MANIPULATING (part 3): Al-Anon's 4 M's of Relationship - Mothering, Managing, Manipulating and Martyrdom: A Journey towards Soul Recovery

Are you losing yourself in manipulation, whether it's you doing the manipulating or being manipulated? Are your relationships feeling unbalanced, riddled with guilt, shame, blame, or judgment? Let's journey together into this challenging terrain, as we deconstruct manipulation in relationships and the ripple effect it can have on our lives. In the 3rd part of this 4 part series on Al-Anon's 4 M's of relationship,  we'll examine the spectrum of manipulation, from the unhealthy control of others to falling prey to gaslighting or passive-aggressiveness. More importantly, we'll offer insights on how we can communicate better and healthier, free of these menacing elements that disturb the peace of our relationships using the process of Soul Recovery.

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Transcript

Rev Rachel Harrison: 0:47

We are currently in the third episode of a four part series on Alenon's four m's of relationship, mothering, managing, manipulating and martyrdom.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 0:58

This episode we're going to be concentrating on the manipulation part, and Manipulation can have both sides of the coin. It can be the part where we are unhealthily manipulating other people, trying to fix or manage or control. But we can also be having people try to manipulate us. Maybe they're gas lighting us or being passive, aggressive, and this dance that we do with people Back and forth is really how things get out of balance. And in soul recovery we're learning how to put the attention on ourselves and how we interact with the people around us in the most healthy way so that, if they are trying to manipulate us, we have the strength to not be affected in negative ways, learning to come from our truest, highest self in all situations. Enjoy the episode.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 1:54

Welcome to the recover your soul podcast a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover Your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, co-dependency and control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and soul recovery to help others transform their lives, as mine was transformed. For us to overcome External circumstances, we need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on our interchange and healing. Positive results and our lives will follow. Welcome back to recover your soul. I'm Rev Rachel and I am so glad that you're here with me today for the recover your soul podcast and to be on this journey of your own soul recovery. If you're new to this podcast in the community, welcome. I'm glad you're here and if you're coming back, thank you, thank you. Thank you for being in this space with all of us and helping support your own Soul recovery, and just by being here, you're actually helping support everybody else's. We're in this together. We're in this together on this spiritual path to a happy and healthy life.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 3:10

We're in the middle of a four-part series with the four M's. The four M's of our relationship are mothering, managing, manipulating and martyrdom. I've already had two episodes on mothering and managing, and and the next two episodes will be manipulating and martyrdom. Now this is where we're going to start to have a shift, because mothering and managing both have aspects that are pieces of us that we want to embrace that divine feminine of being supportive, of a loving, of Unconditional guidance and willingness to hold space for people. That is the positive part of mothering. And then in that episode we looked at the part where we're doing for others, where we're letting our nitpicking or our constant trying to fix a road those relationships. So we looked at that. And then we looked at Managing, which is another word for control, that on our best self, we want to be proud of the fact that we can be a good manager in all aspects of our life, but we don't want to be coming from the perspective that we are supposed to, that we have to, that we're responsible for Managing and taking the autonomy away from other people being part of the experience. Well, now we're breaking into manipulating and martyrdom, and these aspects are going to not just be around our own experience but are maybe about how we are interacting with others in the world that might be affecting us. So it's going to go both ways and the awareness that in the first two, you can live from your best self and have those aspects be part of your life. And yet Manipulating and martyrdom are pieces that we do not want to be living from and that we do not want to be affected in a negative way by. So let's dig into Manipulating.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 5:18

Manipulating is a negative aspect of human relationship that involves influencing others for personal gain or to serve one's own agenda. This behavior can be subtle. It can be so subtle and it can be hard to detect. This isn't something that is often avert. Sometimes it is avert, but really often it is this mmm, it's so ingrained in our communication and how we work with people that it can be really hard to even see that it's happening. But it erodes the trust in, damages the integrity of our relationships, and Manipulation and I'm really excited to sort of dig into some of these can take the form of passive, aggressive behaviors, gas lighting, guilt tripping. It has this part that when we're coming from our unhealthy selves, these behaviors are so easy to get caught into, and when the people around us are coming from their unhealthy selves, they're inflicting them on us. So what we're looking at in this particular episode is these aspects, not just from the perspective of somebody else doing them to us, but the only place that we have power which is for us to really truly look at are these ways that I'm interacting with people in my life and then starting to look at why, why am I using these ways of interacting with the people in my life or in certain situations. What can I do to live from a higher self, to interact and be in relationship and communication from a better Perspective?

