Emotional blackmail
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Emotional blackmail
Emotional Blackmail and FOG, terms coined by psychotherapist Susan Forward, PhD, are about controlling people in relationships and the theory that fear, obligation or guilt ("FOG") are the transactional dynamics at play between the controller and the person being controlled. Understanding these dynamics are useful to anyone trying to extricate themselves from the controlling behavior of another person, and deal with their own compulsions to do things that are uncomfortable, undesirable, burdensome, or self-sacrificing for others.
General
Emotional blackmail typically involves two people who have established a close personal or intimate relationship (mother and daughter, husband and wife, sister and sister, two close friends). Children, too, will employ special pleading and emotional blackmail to promote their own interests, and self-development, within the family system.
Emotional blackmailers use fear, obligation and guilt in their relationships, ensuring that others feel afraid to cross them, obligated to give them their way and swamped by guilt if they resist. Knowing that someone close to them wants love, approval or confirmation of identity and self-esteem, blackmailers may threaten to withhold them or take them away altogether, making the person feel they must earn them by agreement. Fear, obligation or guilt is commonly referred to as "FOG". FOG is a contrived acronym—a play on the word fog which describes something that obscures and confuses a situation or someone's thought processes.
The person who is acting in a controlling way often wants something from the other person that is legitimate to want. They may want to feel loved, safe, valuable, appreciated, supported, needed, etc. This is not the problem. The problem is often more a matter of how they are going about getting what they want, or that they are insensitive to others needs in doing so that is troubling - and how others react to all of this.
Under pressure... one may become a sort of hostage, forced to act under pressure of the threat of responsibility for the other's breakdown and could fall into a pattern of letting the blackmailer control his/her decisions and behavior, lost in what Doris Lessing described as "a sort of psychological fog".
Types
Forward and Frazier identify four blackmail types each with their own mental manipulation style:
Type
Example
Punisher's threat: Eat the food I cooked for you or I'll hurt you.
Self-punisher's threat: Eat the food I cooked for you or I'll hurt myself.
Sufferer's threat: Eat the food I cooked for you. I was saving it for myself. I wonder what will happen now.
Tantalizer's threat: Eat the food I cooked for you and you just may get a really yummy dessert.
There are different levels of demands... demands that are of little consequence, demands that involve important issues or personal integrity, demands that affect major life decisions, and/or demands that are dangerous or illegal.
Patterns and characteristics
Addictions
Addicts often believe that being in control is how to achieve success and happiness in life. People who follow this rule use it as a survival skill, having usually learned it in childhood. As long as they make the rules, no one can back them into a corner with their feelings.
Mental Illness
People with certain mental conditions are predisposed to controlling behavior including those with obsessive compulsive disorder, paranoid personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder.
People with borderline personality disorder are particularly likely to use emotional blackmail, (as too are the destructive narcissists). However, their actions may be impulsive and driven by fear and a desperate sense of hopelessness, rather than being the product of any conscious plan.
Codependency
Codependency often involves placing a lower priority on one's own needs, while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others. Codependency can occur in any type of relationship, including family, work, friendship, and also romantic, peer or community relationships.
Affluenza and children
Affluenza — the status insecurity derived from obsessively keeping up with the Joneses — has been linked by Oliver James to a pattern of childhood training whereby sufferers were "subjected to a form of emotional blackmail as toddlers. Their mothers' love becomes conditional on exhibiting behaviour that achieved parental goals."
Assertiveness movement, training
People have been told to do some pretty obnoxious things in the name of assertiveness - like blankly repeating some request over and over until you got your way. The line between repeatedly demanding with sanctions ("broken record") versus coercive nagging, emotional blackmail, or bullying, could be a fine one.
Recovery
Techniques for resisting emotional blackmail, including strengthening personal boundaries, resisting demands, developing a power statement – the determination to stand the pressure — and buying time to break old patterns: she accepted nonetheless that re-connecting with the autonomous parts of the self the blackmailer had over-ruled was not necessarily easy. One may for instance feel guilty even while recognizing the guilt as induced and irrational; but still be able to resist overcompensating, and ignore the blackmailer's attempt to gain attention by way of a tantrum.
