Michael Mitchell: Archive

"It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them."

--Confucius

This is the most important thing I look out for when I'm interacting with people: Are you communicating with my mind or with my "heart"?

The way I see it, my emotions are my responsibility, which means they're also none of your business, unless I let you in. If you say or do anything only to get an emotional reaction from me, you're crossing the line between my mind and yours, attempting to manipulate my emotions, to make me feel something in order to control me, rather than engaging with my intellect and respecting my psychological independence.

Chronologically, emotions actually come last in our experience with the world, but they're automatic responses -- to what we sense, perceive, identify and evaluate -- making them very easy to manipulate, because the whole process happens so fast, and the more emotion-driven you are the easier it is. If I know you just lost a family member, for instance, I know every time I say their name or whatever that you're going to feel something. If you can't mentally separate the emotion from its cause, then I can control your mind almost directly, simply by saying a name.

I think that's wrong, but most people are emotionalists, they place what they feel above what they think. They may or may not consciously understand how facts cause feelings, but it's the feelings that matter most to them, so communication itself, any form of socializing, is basically everyone just emotionally manipulating each other, deliberately seeking to cause emotions in others regardless of facts and values. The people emotionalists like and love, then, are the people who make them feel good and can trust not to use that manipulative power to hurt them, but eventually they come to psychologically depend on them, which always leads to disappointment and abuse because no one can really control someone else's emotions.

I'm not an emotionalist, so emotions themselves don't hold much power over me. I don't ignore or repress them. I understand them. I face and accept them. I identify them and their causes and change my values when necessary and my behavior accordingly when possible. I usually keep them to myself, too, for the same reason I wear clothes, not as a strict rule, but because I don't expect other people to manage them for me. No one's immune to emotional manipulation, but if you don't go by emotions yourself, if you go by reason instead -- which can be very difficult when you're in a heightened or extended emotional state, like when you've lost someone you love or you're depressed -- then it's impossible for others to use them against you.

Emotionalist or not, though, what you have to watch out for are people who are only "pushing your buttons", people who are not acting naturally, not expressing themselves honestly, who are hiding or faking their own values and feelings. It's that full context that matters. Run like hell from anyone who withholds honest self-expression in a relationship. They're controlling you.

You don't need to diagnose a relationship by searching for and reading into hundreds of signs or "tactics" that may or may not be justified depending on the circumstances. You don't need to study and analyze behavior patterns, either. Leave that shit to the professionals, most of whom really don't know any better than you do, unfortunately. If you think that's just the nature of human relationships, that they're just emotional battles for control, then you're doing them wrong, whether you want to control or be controlled. If you're socially interacting with someone and either of you are evading honest self-expression, you're not really socially interacting with anyone, and you don't need to know shit about human psychology to understand that.

That's the manipulator's trap. They think if they reveal their values and emotions that you'll try to manipulate them, so they guard them like weak spots in their armor, they withhold and fake them even while trying to "expose" yours in order to manipulate you. That's the "battle" and emotions are the "weapons". That's the tell you're dealing with a "toxic" person, one whom if given enough time will completely fuck your head up after you've ridden a roller coaster of emotions that were never a response to anything real -- assuming, of course, you're not guilty of emotional manipulation yourself, in which case you deservedly have no idea what's real because you sacrificed your self for a fake relationship.