Rev Rachel Harrison: 7:03

Now in soul recovery, we have taken guilt and shame and blame and judgment off the table, and this isn't easy to do. This is not easy to do. We live in a society that is around who's right and who's wrong and Around somebody being at fault. We have a hard time turning the attention and looking at ourselves, allowing everybody to just be where they are. Ultimately, in soul recovery, the ability for us to just be present in this moment, to allow ourselves to see what is in front of us, without all of the extensive belief systems, memories and woundedness and ideals that come into our lives, that Shape and form how we think it should be, is not an easy task. To start to peel all that away and to be able to just be present with who we are and seeing and accepting the people in our lives. You don't have to like it to accept it, but accepting it for exactly as it is and manipulation is a way for us to come into control and a desire to fix and change the outcome of what's going on in our lives and oftentimes it's coming from this perspective, that's, around helping somebody, right? So I'm going to first talk about how we could be manipulating in our own lives and then we'll work towards potentially how it's being affected onto us.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 8:43

What are people doing that it feels that way to us because we want to address both of those sides. First of all, being from the Alenan and from the co-dependence world, which so many of you have walked through the door, of which I walked through the door to soul recovery, I was in that place where I was looking at the world around me. I wanted to fix the people around me. If Rich would quit being an alcoholic, if my kids could not be addicts, if our family could be fixed, if we could be different, if the world could be different, if politics could be different, if global warming could be different, there was a lot of things that I really wanted to be different than I could be okay, and the amount of deep sadness, the amount of intense anxiety that I felt, the heaviness and the depression that I felt, those were the reasons why I drank and I ended up using alcohol as a way to heal this part of me that was just so uncomfortable.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 9:49

And what's interesting around manipulation is when I really look at this, when I really look and I take an honest look at myself. How am I showing up in relationships? What is my part Because this is the only place that we have power is to look at when I'm in a situation, what is my participation in it, and for us to get healthy and be in healthy relationships, the greatest desire is that everyone in the relationship is doing their part to get healthy, but we need to be putting all of our energy into making ourselves our best self and not energy into hoping or trying to fix the other person, because that's manipulation, right? So when I'm really honest and I start looking at it, I think I was a master manipulator. I was a master manipulator in how I can speak to people, how I can be in a conversation to make it feel like I'm giving you information. But what I'm really trying to do is I'm trying to move your needle in a certain direction. I'm trying to convince you of something, even if it's positive, and this is so fascinating because this isn't that you shouldn't have opinions or that you don't want to be offering people advice, especially when they ask for it, or you don't want to be able to feel like you have an awareness of who you are and how you want to be and bring great things to the world, but the manipulation means that you are actively trying to change them and have an attachment to their end result. So part of what I realize in my manipulation is let's take I'm trying to think of something for an example there's so many of them, to be honest, that I'm having a hard time having one just pop up into my head.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 11:51

So I had a situation where I was a manager I talked about this in the last episode of a. I was the office manager for a home care agency and I remember that I could talk to clients or talk to caregivers, and what I really wanted was I wanted them to do something. In the end, I wanted a result. In the end, I wanted, maybe, a client to choose a certain care team, or to keep a particular caregiver who needed that job, potentially a caregiver that I wanted to switch to a harder team, I mean, who knew what the situation was. But I remember being in those conversations where I was actively, actively trying to convince them of what I wanted, without letting them know that I was convincing them that, in the end, what I was wanting them to believe was that they had come up with the idea or that they were responsible for this decision.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 12:56

And when I think about it, it's not that we can't be great at giving conversations where we're making people feel good about themselves or sharing truth. I mean, I'm here, I'm doing this for you, right, this exact second right. So I'm sharing these beliefs, but I don't have the same piece of inside of me, as I'm speaking to you right now, that is trying to manipulate you to think a certain thing. I am sharing an idea, I'm sharing concepts. I'm sharing my own personal experience. What you do with it is yours to do. I have no attachment. I have a desire. I would love for this to be helping and change lives, the way that my life has been changed. But I am not sitting here thinking, if I say this exactly right, then I will elicit this particular change. And that is what I was doing.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 13:53

On those phone calls with those caregivers and those clients, I, in my mind, was knew that if I said it just right, I could make them do what I wanted, and that's unhealthy. That's not a healthy way to be. Now, what's interesting is I looked up passive aggressive behaviors and I've had in my relationship with Rich so many times that he's like you are so passive aggressive, and the truth is I never really gave it a lot of thought because I felt like he was manipulating me to feel badly because he was giving me that label, because he knew that that label would really hurt, and it did, even though I didn't truly understand what a passive aggressive behavior was. So, looking up from the internet, passive aggressive behavior is defined as a behavior that is seemingly innocuous, accidental or neutral, but that indirectly, is an aggressive behavior and aggressive.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 14:57

I want to be sure that we're speaking about, in the same way that I talk about attack here in soul recovery, when we're using the words attack and aggressive, what we're really talking about is coming from pain and from fear, and I think that we can get caught up in aggressive meaning overtly aggressive, but emotionally aggressive. Emotionally attacking really just means that we're from protection, we're from fear, we're from pain and we're protected and we're we have the wall up right. So we can use manipulation on others by acting in these behaviors that are not coming from our highest self. We're not speaking from our highest self. We're not communicating from our highest self. We're using these unhealthy communication and behavior styles to get either what we want or to protect ourselves, and even in the protectant of ourselves, we're manipulating the situation. And being able to start to look and take responsibility for ourself in these situations really allows us to determine that is this behavior serving me? And in soul recovery I say so often, we are letting go of all that no longer serves us. So at some point these behaviors, these passive, aggressive behaviors, saved us.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 16:35

