#blameshifting

Signs of evil manipulation can vary depending on the context, but here are some general indicators that may suggest someone is engaging in manipulative and harmful behavior:

Deception: Manipulative individuals often employ deceit and lies to achieve their goals. They may present false information, twist the truth, or engage in gaslighting, making you doubt your own perceptions and reality.

Emotional manipulation: They use tactics to exploit your emotions and vulnerabilities. This could include guilt-tripping, emotional blackmail, or playing with your feelings to control your actions or decisions.

Isolation: Manipulative individuals may try to isolate you from your support network, such as friends and family. They want to limit your access to alternative perspectives and support systems that could expose their manipulative behavior.

Blame-shifting: Manipulators often deflect responsibility for their actions and blame others for their own mistakes or negative consequences. They may make you feel guilty or responsible for things that are not your fault.

Lack of empathy: Manipulative individuals often display a lack of genuine empathy or concern for others' feelings. They may exploit your emotions for their own benefit without regard for the harm they cause.

Control and power dynamics: Manipulators seek to exert control over others and establish a power imbalance in relationships. They may use tactics like intimidation, threats, or undermining your self-confidence to assert dominance.

Constant criticism: Manipulative individuals frequently criticize and belittle their targets to undermine their self-esteem and create dependency. They may focus on your weaknesses and insecurities, making you doubt your own worth.

Gaslighting: Gaslighting is a manipulative technique where the person denies, distorts, or trivializes your experiences, feelings, or memories to make you question your sanity or perception of reality.

Conditional affection and love: Manipulators often use affection, love, or approval as a reward for compliance or punishment for resistance. They may withhold affection, support, or attention to control your behavior.

One of the behaviours that is highly characteristic of pathological narcissism is the making of unjust accusations.

The Overt Lie

Let’s suppose that, out of the blue, a narcissist has unjustly accused you of deliberately doing something bad, X. (I‘ve stipulated ‘out of the blue’, because the situation is slightly more complicated if the narcissist has made such an accusation in response to something that you’ve said. Nevertheless, it’s relatively straightforward to extrapolate from the ‘out of the blue’ case to the responsive/reactive case.)

Probably, there will be an important sense in which this unjust accusation constitutes a pathological lie. However, the main point I want to make is this: there will always be a more useful sense in which such an accusation is also an inadvertent telling of the truth (albeit an encrypted telling of the truth).

When an unjust accusation is narcissistically motivated (and out-of-the-blue), it is always either an instance of what Dr Malkin calls ‘emotional hot potato’, or an instance of what might be called ‘emotional bleed’ (something like a mood-congruent delusion).

Emotional Hot Potato

In the former case (emotional hot potato), the narcissist has unjustly accused you of deliberately doing something bad, X, because he is in fact guilty of deliberately doing X (or some other blameworthy thing).

One of the typical features of pathological narcissism is a pathological desperation to avoid feeling shame, and to avoid accepting that one is flawed or that one has done something wrong. Moreover, one of the dysfunctional narcissistic ways of avoiding such thoughts and feelings is to blame-shift, or to accuse others of wrongdoings. In part, narcissists do this to distract or deflect from their own feelings of shame. However, they also do it in the service of a strange, dysfunctional way of processing the aversive emotions that they’re so desperate to avoid, which is try to make others feel those very same aversive emotions (in this case, shame). Thus, the narcissist might have accused you of deliberately doing the relevant bad thing, X, because he has himself deliberately done X or some other blameworthy thing. In this way, his unjust accusation tells you something true, namely that he might have deliberately done X or some other blameworthy thing.

Emotional Bleed

In the latter case (emotional bleed), the narcissist has made the unjust accusation because he is already experiencing an aversive emotion. Typically, pathological narcissists struggle to differentiate between reality and the contents of their own thoughts and feelings, especially when they’re under stress or feeling a strong emotion. (This is closely related to their impairment of empathy, i.e. to their difficulty with taking the perspectives of others, and acting with consideration for the thoughts and feelings of others.) It seems as though pathological narcissists have only a limited awareness of the emotions that they happen to be feeling, and are relatively incapable of identifying such emotions and reporting to others that they’re feeling them (this latter difficulty is as much due to distrust and fear of vulnerability as it is to an inability to recognise experienced emotions). Instead, it’s as though the narcissist’s emotions invisibly influence and distort reality itself, as perceived by the narcissist.

Additionally, pathological narcissists tend towards paranoia, inasmuch as they tend to construe ambiguous social cues in a negative light, and assume that others are out to get them unless they have (what they perceive to be) strong evidence to the contrary. (This is ironic, of course, since it’s more usually the narcissist who’s exploiting and hurting others.) Therefore, if a pathological narcissist happens to be experiencing a strong aversive emotion—especially if it coincides with something that you‘ve done—then this might automatically affect his representation of reality, and cause him to believe that you‘ve gone out of your way to make him feel the relevant emotion.

Thus, the narcissist might have accused you of deliberately doing the relevant bad thing, X, because he is presently experiencing an aversive emotion, and X is something that, if you‘d deliberately done it, would have implied your intention to cause this bad feeling in the narcissist. In this way, the narcissist’s unjust accusation tells you something true, namely that he might be feeling a particular aversive emotion (specifically, whatever aversive emotion you would have deliberately caused if you‘d deliberately done X).

The Hidden Truth

Since these are the only two possibilities, there is a clear and determinate truth that the narcissist’s unjust accusation has conveyed. By unjustly accusing you of doing something bad, X, the narcissist has resolutely conveyed that

either he has himself deliberately done X or some other blameworthy thing, or he’s feeling whatever bad emotion you would have caused if you‘d actually done X.

In other words, if you know that an unjust utterance of

‘You did X deliberately!’

is narcissistically motivated, then there’s a sense in which you may justifiably reinterpret it as an utterance of:

Some Signs of Covert Abuse

‪Reactive abuse is an abuser's punishment, condemnation, misrepresentation, or gaslighting of others' traumatised responses to his prior abuse of them.‬

Confusingly, reactive abuse often takes the form of treating a person's needs and distress in response to abuse as though these things are themselves abusive or hostile. Sometimes this is an instance of deliberate, manipulative blame-shifting. Alternatively, it can be a function of psychological projection—in which the abuser unconsciously projects his own guilt and wrongdoing onto the target as a defence mechanism.