lure the victim into a close enclosure, fenced off by moral and ideological prohibitions, and in cases where their loved ones go beyond the established framework, the emotional blackmailer attacks them with tirades of righteous anger. It turns out that the victim is constrained not only by moral norms, but also by the fear of the righteous anger of his partner.

Rash promises and righteous anger

Starting a relationship with an emotional blackmailer can look very rosy and promising. They often appeal to spiritual closeness and mutual understanding with their partner, willingly discuss a common future, which is drawn in bright, cheerful colors.

Under the noise of conversations, different promises are pulled from a partner, for example: let's agree that our past will not burst into our future life. If the partner swallows this bait, then at the next step agreements are established that there will be no "ex": ex-husbands, lovers, boyfriends.

Then there is talk that he does not believe in simple friendship between a man and a woman, this friendship most often tends to end in bed. The naive victim agrees that the friendship between a man and a woman often goes to the level of a love relationship. We can say that the ideological and semantic processing of the victim has already been carried out, then outright emotional blackmail comes into force under the guise of zeal for the purity of morals and compliance with agreements.

Imagine a girl who, in a state of love intoxication, “signed” such agreements with her boyfriend. And then one evening an old school friend called her unexpectedly. She was very happy with the call, and it was quite natural that in the course of the conversation she turned to her friend, adding diminutive-affectionate suffixes to the name, according to the old school habit. After the end of the conversation, the girl for the first time in this relationship will face righteous anger directed at her: she violated the established agreements and "threatened the future of our relationship."

We are building our common future

Creating a system of moral ideological and behavioral rules and regulations is only part of a more complex strategy that emotional blackmailers use to deprive their partner of free will and coerce him into a subordinate role in a relationship.

The first months of living with a blackmailer are usually very pleasant and cheerful. After all, it is at this time that lovers make plans for their life together, paint a general picture of the world. But the victim does not yet understand that it was during this bright period of their relationship that she was building her own cage, into which she would be constantly driven by fear of an outbreak of righteous anger, in front of long and boring clarifications of the relationship, in which they would put pressure on feelings of pity and guilt.

One of the problems of victims of emotional blackmail is that they themselves turn out to be devoted to the rosy picture of the world that they drew in their imaginations in the first romantic months of their lives with their future tyrant. It turns out that they voluntarily "emigrated" from their past life to that "magical country" in which they planned to live with their beloved, and somehow did not notice that he quietly took on the role of the guardian of order in this country, and the executor of punishments. It is unnecessary to mention that the main violator of the rules and regulations was the woman who decided to build a common life with an emotional blackmailer.

Forged in the crucible of scandal and passion

Let's return again to the story of the girl who began to build a joint future with an emotional blackmailer. After the first encounters with the righteous anger of her young man, she was slightly dumbfounded, but then she returned to their common small and cozy world, and, it would seem, their life got better again.

At some point, the girl realizes that she is cramped to live within the established rules, and begins to rebel. However, her protests are harshly suppressed, and if the methods of good old emotional blackmail are no longer enough, then tough scandals are used. After scandals, reconciliation occurs, and she again, together with her young man, finds herself in their cozy little world, in which she no longer seems cramped.

Gradually, unrighteous anger or pressure on feelings of pity and guilt begins to be used as a means of emotional blackmail - fear of a scandal becomes a tool of blackmail. Compared to the heat and fire of scandals, life in their small and cozy world no longer seems cramped to her. But then she again, willingly or unwillingly, takes a step to the side and again runs into a series of scandals.

After some time, scandals become more and more, the periods of quiet living in a joint young world are shortened. As a result, scandals with their screams, passions and adrenaline absorb completely both the victim girl and her boyfriend. And a small rainbow world completely burns up in the flames of these scandals.

We can say that from this moment the couple's relationship enters its final period - a period of exhausting, but never ending scandals. Rather, this is the penultimate period: at the end of everything, a long and painful parting follows.

Not a very typical type of daffodil

With some degree of convention, we can say that people prone to emotional blackmail are one of the varieties of narcissists. At least the low level of elaboration and vagueness of this term allows us to do this. In this case, a person turns out to be closed on childhood fears and turns into a slave to his first psychological defenses, which in early childhood sometimes helped him get rid of panic fears of losing love and security.

In this sense, we can say that, like the classic narcissist, a person prone to emotional blackmail is also closed on himself, on what is happening in his soul. This is somewhat reminiscent of the story described by Freud in his "Beyond Pleasure." There, a little boy compulsively threw a typewriter under the bed in order to pull it out again and again by the rope tied to it. In our case, an adult boy again and again acts out the scene with the retention of the mother leaving for work by the skirt. A mother who violated her duty to keep a small and cozy world and decided to leave the boy alone.