Have you ever met someone who complained about their circumstances but wasn’t willing to do anything to change them?  

In fact, if you were to suggest a possible solution to them, they would come up with an excuse or valid sounding reason on why your suggestion wouldn’t work. And the more you tried to help, the more flaws they’d find in your logic. 

The hard truth is that some people don’t want to change nor do they want others around them to help them change. People like this refuse to acknowledge the role they play in their misery and often blame others for their suffering. 

If you are intertwined with someone like this, you might have to be careful that you are not helping to enable this behavior. This type of person may find comfort in your attention to their misery. And as long as they are getting their needs met, they may not mind if you become miserable along with them as you try to help them.

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Emotional abuse is the ultimate brainwashing technique. It hides in the form of feigned helpfulness, generosity, compassion, and love. The perpetrator knows how to appear kind and caring while intertwining abusive behavior, causing their victim to become powerless.

Emotional abuse is a method of controlling, manipulating, belittling, and invalidating a person over time. It is often hard to spot in the moment as it can be seen as benign or even “normal” to most observers. But as this behavior is repeated time and time again, the insidious compound effect of this form of covert abuse causes its victims to lose confidence in themselves, stop trusting in their own decisions, feel devalued and unimportant, and blame themselves for being the cause of, and sometimes even deserving, of the abusive behavior. (read more…)

When you are interacting with people that only want what they want, regardless of how it affects you, you’re in for a very dysfunctional, and possibly emotionally harmful situation.

It’s important to know your line and know when people cross it, then honor that line so that you don’t lose a bit of yourself.

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