30 Tactics Emotional Abusers Use to Manipulate and Control: Coercive Control
Emotional abuse is a form of manipulation that can leave deep psychological scars, often making it difficult for victims to recognize what’s happening. Abusers use subtle and overt tactics to control, belittle, and destabilize their targets. Understanding these tactics is crucial to protecting yourself or helping someone you care about. Below are 30 common strategies used, often as a part of coercive control, by emotional abusers:
- Intermittent Reinforcement: Alternating between kindness and cruelty to keep the victim off-balance and seeking approval.
- Passive-Aggression: Indirect hostility frustrates the victim, like backhanded compliments or subtle sabotage.
- Gaslighting: Abusers distort reality to make the victim doubt their perceptions, memory, or sanity. Phrases like “That never happened” or “You’re imagining things” are typical in this form of psychological abuse.
- Grooming and Re-grooming: Showering the victim with excessive affection and attention, creating a dependency that will later be exploited.
- Breadcrumbing: Providing minimal affection, attention, or communication to keep the victim emotionally invested without offering genuine commitment. It creates false hope.
- Future Faking: Promising a future that never materializes to manipulate the victim into staying. This could include promises of marriage, children, or financial stability.
- Exploitation of potential: Similar to future faking, it is about making promises of growth, change and improvement that are either unattainable or not the intention.
- Silent Treatment: Withdrawing all communication to punish or control the victim, leaving them feeling isolated and desperate for reconciliation.
- Triangulation: Involving or recruiting a third party (another person or even a hypothetical person) to implant fear and create insecurity, punishment or competition in the victim.
- Devaluing: Subtly or overtly belittling the victim, eroding their confidence and self-worth over time.
- Intimidation: Using threats, raised voices, or physical presence to create fear and compliance without direct violence.
- Stonewalling: Refusing to engage in conversation or share emotions, effectively blocking resolution to conflicts.
- Projection: Accusing the victim of the very behaviours or attitudes the abuser exhibits, deflecting blame and causing confusion.
- Bully Victim Switch: Portraying themselves as the one who’s been wronged in response to being challenged to gain sympathy and avoid accountability.
- Minimization: Downplaying the victim’s feelings or experiences makes them feel invalidated or overly sensitive. Instead of working through tough emotions, they are dismissed.
- Financial Abuse: Restricting access to money, monitoring spending, or sabotaging financial independence to create dependency. This can also happen when someone refuses to do their part to carry out financial responsibility.
- Public Humiliation: Making disparaging comments about the victim in front of others to demean them.
- Sarcasm as a Weapon: Using “jokes” or sarcastic remarks to mock or belittle the victim under the guise of humour.
- Isolation: Gradually cutting the victim off from friends, family, and support networks to gain control.
- Guilt-Tripping: Using guilt to manipulate the victim into compliance, often through phrases like, “After everything I’ve done for you…”
- Bating: Using a person’s valid anger and frustration at the abuse as a weapon against them to inflict psychological, emotional and often legal damage. Also known as Reactive Abuse
- Blame-Shifting: Deflecting responsibility for their actions by blaming the victim or external factors.
- Emotional Withholding: Refusing to provide emotional support, affection, or validation leaves the victim feeling neglected.
- Boundary Pushing: Repeatedly testing and violating the victim’s boundaries erodes their sense of autonomy.
- Hoovering: After a breakup, attempting to pull the victim back into the relationship through manipulative gestures or false promises.
- Shaming: Making the victim feel bad about themselves, often for things they cannot control, to maintain dominance.
- Exploiting Insecurities: Using the victim’s vulnerabilities, fears, or insecurities against them to assert control.
- Love Withdrawal: Withholding love or approval as a form of punishment forces the victim to “earn” it back.
- Blurred Boundaries: Intentionally confusing the victim about acceptable behaviour in the relationship to maintain control.
- Weaponized Incompetence: Pretending to be incapable or overly dependent guilts the victim into taking on their responsibilities.
How to Recognize and Address Emotional Abuse
If these tactics feel familiar, you might be in an emotionally abusive situation. Recognizing the signs is the first step toward reclaiming your power. Seek support from trusted friends, family, or a mental health professional.
Remember, these are control & abuse tactics, not conflict resolution. Actual conflict resolution involves empathy, listening to understand, and mapping ways forward that are mutually beneficial. You deserve respect, love, and kindness. Abuse, no matter how subtle, is never acceptable.
If you need support with this or any other challenge you are going through, please contact us at https://diversepathswellness.com/
Because somethings should not be carried alone.