Consistently ignoring the manipulation in a friendly way may however lead to its intensification, and threats of separation, or to accusations of being crazy or a home wrecker.
Emotional blackmail - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
General
Emotional blackmail typically involves two people who have established a close personal or intimate relationship (mother and daughter, husband and wife, sister and sister, two close friends). Children, too, will employ special pleading and emotional blackmail to promote their own interests, and self-development, within the family system.
Emotional blackmailers use fear, obligation and guilt in their relationships, ensuring that others feel afraid to cross them, obligated to give them their way and swamped by guilt if they resist. Knowing that someone close to them wants love, approval or confirmation of identity and self-esteem, blackmailers may threaten to withhold them or take them away altogether, making the person feel they must earn them by agreement. Fear, obligation or guilt is commonly referred to as "FOG". FOG is a contrived acronym—a play on the word fog which describes something that obscures and confuses a situation or someone's thought processes.
The person who is acting in a controlling way often wants something from the other person that is legitimate to want. They may want to feel loved, safe, valuable, appreciated, supported, needed, etc. This is not the problem. The problem is often more a matter of how they are going about getting what they want, or that they are insensitive to others needs in doing so that is troubling - and how others react to all of this.
Under pressure... one may become a sort of hostage, forced to act under pressure of the threat of responsibility for the other's breakdown and could fall into a pattern of letting the blackmailer control his/her decisions and behavior, lost in what Doris Lessing described as "a sort of psychological fog".
Types
Forward and Frazier identify four blackmail types each with their own mental manipulation style:
Type
Example
Punisher's threat: Eat the food I cooked for you or I'll hurt you.
Self-punisher's threat: Eat the food I cooked for you or I'll hurt myself.
Sufferer's threat: Eat the food I cooked for you. I was saving it for myself. I wonder what will happen now.
Tantalizer's threat: Eat the food I cooked for you and you just may get a really yummy dessert.
There are different levels of demands... demands that are of little consequence, demands that involve important issues or personal integrity, demands that affect major life decisions, and/or demands that are dangerous or illegal.
Patterns and characteristics
Addictions
Addicts often believe that being in control is how to achieve success and happiness in life. People who follow this rule use it as a survival skill, having usually learned it in childhood. As long as they make the rules, no one can back them into a corner with their feelings.
Mental Illness
People with certain mental conditions are predisposed to controlling behavior including those with obsessive compulsive disorder, paranoid personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder.
People with borderline personality disorder are particularly likely to use emotional blackmail, (as too are the destructive narcissists). However, their actions may be impulsive and driven by fear and a desperate sense of hopelessness, rather than being the product of any conscious plan.
Codependency
Codependency often involves placing a lower priority on one's own needs, while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others. Codependency can occur in any type of relationship, including family, work, friendship, and also romantic, peer or community relationships.
Affluenza and children
Affluenza — the status insecurity derived from obsessively keeping up with the Joneses — has been linked by Oliver James to a pattern of childhood training whereby sufferers were "subjected to a form of emotional blackmail as toddlers. Their mothers' love becomes conditional on exhibiting behaviour that achieved parental goals."
Assertiveness movement, training
People have been told to do some pretty obnoxious things in the name of assertiveness - like blankly repeating some request over and over until you got your way. The line between repeatedly demanding with sanctions ("broken record") versus coercive nagging, emotional blackmail, or bullying, could be a fine one.
Recovery
Techniques for resisting emotional blackmail, including strengthening personal boundaries, resisting demands, developing a power statement – the determination to stand the pressure — and buying time to break old patterns: she accepted nonetheless that re-connecting with the autonomous parts of the self the blackmailer had over-ruled was not necessarily easy. One may for instance feel guilty even while recognizing the guilt as induced and irrational; but still be able to resist overcompensating, and ignore the blackmailer's attempt to gain attention by way of a tantrum.
