Have you ever been in a relationship with a master manipulator?
I have, let me tell you, it could be a wild roller coaster ride.
One minute, you’re their favorite person in the world; the next, you’re garbage. They will tell you the things you want to hear and be the person you like them to be, but none of them will be true.
They will try to deceive you and control you.
I’m going to share with you seven hidden ways in which the master manipulator will manipulate your feelings through the story of a disastrous relationship you’ve been in for a long time. I have undergone all these manipulations and, like you may not, I have not realized this for the longest time.
I hope by sharing this story; you can avoid the pain and anguish you have been through.
1) they engage in love bombing.
When I first met Cindy, it was like being struck by lightning and surviving – it seemed rare and lucky.
I could not believe that this wonderful, sexy, and talented woman was interested in me.
But she made me believe it by pounding me like crazy.
Every day, there was another new, incredible surprise encounter.
She wants to send me gifts, do small favors for me, and even show up at my apartment unannounced in advance with a bottle of champagne and an evil smile.
She discovered my favorite snack food (the identity is kept secret to protect the waistline) and will make and feed it to me.
But most of all, she was telling me all the time how important I was to her, how much she cared about me, and, surprisingly early in the relationship, how much she loved me.
There was nothing subtle about it.
What was hidden, though, was that it was all done with a plan. It was not authentic, as I discovered much later, but a way to pull me in and implicate me.
And boy, Hello, I did it work!
2) they isolate you.
Things with Cindy were intense and exciting at first.
I knew it would go away, but at first, I couldn’t get enough of it. We spent all our time together so much that my friends started sending me text messages asking if I had died or moved to Kazakhstan.
So after a while, I started feeling like I was neglecting a lot of other relationships, and I wanted to get back to meeting the other important people in my life.
Well, Cindy wasn’t very interested in hearing that.
“What did I do wrong?”She asked me. “You know how much I care about you.”
This made me feel like I should think twice. I still started going out to see friends, but I was also really choosy about it. I always thought about her and whether she was free or not. If it was, I would have stayed in it.
Strangely, I didn’t think about her going out and seeing her friends or meeting her coworkers. It didn’t bother me, but I didn’t realize how that was a double standard.
I was already being manipulated, and I didn’t know it.
She wasn’t isolating me, she was making me want to isolate myself from her.
3) they will play the victim.
One thing about Cindy who has cheated on me for a long time is the number of friends she has.
At least, how much she has.
She was constantly talking about this person and this person, and because she was working at a talent agency, she was also telling stories about celebrities, especially juicy gossip.
But her stories were always full of incredible drama, and she seemed to have as many enemies as she had friends. It’s gotten to the point where I can barely follow the stories of who said What and who did what to whom.
When I couldn’t keep up or get the facts straight, she would get upset with me. I made her feel like I didn’t care about her life.
I just thought she had a very edgy personality, and she was kind of her lover or her hate type of person. But in her opinion, people were out to get her or were jealous of her all the time.
It seemed like a lot of work, and I started asking her why she didn’t change to another industry to get out of that mess. When I did, I acted as if I was telling her to give up and give up, and that upset her.
4) they will lie.
Admittedly, the main manipulator will lie to you.
I mean, all people lie, so it shouldn’t be surprising. It’s just to what extent they will invent things that can be shocking.
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With Cindy, it eventually became clear that her words were not in line with her actions, or with reality for that matter.
There were a lot of inconsistencies in what she told me to ignore. It did not help her that I am a detail-oriented person, and at that time, I had a wonderful memory.
I don’t know about it now!
Although I sometimes get lost in the web of stories about a friend and office drama, I still retained a lot of that information to the point where I was able to pick out when she contradicted herself.
She was telling me that she went out with two people last week and what drama unfolded after that. But later, she would tell a story about the same day but with different people and events.
If you ask her for an explanation, she will be really upset.
“Didn’t you say you went out with Peter and Tracy on Wednesday?”
“Are you calling me a liar?!”
That’s the way these conversations are going to go. I would be accused of not trusting her, but I had more and more reasons not to.
5) it will drain your emotions.
Before I met her, I was living a very quiet life.
I had a small circle of close friends and didn’t go out much except to exercise once or twice a week. I had a quiet office job with none of the drama that Cindy seemed to be experiencing non-stop.
But her life was wild.
She went out a lot for fun and her work, met a lot of people all the time, and worked unexpected hours.
It would seem that I should have had the energy to spare, and it should have been she who was always exhausted, but the opposite was so.
Now I know why.
She must have been some kind of energy vampire who was able to feed off my energy, leaving me drained while she got recharged.
She started to make me feel tired all the time, and this made me even more isolated because I didn’t have the energy to go out and see people.
6) they will get to control you.
I told you that I was young and somewhat inexperienced when I met with Cindy.
So, as hard as it is to say, I made some really bad choices in the relationship.
One of them was moving in together.
At the time, we spent every waking minute together,so it made sense. Anyway, why not save money on rent? But I moved to her place, and this means that she has much more strength than I did.
When we had fights, she’d threaten to throw me or tell me if I wasn’t happy, I would leave, but I didn’t have anywhere to go, and she knew it!
It was just one of the many ways she gained power and control over me.
7) they will gaslight you.
After a while, I began to feel that all this was adding up to something unhealthy.
But when I tried to talk to Cindy about this topic, she tried to make me confused and unsure of myself.
She was always saying things like, “I never said that, “and” it never happened, ” so much so that I was already beginning to doubt my version of reality.
But luckily for me, I had a good friend who somehow stuck by me through all of this. He explained to me what a Gas Light is.
I’ve never heard of him.
That was exactly what she was doing to me. It was a little here and there, but enough to always put me on the back foot and doubt myself.
But for every denial she made, my friend was able to say, “No, it happened. She told me about it weeks ago, and I was upset about it.”
The last words
Eventually, I was able to realize how messed up my relationship was and get out.
Believe me, Cindy wasn’t happy, but I was happier once I packed up and moved on with my life.
I hope you don’t recognize these seven subtle ways in which the master manipulator will manipulate your feelings. But if my story doesn’t resonate with you, it might be time for you to get away while you can.
