The Manipulator

While the harm most of these men inflict is emotional and psychological, there are those among them with a more dangerous twist, who feed off their victims’ souls the way a leech drains the blood of its prey: drop by drop. These are the captivating vampires, whose devious masks conceal every woman’s worst nightmare.

To these men, control is like oxygen. Every sign of submission from others is like the breath of life, falsely confirming their delusion that only force & fear affirms their worth. That hidden fear is the truth that threatens their common delusion of godlike invincibility and exposes them as frightened little men, terrified of everyone and everything, including their own guilt. But guilt, for them, is intolerable.

They twist responsibility for their cruel actions away from themselves and lay it onto their victims. Their domineering maneuvers are magically excused in their minds. They project their own selfish, manipulative and deceptive defects of character onto the very people they harm, while persistently and vigorously proclaiming themselves as blameless.

He was just treating you like a goddess. He was being so sweet and attentive. Maybe he was even telling you how wonderful you are. Then, in the sudden twinkling of a diabolical eye, he’s treating you like you’ve become a “bitch-on-wheels.” And you don’t know why.

He accuses you of everything from insincerity to stalking, and your mind scrambles to discover what you just said or did that’s setting him off. He keeps saying it’s you, and is so intensely convinced that it is you that it’s hard not to believe him.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. There will always be something – apparently innocuous to you – which will abruptly stoke his raging fire again. And again and again, round and around, until your spirit and soul are finally ground into fine, despondent grains of charred debris, and your mind eventually looks like a Tokyo china-shop after a 9.0 earthquake.

Maybe he never physically beats you. Or maybe he never will. But you never know. He is stunningly impulsive and unpredictable. But he always assaults you emotionally, ripping into every fiber of your being with verbal vindictive, threats and accusations. Being keel-hauled over a coral reef is a cake-walk, compared to this torment.

The only thing predictable about such a man is his extreme unpredictability. It is only after you become intimately snared into him that you discover the soul-grinder that lies waiting to strike. Until then, you may even find him amazingly attentive, sensitive and empathic to your every need. He can initially appear to be completely non-threatening. That is why it is critical to learn how to identify this type of individual, because there is a high probability that brutally sociopathic, narcissistic or sadistic-type personality disorders may hide behind his appealing camouflage of muted sensitivity.

When borderline, sociopathic, and sadistic disorders combine with a narcissistic disorder, a particularly deceptive and dangerous Molotov cocktail of character pathology results.

Shortly after he had seduced his next “relationship”, “Tom” developed a calculating and classically “I hate you-I love you” borderline way of mentally & sexually controlling his woman.

Since he knew that the marked conscientiousness of this woman’s character made her particularly loyal, he was certain his method of erotic control would work because, no matter how much she desired sex, she would never seek it with someone else and would always give in to his pressures. This was the key to his method, and his way of making her feel simultaneously responsible and guilty for her own desires and his cunning manipulation of them.

Knowing that he had control of her loyalty, he would “work” her sexual longing by timing its gratification. He would do this by turning her on with words & suggestions, then losing interest by feigning “a tough day at the office,” “a sore back,” or some other pretext. All the while, his borderline instinct for reading her level of sexual frustration watched and waited, until he could tell that she was in a state of carnal gridlock. He relieved himself with prostitutes and porn while she did a slow torturous boil. Then he released the laser intensity of his loin-lions upon her now fever-pitched libido and gratified her to the nth-degree.

To increase the agonizing effect of this cycle upon her, he added two more factors of frustration. He initiated the first by asking about her sexual history with a lot of ‘understand & compassion’, getting her comfortable enough to tell him things she’d done when younger that she felt guilt about. And he always feigned outraged and agonized sexual betrayal including laying moral guilt trips on her. This ratcheted up her sense of guilt even further. Then – just to twist that ratchet one last click – he dropped using excuses like tough days at the office and sore backs for one that was a psychological coup de trompe’ of controller manipulation. He started accusing her of sexually abusing him!

He had completely succeeded in deceiving her into believing that she was manipulating poor, morally-upright, erotically-exhausted him. And he had gotten her to cling to him! Once a this type of pathological man has succeeded in this kind of sexual “trick,” or in other less genital manipulations, the Hater appears. This hateful part of him may have emerged before, but you probably will not see it in full, acidic bloom until he feels he has achieved a firm hold on your conscience and compassion. But when that part makes it’s first appearance, rage is how it breaks into your life.

Roger Melton, M.A., L.M.F.T., CEAP