How to understand that parents are manipulating you
Text: Olga Miloradova
In the process of growing up, someone influenced us all. - not only parents and teachers at school, but also friends, and those who were significant to you - maybe a coach from the sports section, or maybe a high school student from the next doorway. But still, let's say your parent was the significant "other". If we talk about the manipulations you are doing today, then, most likely, they did not suddenly appear out of nowhere when you suddenly grew up, and your parents grew old and started pulling your strings, asking for something, crying and manipulating you. You were prepared for them all conscious life, created the soil, and everything is much more complicated than it seems.
Real parental manipulations are not so easy to recognize, because you have grown together with them
For example, you see "manipulation", which you immediately slyly stop: you would like to go with your child to Italy, and your mother says "no" and demands to bring him to her in the village (city, country or somewhere else). This is most likely not a manipulation, but a real desire of your mother to see a grandson, accompanied by senile changes of organic type in the form of touchiness and tearfulness. And yes, you end up frustrating not your cunning, cunning plan, but your mother. Real parental manipulations you do not recognize so simply, if only because you are in fact merged with them into a coherent whole. To confront them and defend their identity and desires can be very difficult. It’s worth starting with sorting out possible types of manipulations, or rather types of programs, in which you have been raised and thanks to which you are pulled in one direction or another, and as a result, that manipulation is so easy. Perhaps in one of the schemes described you will recognize yourself and your parents and understand why some things are given to you so hard.
The first two programs are diametrically opposed to each other. One is to ensure that you remain Peter Pan forever and never grow up, while the other, on the contrary, deprives you of your childhood and puts all the "joys" of responsibility on you. The program of Peter Pan forms in you a person who is always in need of an adult being around - it is clear what kind of manipulation is possible here: you are not smart enough, independent and responsible to make any decisions, therefore parents are always right, or right who will further assume the function of the parent. What to do? Try to regain the right to vote, to take responsibility. The main pitfalls here and further are that, in fact, you will not change your parents and, most likely, they will still accompany all your actions with comments that nothing will come of it. It is necessary to strive to ensure that "do not give in", to maintain calmness and confidently do what you want. However, confidence is the first thing any manipulation hits, and it is very difficult not to pay attention to what your close people say to you. But if you realize that you are trying to manipulate, this is the first step to cope with the situation.
The second program - always responsible - in terms of manipulation is not so far gone from the first. Despite your super-adulthood, but rather, thanks to the ban on being a child, you didn’t particularly explore the world, both outside and inside, you don’t know and do not know where your own desires and values are and you are ready to lie with your bones just to help others . As a result, the same thing happens: all things are done, potatoes are planted in the country, parents are happy. What do you do? Trying to find an inner child, make friends with him, heal him. Until this happens, unfortunately, little will change, and you will play superhero to the last strength and health balance. Try to listen to your desires, analyze what you really want and what is important for you, increase the awareness of what you are doing - and do not be afraid to seek help from a specialist if necessary.
Next on the list - the prohibition to be yourself. The girl Masha learns better, the girl Sasha is more graceful, and the boy Kirill helps her mother to take care of her younger sister - not like you. This program has the following space for manipulations: you do not understand what is good for you and what is the meaning of life, not to mention that you think that you are not good enough - but then, as always, the parent knows. By whom to work, for whom to marry, when to reduce mother to opera, and father to theater. In short, this is a program of living someone else's life, or the life that your parent dreamed about, but never lived, and now counts on you. A careful and painstaking work is needed to find the meanings of life - the real meanings of yours, the work of regaining self-esteem. Analyze how you are guided when making decisions - by your own interests or imposed by other scenarios: it will be difficult, but it will help you to understand what is important to you and decide to follow your own path.
Study your weaknesses and do not be fooled by provocations, not forgetting that arguing with your parents is obviously a disastrous thing
There is the worst program, which in principle adjusts to the reluctance to exist and live at least some kind of life. The manipulation here is that your whole existence seems to justify the fact of the inconsistency of the parent who put his life on you and did not become someone great. How great is the benefit of this idea for the exploiter, how deeply its destructive impact on the object of this manipulation is, in fact, a manipulation that directly leads to suicide or at least suicidal tendencies. If you have such thoughts, I strongly recommend that you contact a psychiatrist, without any attempt to understand yourself on your own.
However, sometimes the latter scheme can be covered up with a love for dangerous sports and the desire to kill oneself, as it were, unintentionally, that it is somewhat more difficult to realize how dislike of oneself and reaction to someone's manipulations. All the time you are stepping on the same rake: suddenly and unexpectedly it turns out that all your men are addicted to alcohol, on every new job you are suddenly charged a lot more things than the rest, you feel deeply and in no way wealthy , or whatever else happens in your circle, systematically and does not lead to any result. If you managed to find these rakes, you have already done some part of the work aimed at change.
Of course, we must not forget that in real life, everything is far from always working according to well-defined programs, and there are also far more of them than listed here. And if mom sometimes said that Masha studies better, and dad sometimes wanted you to be his little daughter forever, then this does not mean that you grew up in the super-addicted Peter Pan, but still it could make you a little indecisive and a little unsure in itself - with all the opportunities arising from here to manipulate you a little. In general, study your weaknesses (do not be afraid to turn to a specialist for this) and do not fall for provocations, without forgetting that arguing with your parents is a deliberately disastrous matter.