EMOTIONAL MANIPULATION GAS LIGHTING- A FAVORITE TOOL OF MANIPULATION FOR A NARCISSIST

ALOK MIGLANI

No.8, 3rd Cross Street,CIT Colony, Mylapore, Chennai, Tamil Nadu-600004 Copyright © Alok Miglani All Rights Reserved. ISBN 978-1-64983-376-1 This book has been published with all efforts taken to make the material error-free after the consent of the author. However, the author and the publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause. While every effort has been made to avoid any mistake or omission, this publication is being sold on the condition and understanding that neither the author nor the publishers or printers would be liable in any manner to any person by reason of any mistake or omission in this publication or for any action taken or omitted to be taken or advice rendered or accepted on the basis of this work. For any defect in printing or binding the publishers will be liable only to replace the defective copy by another copy of this work then available.

This book is dedicated to my loving parents Ved Miglani and Kusum Miglani , my wife Dr Pratibha Miglani, Clinical Pschyologist and in memory of my sister Monika Miglani who are always an inspiration to me.

Contents Preface

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1. Narcissist- The Manipulators

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2. Traits Of Controlling Personalities

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3. Gas Lighting –a Favorite Tool Of Manipulation For A

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Narcissist 4. Effects Of Gaslighting

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5. How Narcissists Control You ?

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6. How To Avoid Mental Manipulation

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7. Assessing A Relationship With A Controlling Person

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8. How To Resolve A Controlling Relationship?

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9. Detecting And Deflecting Manipulative Or Controlling

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Behavior Conclusion

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Preface "Until you realize how easily it is for your mind to be manipulated, you remain the puppet of someone else’s game." ~ Evita Ochel Imagine you have met him- he is charming, funny, and seems entirely interested in listening to you. He seems perfect what you have dreamt for. He brings for you flowers, gifts, bunch of chocolates, showing love that no person can love you even more than he does and seems like a great guy. The man who once was kind, caring, attentive when you first met to feeling somewhat different including change in behavior and personality. You find yourself shifting from feeling like you were adored to suddenly demanding like you can’t do anything right or think your own when he’s around, and just the sight of him can be enough for you to feel like you cannot even breathe. You are miserable—in love, desperately so, but you cannot deny that the love that you are feeling is also incredibly emotionally painful. Many of the emotional pains we deal with in our society hinder us from making those critical significant steps toward real and lasting happiness. They prevent us from moving forward and making our world the ideal place that it should be. One of the most destructive emotional ills our society suffers from is Covert emotional manipulation. Covert emotional manipulation tactics are underhanded methods of control. These deceptive tactics act to change your behavior and perceptions. Covert manipulation operates under the level of your conscious awareness. Victims usually do not realize they are being manipulated while it is happening. Emotional manipulation can be so subtle and undercover that it can control you for a long time before you figure out what’s happening, if you ever do at all. Some manipulators are highly skilled. They are described as puppet masters, and you could

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unknowingly become a puppet if you don’t know the signs. As your strings are pulled this way and that, you do just what the puppet master wants you to do. You think you’re acting from your own free will, but you are not. If you’re a victim of manipulation you probably know something is wrong, but you’re not quite sure what it is. You might even suspect you’re being manipulated but you don’t know for sure if you are or how it’s being done. One thing you do know is that you want answers. Are you being manipulated or not? Actually, it is easier and more obvious than you might think it is. It’s smart to learn the techniques of covert emotional manipulation and who are these kind of peoples but the truth is you don’t have to know anything at all about the techniques to know if you’re being manipulated. You only need to look at yourself to know if manipulation is at play. Who are these manipulative people? The most skillful and dangerous manipulators are those included in psychology’s "Dark Triad." Psychopathic, narcissistic and Machiavellian personalities(personality trait describing a manipulative individual who deceives and tricks others to achieve goals) lack empathy and manipulate in a planned and purposeful way for their own personal gain, no matter the cost to someone else. They are callous, insensitive, aggressive and opportunistic individuals who use others and act out against them to achieve their own ends. It is entirely possible to have a member of the Dark Triad as your partner, friend, neighbor, relative, coworkers or boss. They attempt to hide who they really are by creating a seemingly normal—and often a charming and likeable—persona, but their malicious intent remains active behind the mask. These individuals are detrimental to the mental health of anyone who has close contact with them. These individuals are likely to be impulsive and may engage in dangerous behavior—in some cases, even committing crimes—without any regard for how their actions affect other.

