What is Emotional Blackmail?
In the past, I’ve always associated the term ‘emotional blackmail’ with a specific kind of emotionally manipulative act. An emotional blackmailer of this sort says something of the form: ‘do this, or else I will hurt myself’. The target of the emotional blackmail is thereby coerced into doing something that she otherwise would not have wanted to do, merely to avoid causing harm to her blackmailer by her omission.
E.g., it is emotional blackmail of this kind if someone threatens his romantic partner with suicide or self-harm, should his romantic partner choose to leave him. This kind of emotional blackmail is highly characteristic of borderline personality disorder, and the reasons for this are quite clear. Among other things, BPD combines (i) a blockage of empathy, (ii) a tendency to interpersonally exploit (e.g., by lying or otherwise manipulating others), (iii) a desperate avoidance of perceived abandonment, rejection, or criticism, and (iv) a tendency towards suicide or self-harm. Accordingly, if a person with BPD anticipates that he will be abandoned by his romantic partner (in those with BPD, such feelings are often so divorced from evidence that they verge on paranoid delusion), he could well stoop to manipulating or coercing his partner into staying with him, such as by threatening suicide or self-harm.
Anyway, this is the specific kind of act that I’ve always associated with ‘emotional blackmail’. But what makes this act an instance of emotional blackmail?
In an instance of standard blackmail, it is typical that the blackmailer is in possession of information or evidence that the victim is desperate to keep from someone, or from the public at large. The blackmailer leverages this information or evidence to his advantage. He threatens to expose the relevant information or evidence, in order to coerce his victim into doing something that she otherwise wouldn’t have done.
This gets to the heart of the ‘blackmail’ component of ‘emotional blackmail’. One person blackmails another person by unfairly leveraging some sort of advantage (or else leveraging an unfair advantage, such as stolen photographs or illegal surveillance footage or what have you) in order to coerce his victim into thwarting what would otherwise have been her preference. Thus, in effect, every blackmailer says something of the form ‘do this, or else’, where the else consists in the thwarting of a preference that is not the preference to avoid physical harm, and usually depends on the exploitation of some ill-begotten advantage. Accordingly, many instances of blackmail involve a threat of emotional harm; this is not exclusive to emotional blackmail. Emotional blackmail does not qualify as distinctively emotional because it involves a threat of emotional harm. Rather, it is distinctively emotional because of the kind of thing that is leveraged or exploited for the purpose of the threat. In a case of emotional blackmail, it is an emotion that is exploited or leveraged, rather than personal information or embarrassing evidence.
More specifically, emotional blackmail coerces a victim by leveraging her positive emotional attitudes towards her blackmailer. This emotional leverage is just as ill-begotten or unfairly obtained as stolen photographs or illegal surveillance footage. Presumably, the victim has formed the relevant postive attitudes to her blackmailer before she knew that he was capable of exploiting and coercing her in this way. Otherwise, she would not have cared about her blackmailer in a way that could be usefully exploited by him, for the purpose of coercion. Moreover, there must be a sense in which the victim cannot help but have these positive emotional attitudes to her blackmailer. They must be relatively stable and tenacious attitudes, such as romantic love or a familial bond. Otherwise, the attempt to emotionally blackmail the victim would presumably be enough to extinguish whatever positive attitudes she’d previously had. Since the victim’s attitudes are of the stable and tenacious sort, this puts her completely at the mercy of her emotional blackmailer, who clearly cannot be reciprocating the positive attitudes that he is using against her. The unfairness of the situation is worsened by the fact that the exploited emotional attitudes are positive in nature. I.e., the victim cares about her emotional blackmailer in some way, despite the fact that he is cruelly leveraging this against her and coercing her into doing something, not doing something, accepting something, or whatever it is.
In light of all this, we can see why the previously mentioned act qualifies as emotional blackmail. In this case, the blackmailer says something of the form ‘do this, or else’, where the else consists in either suicide or self-harm (henceforth, I shall simplify to just ‘self-harm’). Given the above discussion of emotional blackmail in general, there are two important factors that were previously left tacit, even though they are both necessary in qualifying this specific act as emotional blackmail.
