On Manipulation
Hello, everyone!
Happy 5 year anniversary of Shed Letters! Thank you for letting me into your inboxes!
Before I get into this month’s subject, I want to invite anyone who can make it to the Twin Cities this October to consider coming to Gaylaxicon, where I’m going to be an invited guest! I can’t share too many details yet, but I think I am going to be on some very cool panels with some very cool other creators!
On to the main event; this month, I’ve committed to a pretty straightforward mental health topic.
I want to talk about why, as a therapist and a person, you will never hear me refer to another human being’s behavior as “manipulation” or “manipulative.”
Governments and organizations are another matter. I will call propaganda manipulation.
But a single individual human? I will not. And that’s not a popular opinion, I think.
I’ve had that rule since my very first mental health internship, because my supervisor gave me a very clear instruction—don’t focus on how I feel about my client’s behavior and don’t focus on what I think the client is trying to do with that behavior; focus on what that person is actually doing.
Because that’s the thing with the idea of “manipulation”; it assumes:
1) harm
2) dishonesty
3) conscious intent
4) to get a specific outcome that favors them
It’s not that nobody ever causes harm by being dishonest on purpose, to get some specific outcome. Obviously that can and does happen. But it’s a lot, and I mean a lot more difficult to know that is what’s going on than most people think.
Harm isn’t so hard to determine. But a lot of things look like lying that aren’t lying. A whole lot of neurodivergent people tend to over-explain because of being so frequently misunderstood, and people ping that over-explaining as lying. Then, over-correction in the other direction is also pinged as lying. Someone having feelings that are bigger or different than an onlooker expects may often be accused of dishonestly representing their feelings to control others. Minorities of all sorts get accused of lying more often by people who are not a member of the same minority because of cultural mismatch and outright bigotry. Disabled people are often accused of lying about their experiences by those who have bought into the idea that people routinely fake disabilities to get the lukewarm accommodations available.
I frequently see people who have been taught that crying is an unacceptable weakness framing others crying as a deliberate taboo violation in order to force compliance. Same for pain. Same for many other “weaknesses”.
Which leads us into the next part; the danger of assuming that you know a person’s true motivations. It is my very longstanding belief, constantly reinforced, that most of the time human beings are lucky to understand our own motivations, let alone reliably correctly guessing other people’s.
Is this person doing what they’re doing to force someone to do their bidding, or do they just need to fix their blood sugar? Is this person being evasive on purpose, or do they just not have adequate skills for saying things directly? Is this person sabotaging someone, or do they just have a different set of rules that they’re operating out of? Any one of us could be on either side of that equation.
The reason this is coming up for me now, and the reason I wanted to write about it, is that I feel like there’s a big movement towards mitigating empathy right now. For quite a while, now. Right wing Christian wingnut Ben Garret called on people to “not commit the sin of empathy”. We see thinkpieces misappropriating the idea of “emotional labor” and Instagram influencers claiming that your long time friend mentioning their childhood abuse is “trauma dumping” while TikTockers claim that anyone who makes you feel upset is a sociopath. The message keeps being: anyone who interferes with your sense of calm is knowingly harming you for their own selfish ends.
To play armchair sociologist for a moment, my whole life there have been anti-tax, anti-social-welfare people preaching a warped social Darwinism and modern day Calvinism, but now we’re also seeing the effects of the 24 hour news cycle, the shrinking world, and social media that has put people in constant contact with bad news and horrors and fears from around the globe. It makes people feel helpless, to always see bad things they can’t directly fix. Especially if they aren’t used to the idea of collective action working, or don’t know how to be part of that.
We are not built for this.
It makes it so very, very easy to burn out. It’s understandable that people may start frantically pushing away things that make them feel bad, and getting angry at people who interact with them in a way that makes them feel bad.
But shit has gotten out of hand. Last month I heard a woman accuse what appeared to be her 18 month old daughter of being manipulative for crying when she bonked her head going down the slide. The kid was clearly not physically hurt, and the mother was cranky and dismissive and attributed malice and forethought to a toddler who was flatly not capable of that level of pre-planning. I hope that mom was just having a bad day, but I have certainly seen emotionally burnt out parents who do treat their kids’ every emotional reaction as being an unwarranted personal attack on the parent, and it doesn’t go well.
Those kids often grow up to see any display of disallowed emotions as a voluntary breaking of a normal taboo and thus, you guessed it, manipulative.
Now, to be clear, this doesn’t mean that I wont or can’t call out harmful behavior. That’s like…a lot of my job. But I am going to specifically name the actual, observable action. I could say that someone is not describing a situation fairly or accurately. I could say that someone is shouting or getting in my face. I could say someone is controlling things that are not for them to control.
I’m not going to accuse them of manipulation, because then all they have to do is claim that I’m wrong about their intention. Boom. I am refuted, even if I was right.
And, if the person is acting in good faith, my naming the specific thing I’m seeing opens the door to actually addressing it.
Their reactions to a specific complaint also gives me a lot more to work with in terms of establishing whether they’re willing to have a good faith negotiation about it.
So that’s my soap-box for the month.
In addition to asking you to just have a think about how you frame manipulation, I have two additional little asks. Please remember that I am still trying to get my books into libraries where the teens I wrote them for can actually access them without money, and where I think additional stealthy queer books are always needed.
And please consider signing this petition to stop blocking offshore wind turbines. Won’t take you but a second!
Thanks, and I’ll see you next month!
Lee