Consistently ignoring the manipulation in a friendly way may however lead to its intensification, and threats of separation, or to accusations of being crazy or a home wrecker.
Emotional blackmail - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Member
Join Date: Feb 2013
Posts: 923
MG--that is awesome...have gone through periods of FOG but didn't know what it meant...only how it felt.
In the emotional blackmail categories...I can see myself more clearly than anyone else...although I have learned that I had a narcissistic mother and that I am not narcissistic, but I have used some of those unhealthy ways of dealing and although working on myself since 1991--in various ways, shapes, or forms...realize that there are some things that I am predisposed to...and that I need to keep working on myself...no matter what else is going on (now in my adult family of husband and 5 adult kids).
I know that I have been subjected/controlled by the alcoholics in my life and just plain controlling people as I am a deep deep codependent...I took a stand on the drug addicts and have been doing that for 19 years...as I was crystal clear that I could only support them in certain ways (probably way too much...but still...I did take a stand and holding one now). The last 5 months...I hit my codependent bottom...and became very ill...involving a lot of health care and new meds...and am now attending naranon...but am totally back to Melanie Beattie...who helped me wake up to my codependent role in family of origin...and really really aware and knowing that I can't afford to go any further down...we codependents do get sick...and sometimes the addicts/alcoholics outlast us. That has been my ahha...expensive lessons to learn...so grateful for them.
This post is awesome as I don't remember ever really reading definitions like this...and am ready and able to read them...and to take next right steps...as they unfold for me.
In the emotional blackmail categories...I can see myself more clearly than anyone else...although I have learned that I had a narcissistic mother and that I am not narcissistic, but I have used some of those unhealthy ways of dealing and although working on myself since 1991--in various ways, shapes, or forms...realize that there are some things that I am predisposed to...and that I need to keep working on myself...no matter what else is going on (now in my adult family of husband and 5 adult kids).
I know that I have been subjected/controlled by the alcoholics in my life and just plain controlling people as I am a deep deep codependent...I took a stand on the drug addicts and have been doing that for 19 years...as I was crystal clear that I could only support them in certain ways (probably way too much...but still...I did take a stand and holding one now). The last 5 months...I hit my codependent bottom...and became very ill...involving a lot of health care and new meds...and am now attending naranon...but am totally back to Melanie Beattie...who helped me wake up to my codependent role in family of origin...and really really aware and knowing that I can't afford to go any further down...we codependents do get sick...and sometimes the addicts/alcoholics outlast us. That has been my ahha...expensive lessons to learn...so grateful for them.
This post is awesome as I don't remember ever really reading definitions like this...and am ready and able to read them...and to take next right steps...as they unfold for me.
Member
Join Date: Jul 2010
Posts: 10,912
Thanks for this post, Morning Glory. All this is so meaningful to me right now... both in terms of recognizing some of these in myself (as an addict) and also regarding some of my family and relationship history that I'm just becoming really aware of now and trying to figure out how to deal with them. It's a bit of a traumatic experience to dive into all this after so many years, inside out... but I believe there will be long-term benefits of working through it, hopefully in a few ways.
Member
Join Date: Jun 2010
Posts: 341
This is so helpful. It helps give a name to what I feel with my AS. He often wants to include me in his inappropriate choices and pushes me to go against what I know to be right. I feel so stupid and guilty when I fall for it. I am working on getting stronger and have told him I do not want him to co-conspire with me about things he wants to do against the rules or program. This will help me to better identify what is going on and how to be ready for it. Thank you.
Member
Join Date: May 2010
Posts: 1,254
Originally Posted by Morning Glory 
Emotional Blackmail and FOG, terms coined by psychotherapist Susan Forward, PhD, are about controlling people in relationships and the theory that fear, obligation or guilt ("FOG") are the transactional dynamics at play between the controller and the person being controlled. Understanding these dynamics are useful to anyone trying to extricate themselves from the controlling behavior of another person, and deal with their own compulsions to do things that are uncomfortable, undesirable, burdensome, or self-sacrificing for others.
