Emotional blackmail

General

The first known documented use of "emotional blackmail" appeared in 1947 in the Journal of the National Association of Deans of Women. "Emotional Blackmail Climate" was used to describe one type of problematic classroom control model often used by teachers.

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:

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.

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 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 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 training

Assertiveness training encourages people to not engage in fruitless back-and-forths or power struggles with the emotional blackmailer but instead to repeat a neutral statement, such as "I can see how you feel that way," or "No thank you, I'm not hungry." They are taught to keep their statements within certain boundaries in order not to capitulate to coercive nagging, emotional blackmail, or bullying.

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.

Cultural examples

Criticism

Daniel Miller objects that in popular psychology the idea of emotional blackmail has been misused as a defense against any form of fellow-feeling or consideration for others.

Labeling of this dynamic with inflammatory terms such as "blackmail" and "manipulation" may not be so helpful as it is both polarizing and it implies premeditation and malicious intent which is often not the case. Controlling behavior and being controlled is a transaction between two people with both playing a part.