All posts tagged: emotional manipulation

How to Know Your Frenemy

[ad_1] Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. There are many different kinds of friends. Aristotle distinguished among friendships based on utility, pleasure, and virtue. Michel de Montaigne wrote about true friendship, which “grows up, is nourished and improved by enjoyment, as being of itself spiritual, and the soul growing still more refined by its practice.” In this column, I have written about the difference between real friends and deal friends. And then there is the frenemy. This portmanteau of friend and enemy first appeared as long ago as the late 19th century. It signifies a discordant relationship in which someone appears to be your friend or has a superficially friendly demeanor toward you but behaves in ways that real friends wouldn’t and shouldn’t. Perhaps the frenemy undermines you, manipulates your feelings, gaslights you, or says mean things about you behind your back. Identifying frenemies isn’t always easy, because the behavior can be designed to go undetected, or perhaps to be so …

Dear Therapist: My Mother Is Marrying Her Abuser

[ad_1] Dear Therapist, My mother has been in a verbally and at times physically abusive relationship for more than two-thirds of my life. After my parents split up when I was a child, my dad had custody, but during visits with my mom, and a brief time living with her, I witnessed physical violence and sexually inappropriate talk, and was verbally abused myself by this man. Sometimes the police were involved, but my mom always dropped the charges. I suffered immense trauma, which to this day has still not been validated by her; at times she has even denied that certain things happened. After many years of therapy in adulthood, and a really bad incident that led to her boyfriend’s arrest a few years ago, during which I provided emotional support to my mom only for her to later return to the relationship, I chose to no longer have any contact with this man. I also set boundaries around my relationship with her for the first time. At first, there was a huge strain on …