General
Emotional blackmail typically involves two people who have established a close personal or intimate relationship (mother and daughter, husband and wife, sister and sister, two close friends). Children, too, will employ special pleading and emotional blackmail to promote their own interests, and self-development, within the family system.
Emotional blackmailers use fear, obligation and guilt in their relationships, ensuring that others feel afraid to cross them, obligated to give them their way and swamped by guilt if they resist. Knowing that someone close to them wants love, approval or confirmation of identity and self-esteem, blackmailers may threaten to withhold them or take them away altogether, making the person feel they must earn them by agreement. Fear, obligation or guilt is commonly referred to as "FOG". FOG is a contrived acronym—a play on the word fog which describes something that obscures and confuses a situation or someone's thought processes.
The person who is acting in a controlling way often wants something from the other person that is legitimate to want. They may want to feel loved, safe, valuable, appreciated, supported, needed, etc. This is not the problem. The problem is often more a matter of how they are going about getting what they want, or that they are insensitive to others needs in doing so that is troubling - and how others react to all of this.
Under pressure... one may become a sort of hostage, forced to act under pressure of the threat of responsibility for the other's breakdown and could fall into a pattern of letting the blackmailer control his/her decisions and behavior, lost in what Doris Lessing described as "a sort of psychological fog".
Types
Forward and Frazier identify four blackmail types each with their own mental manipulation style:
Type
Example
Punisher's threat: Eat the food I cooked for you or I'll hurt you.
Self-punisher's threat: Eat the food I cooked for you or I'll hurt myself.
Sufferer's threat: Eat the food I cooked for you. I was saving it for myself. I wonder what will happen now.
Tantalizer's threat: Eat the food I cooked for you and you just may get a really yummy dessert.
There are different levels of demands... demands that are of little consequence, demands that involve important issues or personal integrity, demands that affect major life decisions, and/or demands that are dangerous or illegal.
Patterns and characteristics
Addictions
Addicts often believe that being in control is how to achieve success and happiness in life. People who follow this rule use it as a survival skill, having usually learned it in childhood. As long as they make the rules, no one can back them into a corner with their feelings.
Mental Illness
People with certain mental conditions are predisposed to controlling behavior including those with obsessive compulsive disorder, paranoid personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder.
People with borderline personality disorder are particularly likely to use emotional blackmail, (as too are the destructive narcissists). However, their actions may be impulsive and driven by fear and a desperate sense of hopelessness, rather than being the product of any conscious plan.
Codependency
Codependency often involves placing a lower priority on one's own needs, while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others. Codependency can occur in any type of relationship, including family, work, friendship, and also romantic, peer or community relationships.
Affluenza and children
Affluenza — the status insecurity derived from obsessively keeping up with the Joneses — has been linked by Oliver James to a pattern of childhood training whereby sufferers were "subjected to a form of emotional blackmail as toddlers. Their mothers' love becomes conditional on exhibiting behaviour that achieved parental goals."
Assertiveness movement, training
People have been told to do some pretty obnoxious things in the name of assertiveness - like blankly repeating some request over and over until you got your way. The line between repeatedly demanding with sanctions ("broken record") versus coercive nagging, emotional blackmail, or bullying, could be a fine one.
Recovery
Techniques for resisting emotional blackmail, including strengthening personal boundaries, resisting demands, developing a power statement – the determination to stand the pressure — and buying time to break old patterns: she accepted nonetheless that re-connecting with the autonomous parts of the self the blackmailer had over-ruled was not necessarily easy. One may for instance feel guilty even while recognizing the guilt as induced and irrational; but still be able to resist overcompensating, and ignore the blackmailer's attempt to gain attention by way of a tantrum.
Consistently ignoring the manipulation in a friendly way may however lead to its intensification, and threats of separation, or to accusations of being crazy or a home wrecker.
Emotional blackmail - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
General
Emotional blackmail typically involves two people who have established a close personal or intimate relationship (mother and daughter, husband and wife, sister and sister, two close friends). Children, too, will employ special pleading and emotional blackmail to promote their own interests, and self-development, within the family system.
