Don't Defeat Yourself With Emotional Manipulation

By Bob Lancer

When you use feelings of disappointment to manipulate someone into giving you your way, you program yourself to relate with your experience as a defeat. This costs you your freedom.

There is really nothing wrong with your situation. The present offers you every opportunity. But you bind yourself to disappointment when you express yourself as a victim of your circumstances.

You imagine your condition as a loss when you engage the sorrow of sacrifice and martyrdom. In the act of trying to convince another that he or she is taking unfair advantage of your kindness and generosity, you convince yourself right out of the total freedom offered to you in the now.

It is tempting to use pitiful feelings of disappointment and victimization to subtly coerce others into making more of a sacrifice for us. If we can make them feel guilty enough, they may just realize that they can take no pleasure in denying us of what we want, and that may cause them to surrender their free will for our happiness.

The price we pay for this may be too subtle for us to recognize, even though it takes such a heavy toll on the quality of our lives and relationships. Only by practicing the act of looking within to examine your thoughts and feelings do you gradually awaken to such subtle manipulation games that cost you your integrity, your self-respect, your happiness, your mutually supportive relationships.

You use negative emotion to manipulate others when you express disappointment, disapproval, dissatisfaction over the choices they make. You use your unhappiness as a weapon. The closer they are to you, the more disturbing your unhappiness feels to them. You know this unconsciously until you wake up to what you are up to within. You use the disturbing influence of your unhappiness to prod them into acting on your behalf.

Paying attention to your thoughts and feelings reveals that your feelings attune you to your perspectives. Thus, living in feelings of gratitude begins to reveal all that you have to feel grateful for. Practice feeling gratitude long enough and you see no reason not to feel grateful for everything.

When you express feelings of disappointment, those feelings attune you to a perspective that reveals only the costs, the losses that you must suffer. In every situation you have gains and losses. Disappointment tunes you into the losses and gratitude tunes you into the gains. Both perspectives are true, but you get to live in the truth you choose.

Negative feelings deprive you of inspiring, empowering points of view. You live in your view. You experience what you are aware of. Feelings of disappointment lead you into a sorry reality. The longer you live in disappointment, the stronger and deeper it grows. As that occurs, you experience more and more loss in your life.

Feelings are contagious. The stronger your feeling of disappointment the more it draws everyone around you into similarly negative feeling states. Individuals who want to feel happy, who want to experience success and abundance and freedom, will avoid you or leave you alone. Those who remain with you will increasingly resent you as they feel themselves being sucked into a reality, a life, a world that fails them.

Using feelings of disapproval and dissatisfaction to manipulate others works just like disappointment. In disapproval, all you can see and feel is wrong. In feelings of dissatisfaction all you can see and feel is displeasing. You cut yourself off from the infinite good ever-present in the now by dwelling on anxious feelings of dread as well, and using that to get your way.

When you feel disturbed in any way, let that feeling be. Don't hold onto it. Don't use it to get your way. It will naturally pass on its own into peace if you let it go. Do not resist it. And definitely do not identify it as the way you truly feel, as the only reasonable or right way to feel, or as a necessary way to feel.

Take deep, relaxing breaths. Gently ease yourself into peace, into truly peaceful acceptance of and trust in whatever is. Stop telling yourself what is wrong with what is happening and just open your mind and heart to experience the good available to your right now. The good begins with a feeling; it is your natural way of feeling when you do not impose unhappiness upon yourself.

That's right, you impose unhappiness upon yourself whenever you feel unhappy. You are naturally happy, loving, kind, trusting. You are naturally in a state of harmony. You don't have to make yourself feel in harmony. You just have to observe how you make yourself feel distressed. When you see how you do that, you can stop it. So the real key to inner freedom is the practice of directing your awareness within, to see how you treat yourself.

Growing self-awareness automatically leads you into healing feelings of peace. Your inner peace grows by small degrees the more you allow yourself to live in it. The more you choose it. In feelings peace, feelings of love, gratitude, faith, success and fulfillment grow, and these you attune you to realities that reinforce, nurture and expand these healthy and contented feeling states. You will soon see every reason to feel this good and no more reason to feel worse. You will discover more and more things going your way, more of what you want coming your way, including the support, assistance, understanding, sensitivity, care, and cooperation you used to futilely rely on negative manipulation tactics to bring you.

Bob Lancer leads individuals, businesses, families, and associations to fulfill their greatest dreams. He does this through a wide variety of venues, including his WSB radio show, Bob Lancer's Parenting Solutions, a show that focuses as much on the raising of ourselves and of our society as on the raising of children. The show has been on the air since 1995 and broadcasts to 35 states over the radio, and worldwide over the internet.

He is the author of numerous books and he has created dozens of motivational recordings on his themes.

Bob Lancer transforms audiences through his dynamic keynotes and seminars on parenting, marriage, and personal and professional development at live events, including conferences around the nation and overseas. He has been leading his audiences to greater personal and professional success as a public speaker, seminar leader, consultant and author for over 20 years and his work has been featured on CNN and other network television stations, in national magazines and in major newspapers.

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