We have talked a lot about violence, scourges, punishments and authority, about limits and capricious upbringing, but I wanted to address now a deeply recorded issue in our way of relating to children and also, sometimes, to other people, and it is emotional blackmail.
I want to focus on analyzing the ways and consequences of resort to emotional blackmail to control or channel children's behavior to help us recognize it and look for other healthier alternatives to communicate.
We all use the emotions of others unconsciously. But when we use them to harm, control and intimidate the other for fear of fear of losing our love, we are making a abusive use of love when using fear to impose ourselves.
What is emotional blackmail
Emotional blackmail is a form of manipulation very powerful in which close and emotional people threaten us, directly or indirectly, to punish us in some way if we do not do what they want.
The best way to define it is to say that it is about a form of psychological violence in which, through the threat, it is achieved that a person emotionally united to the aggressor, do what he wants for fear of losing it or losing the respect of other people also important to him emotionally.
In emotional blackmail the other is manipulated using his emotions and especially fear to, with intimidation and threat, overcome the will of the other and get him to do what we want. Guilt and fear of losing someone you love are the weapons of emotional blackmail.
Recognize emotional blackmail among adults
In adult relationships this can be easily detected, in theory. Like all forms of violence, the victim may not be able to recognize that he is suffering, especially if he has a previous history, even in childhood, of this type of emotional violence.
If her parents blackmailed her she may have more difficulty recognizing or defending emotional blackmail, since she has internalized it as normal.
But let's see first, before returning to children, the way it manifests emotional blackmail among adults. Then, having recognized it, on this basis, we will see how it is exercised on children.
If another adult makes us emotional blackmail we can identify him. There are typical phrases in insane relationships, especially those of a couple, that should alert us: "if you leave I kill myself", "you are nothing without me", "if you leave you will not see your children", "if you do not give what I want I will go find it outside "," if you do not do what I want, I will not love you, or I will abandon you "," I would not know how to live without you "," if you leave now, do not come back ".
Our family and friends can also blackmail us, forcing us to do things that we do not want to blackmail us with threats or simply by not loving each other or telling us that if we really loved them, we would give in.
The emotional blackmailer towards adults comes to use shared secrets in intimacy to coerce the other and seeks obedience and submission as an objective, even believing that the use of violence is justified, because the other does not perceive him as a free person, but as someone to whom dominate and from whom to extract benefits or actions that the manipulator wants.
The blackmailer screams or cries, threatens, breaks things, hits blows against the walls, threatens suicide or takes the children, adjusts accounts or tells you that he will reveal private secrets if you do something he does not want you to do. Use the fear of losing your love, your company, your respect or that of others we love to control and keep us subdued.
Threatens even with killing yourself or with which he will die because of you, of the dislikes you give him, if you don't give in and, for example, you will eat Sunday at his house or put the curtains on him or end an unsatisfactory love affair.
When the victim is a child
When the person who performs the blackmail has a position of power over the victim the violence is more serious, because the victim, who depends on his aggressor emotionally and even materially, has no possible way out. All the resources and expressions we have cited in blackmail between adults are also used, but more frequently and normally, towards children, even if they are made subtly or blind to them.
If the victim is a child and who emotionally blackmails are his parents, grandparents or teachers, the helplessness is even greater, because the child has not developed the psychic resources to defend himself and, in addition, he is receiving the implicit message that the adult person who naturally takes as a model considers this way of controlling the one who depends on she.
That is to say, the victim has many possibilities to repeat that resource and use emotional blackmail to get what she wants. And he will use it with his own children, because he will not have received better tools to communicate with them and he will have received the message from his parents that doing emotional blackmail to children is something to which adults are entitled.
But I would like us to consider what makes emotional blackmail harmful when the victim is an adult and what makes society normalized if the victim is a child. Do youAdults have the right to blackmail children?