Emotional blackmailers use fear, obligation and guilt in their relationships, ensuring that others feel afraid to cross them, obligated to give them their way and swamped by guilt if they resist. Knowing that someone close to them wants love, approval or confirmation of identity and self-esteem, blackmailers may threaten to withhold them or take them away altogether, making the person feel they must earn them by agreement. Fear, obligation or guilt is commonly referred to as "FOG". FOG is a contrived acronym—a play on the word fog which describes something that obscures and confuses a situation or someone's thought processes.
The person who is acting in a controlling way often wants something from the other person that is legitimate to want. They may want to feel loved, safe, valuable, appreciated, supported, needed, etc. This is not the problem. The problem is often more a matter of how they are going about getting what they want, or that they are insensitive to others needs in doing so that is troubling - and how others react to all of this.
Under pressure... one may become a sort of hostage, forced to act under pressure of the threat of responsibility for the other's breakdown and could fall into a pattern of letting the blackmailer control his/her decisions and behavior, lost in what Doris Lessing described as "a sort of psychological fog".
Types
Forward and Frazier identify four blackmail types each with their own mental manipulation style:
Type
Example
Punisher's threat: Eat the food I cooked for you or I'll hurt you.
Self-punisher's threat: Eat the food I cooked for you or I'll hurt myself.
Sufferer's threat: Eat the food I cooked for you. I was saving it for myself. I wonder what will happen now.
Tantalizer's threat: Eat the food I cooked for you and you just may get a really yummy dessert.
There are different levels of demands... demands that are of little consequence, demands that involve important issues or personal integrity, demands that affect major life decisions, and/or demands that are dangerous or illegal.
Patterns and characteristics
Addictions
Addicts often believe that being in control is how to achieve success and happiness in life. People who follow this rule use it as a survival skill, having usually learned it in childhood. As long as they make the rules, no one can back them into a corner with their feelings.
Mental Illness
People with certain mental conditions are predisposed to controlling behavior including those with obsessive compulsive disorder, paranoid personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder.
People with borderline personality disorder are particularly likely to use emotional blackmail, (as too are the destructive narcissists). However, their actions may be impulsive and driven by fear and a desperate sense of hopelessness, rather than being the product of any conscious plan.
Codependency
Codependency often involves placing a lower priority on one's own needs, while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others. Codependency can occur in any type of relationship, including family, work, friendship, and also romantic, peer or community relationships.
Affluenza and children
Affluenza — the status insecurity derived from obsessively keeping up with the Joneses — has been linked by Oliver James to a pattern of childhood training whereby sufferers were "subjected to a form of emotional blackmail as toddlers. Their mothers' love becomes conditional on exhibiting behaviour that achieved parental goals."
Assertiveness movement, training
People have been told to do some pretty obnoxious things in the name of assertiveness - like blankly repeating some request over and over until you got your way. The line between repeatedly demanding with sanctions ("broken record") versus coercive nagging, emotional blackmail, or bullying, could be a fine one.
Recovery
Techniques for resisting emotional blackmail, including strengthening personal boundaries, resisting demands, developing a power statement – the determination to stand the pressure — and buying time to break old patterns: she accepted nonetheless that re-connecting with the autonomous parts of the self the blackmailer had over-ruled was not necessarily easy. One may for instance feel guilty even while recognizing the guilt as induced and irrational; but still be able to resist overcompensating, and ignore the blackmailer's attempt to gain attention by way of a tantrum.
Consistently ignoring the manipulation in a friendly way may however lead to its intensification, and threats of separation, or to accusations of being crazy or a home wrecker.
Emotional blackmail - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Then the assertiveness thing. He was in lower level management but thinks he is an executive but he loves emphasizing the point he mentioned various issues first and loud. He thinks he if he is first and the loudest he is the only one who thought of it or knows the answer-not. He loves to say things "like I said before". His behavior also fall under addictions.
It's like "or else" or so what when dealing with him.
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