Harmful Personalities, Guilt Mongers

It’s a very old kind of ruse. A strategy as old as the world itself, exercised by everyone who, at any given moment, needs to subdue another person. Dominate and have a sense of control. It is common in relationships, in those toxic relationships where we experience all kinds of emotions except happiness. But guilt does not live only at the emotional and couple level … there are many relationships with harmful personalities in which they can skilfully allow us to sharpen this feeling.

A relative who blames us for his loneliness and that we do not take care of them, a child who rebukes us that we love our little brother more than he … there are many faces that the “guilt spinner” has, and many victims who, in a given moment we have suffered. But you have to set limits. Protection limits where our emotions and feelings are not manipulated. It is worth delving a little deeper into this topic of harmful personalities. Seem to you?

Guilt or the feeling of false sadness

It is a double-sided coin whose sensation will be well known to you. When they make us feel guilty, what really pumps inside us is sadness. An uncomfortable, stinging sadness that really should be anger at being handled so coldly.

We prefer to shut up and accept that subtle deception into which they have made us fall, because deep down, we love the person who makes us feel guilty. We do not want to react in a blunt way so as not to end that relationship, or simply so as not to further complicate the situation. Once again they have abused our goodness and we feel bad, we feel that our self-esteem is eroding like a rock facing the sea continuously hit by the waves.

What can we do? What should we do when it is our partner who always likes to make us feel guilty? Or when they are our parents, for example, capturing our attention so that we are more with them? Not forgetting children, who from very early on can become skillful manipulators of their parents.

It is a very common reality in which we usually fall and from which it is difficult to know how to react. But we must do it for our own mental and emotional health. If we allow ourselves to be gagged with this type of harassing feelings, they will destroy us little by little, mining from the inside until we become a shadow of ourselves.

Defend ourselves from the guilt projected by harmful personalities

“You cannot refuse, with everything I have done for you it is the least you can do.” “I’m always the last on your priority list, you can tell you don’t love me anymore.” These phrases are undoubtedly the most common that we can hear from those people who are experts in emotional manipulation.

But bear in mind something, the harmful personalities that use this strategy are only going to get our resentment to grow. Our rage. And little by little it will poison us. The way in which we should set limits to this type of behavior would be the following. Do we take note? Excellent:

• Let that person know that you love them. That he is important to you, but that what he is asking or saying is not right. That this is not the way to do it because it makes you feel bad, unhappy and manipulated.

• Tell him that if he continues to behave in the same way, proposing things with double meaning or twisting words to make us look bad, what will end up causing you to be estranged. Make him understand that you don’t want that and that you don’t deserve to be treated in such a negative way either.
• Point out that what you really hope is for them to be more direct, to say the things they really feel without manipulating, and not for them to force us to do things we do not want by making us feel bad. Sincerity is what you value the most and it is what you expect from others. Manipulation is a form of abuse and it should be clear that it is not what you want.
• Also tell him that you need freedom of choice. There will be things that he proposes that you want to do and things that you do not, and that freedom of choice is basic for you. Not by saying “no” to something you love them less, at all, it is a way of respecting spaces, emotions and wills. Saying “no” is not being selfish, it is acting with freedom and also with love.

To conclude, we know that putting all these statements into practice is not easy, on the contrary, that it requires time and perhaps the occasional discussion. If the other person understands us – and respects us – it will be a real triumph and a rest. But if they don’t attend to us, if they turn a deaf ear and like to continue exercising the same behavior, it will be time to make decisions.

Think that the most important thing in life is to be happy. Have your personal and emotional balance, be able to get excited every day. If you only feel sadness, anger and resentment, your heart will already be poisoned….

Images: Melania Brescia.