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Narcissistsare self-centered and arrogant people who lack empathy for others. They live in their own world and believe they are unique and special. Hence, they always seek attention and praise from others. These group of people only seek to serve their own needs and won’t mind using people as a means for their ends. They don’t even think about how their behavior affects others, and this is why they find it so easy to use gaslighting techniques in their relationships. A narcissist will frequently use gaslighting, as a narcissist’s goal is to disorient the victim to gain total control over them. A narcissist achieves this aim by gradually sowing seeds of doubt in the victim’s mind, and in the end, the narcissist controls the victim to do their bidding. Gaslighting”refers to a manipulative psychological tactic employed to make someone doubt their sanity. A manipulator tries to get someone to question their reality and perceptions. Gaslighting occurs in personal relationships, professional relationships, and in some other cases, gaslighting is used by public figures to alter the perceptions of targeted members of the population. Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse as it can make you start to doubt your ability to perceive reality correctly. It can make you think you didn’t see what you thought you saw or hear what you thought you heard; you start to wonder if you can trust the information you are getting from your five senses. Moreover, this, in turn, will make you begin to think that there must be something wrong with you, and you will begin to doubt your sanity. Gaslighting creates an abusive situation which can cause serious health problems if the victim continues to be in such a position for a long time. It’s essential to be aware of the signs that you or someone you know might be a victim of gaslighting, as this awareness is the first step to getting out of the negative situation. The first step to take towards being free from gaslighting is to recognize precisely what gaslighting is as it is often so hard to recognize the signs of gaslighting because the techniques used in

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gaslighting affect the mind so much that after a long period the victim doesn’t trust the thoughts of their mind. This book aims for promotion to understand the characteristics of these kind of manipulative personalities and how can we identify them and deal with it. This book is written with a more concise aim of exposing the extent to which narcissists as people use gaslighting as a means of manipulation. It is one thing to recognize what gaslighting is, and it is another to know how narcissists operate with it, how narcissists seek to control and abuse victims physically and mentally; it exposes the words they say and the actions they take to abuse victims.

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CHAPTER ONE

Narcissist- The Manipulators The Narcissist, simply put, is someone suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder. These tend to be incredibly difficult to identify simply because they are always changing. The narcissist rarely has one particular personality type—they shift who they are constantly in order to show other people who they think they need to be in order to win over their targets. Narcissists are predators—they hunt other people as their prey, searching for the right personality type to latch onto and draw from. They feed off of admiration and respect, and they seek to get it at any cost. They will find their targets, win them over with love, affection, and pleasantries, and then when they are confident that the other person is so deeply enamored with them that there is no reason or way they would ever make it a point to try to escape, the more sinister abuse and manipulation comes out. Psychological traits of Narcissist person Below are some common traits that a narcissistic personis likely to have however the degree to which these traits manifest themselves will vary largely depending on the individual. • Lack of empathy, unwillingness/inability to recognize and honor the needs and feelings of others. • Manipulative or controlling behavior.

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• • • • • •

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A grandiose sense of self-importance. Sense of entitlement or superiority. Strong need for admiration. Focus on getting one’s own needs met, often ignoring the needs of others A preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love A belief that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by or should associate with similar high-status people and organizations. unreasonable expectation of special treatment. A tendency to use others for their own needs or wants. A sense of arrogance shown in behaviors and/or attitudes. Higher levels of aggression. Difficulty taking feedback about their behavior.

A narcissist is anyone who suffers from Narcissism Personality Disorder (NPD). The cause of this disorder is not known, but psychologists link NPD to the environment, genetics and neurobiology. It is essential to understand the behaviors of individuals who suffer from NPD because most times we don’t know what a narcissist looks like and the behaviors of these individuals are what points them out as narcissists. A narcissist can be said to be someone who exhibits more than one of the following behaviors: Constant Need for Attention and Validation Someone who shows a continuous need for attention might be a narcissist, it might be by physically being all over you or constantly saying words to demand your attention. Narcissists can’t selfvalidate, and so they continuously look for other people to approve of them and no matter what others say to validate them, they never feel it is enough, and will always want more. No matter how much you say “I love you” or “I admire you” to a narcissist, they never feel it is enough. They continually attempt to evoke recognition and

