Manipulation—Read All About It!

Manipulation is a way to covertly influence someone with indirect, deceptive, or abusive tactics. Manipulation may seem benign or even friendly or flattering, as if the person has your highest concern in mind, but in reality it’s to achieve an ulterior motive.

Favorite weapons of manipulators are: guilt, complaining, comparing, lying, denying (including excuses and rationalizations), feigning ignorance, or innocence (the “Who me?” defense), blame, bribery, undermining, mind games, assumptions, “foot-in-the-door,” reversals, emotional blackmail, evasiveness, forgetting, fake concern, sympathy, apologies, flattery, and gifts and favors.

Darlene Lancer, JD, MFT
How to Spot Manipulation, whatiscodependency.com

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eBook (PDF) 287 pages
Price: $3.89
Unlike people who are trying to influence others, manipulators work with unfair means to get what they want. They do not respect the personal rights of their victims. They work with hidden agendas and deliberately use dishonest tricks like faulty reasoning, coercion, blackmail, and lying as they attempt to assert control. Manipulation is about suiting the manipulator’s advantage or purpose only, often at the expense of others. 

It’s often difficult to recognize manipulation. After all, would we allow ourselves to be manipulated if we are aware that it is happening? This book explains the tricks manipulators use and teaches you how to best defend and protect yourself.

Manipulation: Handbook of Social and Psychological Manipulation

By Dean Amory
Available in PDF Format

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People who suffer from low self-esteem are at risk of getting stuck in relationships where they’re being controlled; becoming the unwitting targets of individuals with personality disorders that propel them to behave in a manipulative way.

Manipulation: How to Recognize and Outwit Emotional Manipulation and Mind Control in Your Relationships
By Sarah Nielsen

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Being manipulated is a highly stressful experience. It is unpleasant, demeaning, and disturbing.

Every time you comply, capitulate, cave in, or otherwise satisfy your manipulator’s wishes and purposes, you reinforce the toxic cycle that is compromising your self-esteem, co-opting your values, and corroding your emotional wiring.

This book was written for people who are targeted, exploited, and controlled by manipulators.

Who’s Pulling Your Strings? How to Break the Cycle of Manipulation and Regain Control of Your Life
by Harriet Braiker115 customer reviews
See also the author’s website: DiseaseToPlease.com

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See also: Manipulation Tactics

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But He Never Hit Me…

When most people hear the word “abuse,” they naturally conjure up images of broken bones, black eyes, and bruises. But in truth, physical violence comprises the vast minority of abusive behaviors in any relationship. The overwhelming types of abuses are those that are difficult to recognize: verbal, emotional, psychological, financial, and spiritual. Because no outward signs of mistreatment exist, these types of abuses usually go unnoticed, especially by the woman experiencing them. In particular, abusive comments often lead a woman in any unhealthy relationship to distrust her own reality and good sense.

But He Never Hit Me: The Devastating Cost of Non-Physical Abuse to Girls and Women exposes the truth about these destructive behaviors and also reveals the red flags of a potentially abusive relationship. Women can explore their own background information to understand what led them to these men, the shocking costs that non-physically threatening relationships have on every part of their life, and ways in which they can make changes toward a more positive, healthy, and rewarding future. Imperative for women of all ages, from teens through senior citizens, But He Never Hit Me joins and aligns a large and supportive community of women dedicated to healthy, rewarding relationships.

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