How do you like to manipulate people?

 

Today I thought I’d write about some of my personal favourite ways.

If you think I’m joking, I most certainly am not!

And if you think that you are “above” the subtle art of manipulation, think again – we all do it.

 

If that ruffled your feathers a bit (as it did mine the first few years I was confronted with that truth), let’s ease into things then with an inquiry.

 

Why do we manipulate?

 

Although we start to do it at a very young age, it’s not the default starting off point. What happened and when did it happened?

We are relational beings – we are actually designed that way. Our nervous system is designed to attune to our primary caregivers, primarily our mother, but we also attune to our fathers and in certain circumstances, substitute caregivers in a very deep, symbiotic way for our survival.

As babies, we communicate our needs, our desires, directly – no holding back on a baby’s belting wail. Unless of course we are trained otherwise, as babies we do not filter for the most part what we need and when.

Somewhere between wailing lungs and learning more sophisticated ways of communication through language, our nature of direct communication starts to change. We are being trained by our caregivers to fit into the tribe so that we can thrive and survive.

Unfortunately our cultural indoctrination also comes with consequence – we learn it’s no longer ok to ask for what we want, when we want it, directly.

 

Little by little we are told that we are being selfish, or that we must wait our turn. We are taught that there is a particular order to the way the world works that we must follow in order to “all get along”.

 

This cultural indoctrination is important on an instinctual level to our parents for survival but it also does something else.

We have to get creative about getting our needs met. We adapt.

 

Obviously I am oversimplifying, but the core essence is that most of us at some point or another learn that how we are (that often gets interpreted as who we are) isn’t ok to the people who care for us – the ones we need for some time to stay alive.

 

One of our most basic, core need (yes need) is for meaningful connection. We are a tribal species. We are not designed to be isolated or separate – it can literally kill us (if you don’t believe me, just do some Google Scholar searches on the Romanian orphanage studies). So it isn’t much of a surprise to me that our main patterns of manipulation involve how we relate to others.

 

Relationships.

The more intimate, the more high stakes.

The more high stakes, the more likely we are to trigger our survival instincts, that play out our indoctrinated patterns from childhood (and not in a good way).

 

Being “nice”.

 

It’s become clearer and clearer to me that this is a huge personal manipulative pattern for me.

Being told that “good things happen to nice people” and fundamentalist religious indoctrination about God and Goodness made being nice an essential path to protect myself from the “bad”.

Wouldn’t we all live in a better world if we were just nice to each other?

Just typing that makes me cringe.

Because it’s bullshit and we all know it.

Performing a certain way to please other people just broods resentment in us.

It’s the toxic positivity culture.

It’s completely dishonest in so many ways.

We all know what that feels like.

The disgust we try to hide when we are talking to someone we know is being “fake nice” to us.

It’s just fucking gross!

We know we are being lied to – and to our faces!

The cloak of “niceness” gives us a superiority complex – think the “Rescuer” archetype in the victim triangle.

It makes us feel like we are “better than” “not nice” (but honest) people because we are somehow better able to hide our humanity through a thin veil of socially acceptable lies.

 

Doesn’t sound so “nice” when I put it that way, does it?

 

“Niceness” also traps us in a performative cycle that actually disconnects us from our real needs and our true, honest humanity.

It creates Martyrs and then we are victimized by our sacrifices because we are so deeply ingrained with being nice.

We are trapped in this perpetual cycle – damned if we do and damed if we don’t.

Literally.

 

I’ve been contemplating this in my own being recently. I’ve been looking at all of the ways that I manipulate how I am perceived by others. I often ask “what am I hiding”? What am I ashamed of asking for? When/where did I absorb this belief that shaped my own sense of value and worth as a human being?

 

On a personal note, I learned very early on that the world by large is not by default “nice”.

I was bullied so severely throughout my whole childhood, adolescent, and teen years. But my indoctrination was that I would be “likeable” and that maybe people would be nice to me if I was nice to them.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact location of where my own personal rootedness to niceness came from, however, I see and feel it’s impact in my everyday life.

It’s where I “put on a face” or put on my persona out in the world. It’s the place where I get tired being out in the world with other people “playing” a certain role – a certain way of being.

If you think you are immune, think again.

 

Often these patterns are so “natural” and subconscious, we don’t even realize we are doing it.

We are not purposely manipulating and deceiving – it’s just how we think it is.

 

This is the tricky part of our own performative nature – we don’t realize we are performing while we are doing it.

It’s so seamless and natural we actually believe it’s who we are.

But here is the contact point – the place where the subconscious becomes conscious.

Here, in the places that rub up against who we think we are and the places, people, circumstances that challenge us, is the sacred space – the gap between unawareness and awareness.

It’s an uncomfortable space, certainly, for it challenges our very essence and core survival instincts.

It’s what we would literally kill to protect.

 

That’s one of the reasons that unraveling these learned patterns is so tricky and sticky – they are literally woven into the fabric of our nervous system. We think our survival as a species depends on them.

 

For me personally, I’ve had to lay down a significant foundation of work through healing – over 10 years of healing, unwinding, and nervous system regulation – to get to this place where I can be with my own stuff.

Without a foundation we can rest into, we just constantly trigger our survival mechanisms, leading to burnout, frustration, and further ingraining the beliefs that we are broken.

 

In my personal experience, my journey to claiming all of my humanity, bit by bit, has been one of the most powerful and liberating experiences here on earth. It’s why we are here – to learn.

We are here to learn.

We are not here to be perfect, or nice, or perfect.

We are here to learn.

 

As I play with shedding my skin of “niceness”, little by little, letting go of my need to perform for others to be liked, loved, accepted, I enter into foreign territory – the Great Mystery.

The Void.

Will you join me there?