Manipulation is prevalent in 2023. It has been for a very long time. Some may do it and don’t realize they are doing it while others may do it as a hobby to get their way hurting people along the way. Do you know what manipulation is? The Webster’s dictionary is “to control or play upon by artful, unfair, or insidious means especially to one’s own advantage”. The Oxford definition is “the action of manipulating something in a skillful manner or the action of manipulating someone in a clever or unscrupulous way”.
Manipulation is like a yo-yo. Imagine the string on the toy being manipulated around the circle being thrust up and down and around and around. This is the same repetitive motion people use to manipulate others. They have you up one minute and down the next. They will also have you going around in circles just to end back at the same place, going nowhere. Manipulation is an intentional and influential skill used to control others to get them to think, act and behave in a way needed by the manipulator to accomplish an objective or goal. A skill of entanglement. A skill used to fog your mind and clog your judgement; take away your sense of clarity. Its intent is to cause as much confusion as possible to hide what’s really in front of you. Manipulators are disturbed and they want you to be disturbed. Manipulators are emotionally and mentally dysfunctional and it’s their mission to entangle as many on their path in their web of messiness. They want you to question everything about your existence, cause you to dismantle self and view yourself as the problem when in essence the real problem is them. A manipulator will lie and have a convincing argument that is believable if you don’t have the gift of discernment.
Manipulation is something I know all too well. I’ve allowed people to manipulate me more times than I can count. You name it, I’ve heard it and experienced it. I thank God for the gift of discernment. It took me a while to come to my senses and become wise, get from beneath the spell of others and to set healthy boundaries for myself. It took me a while to get “hip” to the skill others were using on me; taking my kindness for weakness and my willingness to see the good in people as an opening to use me. For example, I’ve been told by someone “I’m going to take a trip to see if I can handle it alone”. When asked for the location where this person would stay, I got the excuse that “the system is down, and it isn’t giving me the booking information”. I also was told, “no, I didn’t receive a confirmation email”. And the ultimate lie, “I can send you the host information” knowing full well that if I chose to call, I would not be given any information about the booking from the host because I wasn’t going to be a guest. Why lie, I asked myself? I didn’t ask for a lie or for them to be untruthful to themselves. I pose the question, how hard is it for a person to tell the truth? Why waste time convincing someone of something when clearly, it is a lie? Awareness took over. I realized I can’t do anything to stop a person from being untruthful, but I can stop listening to them by not associating with them. I can stop them from feeding me lies by simply taking their position in my life and terminating it. Another occasion that I remember is a family member asking for money when I asked for help with something non-monetary. Only to find out they sold an item they were committed to using to help me with. They got upset with me because it took longer than they expected. Not knowing the person that purchased the item was upset because the person who helped me didn’t stay committed to their word. How is that fair I wondered? How is that my fault? Why do I have to feel guilty about something someone else created? Well, I didn’t, in either instance. I let it be. Did I get upset? Sure because of the lies and their insensitive actions and behavior towards me to manipulate me but not because of anything else relating to emotion. Emotions you have to control not the other way around.
One way to combat manipulation is to get with someone you trust and talk to them revealing what was told to you. The reason behind this is not to gossip, not to seek validation, not to question or test what your intuition is telling you. Repeating what a manipulator has said to you out loud helps you hear clearer and really understand what they were saying to you. It’s a different type of revelation when you hear yourself repeating a lie out loud to someone else. A person other than yourself brings value to the situation. They help because they aren’t confused, they have clarity and discernment to recognize if they are being told a lie and can smell manipulation a mile away. They aren’t close to the manipulator or the situation so they can immediately recognize it.
Surrender it all….. The manipulators. The lies. The inability of discernment. The acceptance of a false reality. The trust of another human being completely. The only person you can trust completely is God. You trust humans at the length they are willing to go to display their trustworthiness. Read that again if you missed it. When you are aware, have clarity, and master listening and trusting your intuition you will not be easily manipulated and controlled. Free your mind and then free yourself of manipulators.
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