6. Manipulative Motives
Manipulators operate out of three principal interpersonal motives:
1. They need to advance their own purposes and their own personal gain at virtually any cost to others. They are entirely self-serving and selfish by disposition, even if they say otherwise. Remember, smart, skilled manipulators know how to disguise their motives, sometimes even to themselves.
Just because a manipulator tells you that he is doing something for your own good—or telling you something because he cares enough to be “totally honest” and he says that he has your very best interests at heart—
do not believe it. Good lip service is part of themanipulator’s tactics.
Why do manipulative people often represent themselves as concerned about others, as unselfish and altruistic?
Because it works. Remember, the manipulator will say and do whatever is necessary to advance his own ends, purposes, or personal gain. This includes saying that he believes himself to be a good, kind, fair-minded, honest, and generous person. His tactics even mayinclude making you feel guilty or like an unfair, mean spirited, distrusting, and generally bad person for suspecting that he is operating out of manipulative motives.
2. The manipulator has strong needs to attain feelings of power and superiority in relationships with other people. She wants the control she seeks over others to be acknowledged and validated. The victim’s compliance with manipulative tactics is the acknowledgment and validation the manipulator seeks. Paradoxically, this need springs from strong underlying—sometimes unconscious—feelings ofinferiority and low self-esteem. The manipulator’s low self-esteem is frequently hidden by outward layers of personality style and presentation characterized by what looks like bold self-confidence and even an inflated or grandiose ego or sense of self.
This is the paradox of the manipulative personality: She operates out of low self-esteem but with an inflated or strong-appearing sense of self-confidence. In fact, the manipulator’s strong need to exert and demonstrate power and control over others arises from the underlying strong need to compensate for feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. The manipulator, who has contempt for people like herself, consciously rejects these weak feelings.
The manipulator views power as finite. In other words, there is not enough power to go around for her to share or to acknowledge and respect your right to be empowered to make decisions and to attain control in your own life. If you are empowered to
any degree, this represents less power for her.The manipulator views power as a zero-sum game. This means that there is always someone who wins by attaining, maintaining, and exercising power and control over others, and there is always someone who loses by ceding control to the winner.
There is no room in the manipulator’s model of human relationships for a win-win scenario where power is shared or where everyone comes out gaining or benefiting from a given interaction.If you attempt to exercise power and control—even if it is just over your own decisions and behavior—the manipulator will feel threatened because she needs all the power that is around to get. If you exercise power in your own life, then from the manipulator’s standpoint,you are taking power away from her. She therefore will feel compelled to take immediate retaliatory steps to regain control.
3. Manipulators want and need to feel
in control. Feeling like they are out of control or that they might even be losing control in any realm evokes very high levels of anxiety. The manipulator’s need to feel in control extends beyond his or her desires or needs to control others.
Manipulators want to be seen and want to see themselves as being in control of their emotions, especially emotions that they associate with weakness, such as anxiety, sadness, or loneliness. In competitive situations, they want to win— at nearly any cost to others.While manipulators have a strong, even pathologic or sick need to control others, they generally struggle with control issues in their own lives. Their need to maintain control over others is frequently manifested by a need to “be right” and to make others “wrong.”
There is no room in the manipulator’s mind for both people in a given argument or conflict in which he is involved to each have valid positions, nor is their room for two different and equally “right,” albeit separate,points of view. For the manipulator,
only one person can be right—and that must be him. The other person necessarily becomes wrong to the extent that there is less than full agreement with the manipulator.
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