How Can You Take Back Power From a Manipulative or Controlling Person?
It's time for you to stop allowing other people to decide the course of your life.
Most of the people who land on my blogs get here on the back of bad relationships and traumatic childhoods. Life hasn’t been kind to them, and they’ve learned to think poorly of themselves along the way. In many cases, this has created individuals who get trapped in toxic cycles with manipulative people. Low on themselves, they allow dangerous people in to pull their strings and coerce them.
Breaking this cycle of manipulators is hard. Their controlling behaviors undermine our central idea of self, and create this idea that we have to accept what they do to us. It’s not true. We can break through the pattern and find a better way to live and relate to the people who populate our lives.
The sneaky ways manipulative people steal your power.
A manipulative person rarely takes power, out in the open where everyone can see it. They convince us to give our power away, little by little, over time. By lying to us, and convincing us that we are worthless, powerless, or otherwise unlovable, we give them to reign over our lives. We let them choose how our relationships look and even what our life feels like with them.
Every manipulator is different. Some manipulators use guilt and others will stage elaborate stories and lies which play out over time. No matter how it occurs, you end up powerless on the other side and they end up on top of whatever pile they value most.