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endorsement from others to support their delicate self-image, but regardless of the amount they are given, they always need more. Demand for Control all the Time Narcissists will demand that you say and do precisely what they have in mind so that they can achieve their ideal goals. A narcissist sees you internally as a character in their own script, not a genuine individual with your own thoughts and sentiments. When you don’t behave as a narcissist expects you to behave, they become very disturbed because they don’t know what to expect from you next as you are now operating outside of their scripts. The need for control stems out of the narcissist’s ideals. Narcissists don’t want to believe life is imperfect and they want to control and mold life into what they envision, so they always want to be in control of everything. Entitlement The narcissist sees themselves at the top of the world with everyone beneath their feet. In their heads, they are entitled to the best, and they have to be the best, the richest, the greatest and so on. By being entitled, they don’t see the world for what it is; they see the world in binary, either good or bad, and they are either superior or inferior beings. They feel everything must be done their way and they must own and control everyone. Perfectionism Is there anyone in your life who believes everything should be perfect and is dissatisfied continuously when life doesn’t play out the way they envisioned it? The narcissist has an extremely high need for everything to be perfect. They believe they should be perfect, you should be perfect, events should happen exactly as they expected. This is an excruciatingly impossible demand, which results in the narcissist feeling dissatisfied and miserable much of the time. Refusing Responsibility At the point when things don’t go as planned, the narcissist puts all the fault on others. It must always be another person’s deficiency and not theirs. To keep up the façade of flawlessness, narcissists consistently need to accuse some other person or a thing.

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Absence of empathy Narcissists have next to no capacity to empathize with others. They are too self-absorbed to comprehend what other individuals are feeling. They are also rarely apologetic, remorseful, or guilty. Narcissists likewise come up short on a comprehension about the idea of emotions. They don’t see how their feelings happen. They think their emotions are brought about by a person or thing outside of themselves. They don’t understand that their emotions are brought about by their very own natural chemistry and thought patterns. This absence of sympathy makes genuine relationships with narcissists very difficult. They simply don’t see what any other individuals are feeling. Invulnerability Narcissists are quick to jump from one relationship to the other because they desperately want someone to identify with them and feel their pains but are not willing to respond to the feelings of the other person. The reason for this is that it takes a little vulnerability to keep relationships. Relationships are all about caring and sharing, because of the narcissist’s inability to understand feelings, their lack of empathy, and constant need for self-security, narcissists can’t genuinely love or connect on an emotional level with other people. They cannot see the world from anyone else’s perspective. Inability to work as part of a team Being insightful and cooperating with other people requires a genuine comprehension of other’s feelings. A narcissist can’t genuinely understand other peoples’ feelings and won’t give up anything for the benefit of others. Narcissists are also compulsive liarswho will go to great lengths to gain power and control over others. The willingness to do anything just to control the actions of others makes gas lighting easy to them for use, and since gas lighting is lying with a goal, the goal of the narcissist is to gain control over the action of another. Narcissists will use shame and confusion to isolate victims. The narcissist’s goal is often to make the target entirely dependent on

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them alone, and in a bid to control the victim they will incite fear with words and actions that will make the victim withdraw from loved ones. This withdrawal from loved ones makes it easy for narcissists to abuse victims even more as there are no persons of the third-party present to rescue the victims. Narcissists have a compulsive need to be perfect people at all times, so gas lighting comes in handy in making other peoples’ perception of an event a wrong one and to show and convince that they are right at all times. Narcissists have huge egos, and they only know how to love themselves. They will go to great lengths to have people perceive them in a certain way. They often tell stories of grandeur and think that there is no one better than them. Most narcissists are charismatic and can draw the attention of a crowd very easily. This can make it easy to fall for them and for them to gain control of you and your life. Recognizing a narcissist early on is the best defense against them. Malignant narcissists can be highly manipulative, and they don’t care who they hurt as long as they get their own way. They see the world in black-and-white terms, including seeing others as either friend or foe. They seek to win at all costs and generally leave a great amount of pain, frustration, and even heartache in their wake. They generally don’t care about the pain they cause others—or may even enjoy it and experience it as empowering—and will do what it takes to prevent themselves from loss, inconvenience, or failing to get what they want in any situation. All of us have dealt at one time or another with controlling people. Quite surely, it is an experience that is neither pleasant nor empowering. More often than not, they leave scars that are not so easily forgotten.

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