First, this act presupposes, and exploits as leverage, the fact that the victim cares about her blackmailer in some way (and will continue to care about him even after he attempts to blackmail her). One could argue that we should care about whether any person is harmed, even if we do not have any special positive emotions towards the person. However, even if this normative claim is true, it is only the corresponding descriptive claim that matters. I.e., as it happens, we do not reliably care about others in this way, regardless of whether we should do so. Accordingly, if a person does care about another person in this way, it constitutes a special condition that is being exploited for the purposes of coercion.
The second necessary factor is also relevant here, which is that the act in question involves the threat of self-administered harm. Accordingly, there is a sense in which the blackmailer could avoid coming to harm, even if his victim does not do what he is demanding of her. The blackmailer has a choice, when it comes to the threatened harm. Whatever our general ethical attitudes to others might be, it is certainly not the case that we would continue to care about anyone, no matter who they were, even though they were coercing us with self-harm. Accordingly, it really is a special emotional attitude that the emotional blackmailer is exploiting, no matter how one looks at it.
Separately, the self-administration of the anticipated harm is necessary for the act to qualify as emotional blackmail. Otherwise, it could not be the case that the anticipated harm was being used to threaten the target, for the purpose of coercion. Rather, it would simply be predicted or reported that the individual was going to come to harm through no fault of his own, and that this harm would be prevented if the other person did a particular thing. This is just standard ethical duty, no matter how burdensome it might be, and however much it might thwart pre-existing preferences. There is no coercion here; and so there is no emotional blackmail. In order for there to be emotional blackmail in this sort of case, it is necessary that the anticipated harm to the blackmailer is self-administered. The mere ethical pressure to prevent harm cannot constitute emotional blackmail.
In sum, then, an act counts as emotional blackmail just in case it exploits or leverages the target’s positive emotional attitudes towards the actor, for the purpose of thwarting preferences that the target would otherwise have had.
Given this general analysis of emotional blackmail, it is clear that the discussed kind of emotional blackmail is not the only kind. It is just the one that I’ve always associated with the term ‘emotional blackmail’. In particular, there is a kind of emotional blackmail that looks very much like the opposite of the discussed kind of emotional blackmail (even if this dissimilarity proves to be superficial). Specifically, the narcissistic behaviours that revolve around stonewalling, discarding, threats of discarding, and expressions of indifference constitute a form of emotional blackmail. In such a case, the emotional blackmailer is effectively broadcasting that the victim is worthless or disposable to him, and that he is willing to ignore her, break his promises, abruptly abandon her, etc., in order to coerce her into doing something, not doing something, accepting something, or what have you.
This emotionally blackmailing behaviour presupposes and exploits the victim’s emotional bond to her blackmailer. A person could not be threatened and coerced in this way if it were not for the fact that she cared about her relationship with the blackmailer, would be hurt if he ignored her or dismissed her or displayed indifference or contempt towards her, and would be hurt if he abandoned her without trying to resolve the relevant conflict or problem cooperatively. It is certainly not true that we feel this way about everyone. This sort of emotional bond is relatively rare. Accordingly, most people are not in a position to exploit and coerce us in this way. Among other things, for a person to exploit and coerce us in this way, we must have invested a fair amount of trust in them. When this advantage is exploited by a blackmailer, it is ill-begotten inasmuch as the victim would not have formed the relevant emotional bond to the blackmailer if she’d known he’d treat her this way, and if she’d known that he didn’t genuinely reciprocate the bond.
In the earlier case of emotional blackmail (which is more characteristic of those with borderline personality disorder), the blackmailer exploits his victim’s positive emotions towards him by threatening self-harm. He thereby coerces her to stay with him. He coerces her in order to avoid being abandoned. However, in the case of emotional blackmail just discussed (which is more characteristic of those with narcissistic personality disorder), the blackmailer exploits the victim’s positive emotions towards him by actually threatening her with abandonment (or by displaying indifference towards her, or by giving her the silent treatment). He thereby coerces her into doing what he wants, in a manner that bypasses reason and conversation, and thereby completely circumvents the victim’s agency and consent. When an emotional blackmailer facilitates an emotional bond of the relevant kind and then leverages it against his target, he is thereby able to coercively control her or silence her. E.g., such a blackmailer will often coerce his target into not asking questions that are emotionally important for her, not bringing up how she is feeling, remaining silent when her boundaries have been violated or she has otherwise been harmed, and so on.
