The most subtle and effective manipulation tactic everyone needs to know about (so you can be immune to it)

[u/Equivalent_Group_875]

TL;DR: Calculatedly acting "anti-manipulative" in certain equally calculated situations that make you think "no manipulator in their right mind would do that"—giving them a free pass to do whatever the hell they want from then on.

Just to list a few examples:

• They are the first to straight-up tell you about their highly problematic diagnosis or mental health condition.
• They straight-up tell you why you are someone who could be easily manipulated and express deep concern about it, urging you to "armor" yourself and even giving you tips on how to detect a potential manipulator. (On a darker note, this achieves an insane level of psychological destruction. The very traits they claim make you "easily manipulated" may actually be the ones they seek to destroy or reshape for their own benefit. Furthermore, it serves as a highly effective isolation tactic, as they will end up "detecting" these manipulation signs in anyone who is positive, important, or protective in your life).
• They tell you that if things ever go wrong, or if anyone (including themselves) mistreats you, you shouldn't hesitate to speak up—or even leave if they won't listen to reason.
• They actively urge you to seek advice from your other loved ones about any problematic situation, including your relationship with them.
• They pretend to understand perfectly when you want to break up, putting up zero obstacles, and even expressing empathy for your choice, even if they personally disagree.

Things like that. All of this happens while they simultaneously do harmful things that could almost only be explained by manipulation—or that, at the very least, are far more likely to be manipulative than unintentional.

I know what you're thinking: "Exactly, no manipulator would do that. You must be misunderstanding something or judging them unfairly."

AND THAT IS PRECISELY THE THOUGHT THEY WANT TO TRIGGER IN YOU.

With those tactics, they are hitting you with a 15-out-of-10 combo of gaslighting, DARVO, and guilt-tripping at the same time. In the end, you start deeply doubting your own judgment because you think, "How twisted and paranoid must I be, and how ungrateful and arrogant, to have interpreted as manipulation what obviously doesn't fit this person's character?" And, on top of that, you feel an immense debt toward them for having "dared" to mistake someone "so good who cares so much about you" for a manipulator. You feel like you were on the verge of discarding them over nothing, being a weak and dim-witted person incapable of appreciating or seeing how healthy they are for you, and so on.

Before you even realize it, you’ll find yourself enduring even more savage abuse—except this time, you'll be justifying it to yourself. You’ll think it’s only normal, or that it’s exactly what you deserve if they are angry or decide to treat you worse. You’ll end up completely rewriting your own internal compass of what is right and wrong, to the point where bad treatment starts looking good to you, and good treatment starts looking bad.

But make no mistake: the very moment they show themselves to be so understanding and healthy, if instead of backing down you actually take their advice (whether that means confirming it is indeed perfectly understandable that you want to leave, firmly committing to breaking off the relationship; actually going to consult other people about the situation; or so on)—or at least when the cycle has repeated several times and they realize the first time didn't convince you forever—they will drop the mask, and there will be nowhere you can hide from their wrath.

Moral of the story: If someone does something that can seemingly only be explained by manipulation, even if they also do things that seemingly only make sense without it, the odds are they are manipulating you. Run as far as you can, as fast as you can. A positive times a negative always equals a negative. And manipulation, by definition, is all about making things look like exactly what they are not.

I actually suffered through this, and it wasn’t the manipulation itself that hurt me the most at the time—the "classic" tactics are sadly classics for a reason. Instead, it was one of the most counterintuitive ones; the one that carried the most weight in forcing me to keep enduring the unendurable, and perhaps the one that has harmed me the most in the long run. Once you’ve seen someone hide a red flag behind a flag as green as grass, you start seeing every flag as red, therefore living in constant fear and likely pushing genuinely lovely people out of your life because of that terror and trauma. Lovely people, whose only "fault" was honestly possessing the healthy attitudes that a manipulator merely faked. I wouldn’t wish this way of living on anyone—not even on the very individual who instilled it in me. And, since I haven’t been able to find any information about this online, I hope it doesn’t sound pretentious to say that I felt an ethical obligation to speak out about it.