And if you're in a situation in your life where you're really living from some of these behaviors I'm going to list for you there's a reason why. There's a reason why our feelings are telling us something. If we don't feel safe, if we are not happy, if there is constant dissatisfaction in our life, it shows up in our feelings and it is pointing a finger, of pointing an arrow at something that doesn't feel good. And so many of us end up living in lives that don't feel good because we don't think that we deserve more, we don't think that we can have more, we don't think that we can step out and have a bigger life, and I'm here to tell you that you can.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 17:23

So if you are finding yourself manipulating, it is because you're in pain and so you want to look at why are you in pain? What is actually going on? Can I be in this situation and see it differently? And quite often, when we see it differently, we realize that this manipulation is really around our own pain and that what's happening and true in our lives can be restored, that those relationships can be healed and restored. That's what's happened in my life and sometimes we get healthy and we start to look at our life in a different way and we realize that we're really not safe or happy and that there isn't an opportunity for change in this relationship or this situation and we need to leave. And it's terrifying. It's terrifying to think that you need to go do something else.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 18:21

If you're ready for soul recovery, as a spiritual coach, I can support your healing to help make real changes that will bring you a life of peace, happiness, connection and abundance. You can also work in smaller groups by taking a deep dive in a Zoom workshop or with me in person at a retreat or an event. Join others on the Soul Recovery Path once a month for the free Zoom support group or daily on the private Facebook page. Visit the website recoveryyoursoulnet to book coaching sessions with me or find all the information you need about soul recovery dates that are coming up and how to register for those groups and workshops. To support the podcast and the community, check the links in the show notes to make a small monthly donation or a one-time donation of your choice. That will make a huge impact to support this community and the Soul Recovery mission. Together we can do the work that will recover your soul.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 19:18

But if you're using some of these passive, aggressive behaviors so some of them are ghosting somebody or being ghosted right that when you use this manipulation which is to disappear, you're really manipulating the situation. You're manipulating how you're connecting, giving a backhanded compliment, and the example it has is I saw you did the dishes. I was surprised. Right. Backhanded compliments are actually a dig and a manipulation to share how you feel, instead of saying you never do the dishes and I feel like I'm the only one here who's doing it and I feel abandoned and I feel alone and I feel like I'm being treated like a housekeeper. That's probably not the nicest way to say it, but if you were being aggressive and you were actually sharing what your thoughts are from this, intense and I'm using the word aggressive based on the previous conversation even if you were being intense and you said it that way, that's healthier than the backhanded way of speaking to people, and we backhand all the time and don't even realize it.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 20:33

Sometimes we can manipulate by and be passive, aggressive by saying that we'll do something but we'll have no desire to do it. When I was reading this I thought that's so funny, because this was Bodhi. Alex would say no. You would ask Alex to do something and he would flat out look at you in the eyes and say no, and it'd be really frustrating that he would say no. Well, it was equally as frustrating that Bodhi would say absolutely, and he had no plan to do that whatsoever when he was a kid, but he had learned the manipulation of saying absolutely because he knew at that moment that we would respond in a better way. Also, making excuses rather than saying what's really going on with you. This is passive, aggressive behavior.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 21:19

Procrastinating when you're asked to do something, responding with sarcasm, subtle digs these are all ways of actually what you are is you're upset. What you are is that you're activated. What you are is that you're triggered. What you are is that you're in pain. But instead of coming out with that, either from an unhealthy, aggressive way, sharing your attack, or from a healthy way of being able to come from eye statements, being able to have clarity of what you really need and what you really feel, we utilize all of these unhealthy ways to actually say what we think or want or do, but not from our best self. We want to be living from our best self. We want to be living from our healthiest self.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 22:10

Now, the other side of the coin is when people are doing this to us. The interesting thing about attack is and I said this in the other podcast is that when we are attacked, we're going to attack back, and when we attack, they're going to attack back, and using the word attack feels aggressive. But when we start to look at it even deeper and say when we come from pain, they'll respond with pain. When they respond with pain, we respond with pain. Energies attract and what we're looking at in this manipulation aspect is how are we showing up from our pain with the desire to make the situation be different, and what tools do we use that could be healthier, and how can we actually realize that we're manipulating. Now I will come straight out and say I'm still working on it because I will still, with my kids, in particular my adult boys, 24 and 27, watch myself even today with all the work that I've done. And those of you who've been on the podcast journey, the solar recovery journey, with me, you know how much I'm working on my adult kids.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 23:35

But I find that subtle manipulation where you're providing or doing for them because you want some result. And you know what I want the result to be. I want them to be happy, I want them to have their needs met, I want them to enjoy their lives. That's my goal Now. That's a great goal, that's a fabulous goal. And again, it's the same as how do you share without it being a manipulation? And money can be a manipulation. Time can be a manipulation. How we bring ourselves into a situation can be a manipulation. It can be a manipulation. It's complicated and it's not, it's not straightforward.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 24:25

I want to just hit on guest lighting really quick, because that was part of the lead-in, and guest lighting is something that we may be doing to others, but I would say that it's very likely that a lot of us who are incodependent and Alan on relationships. This might be something that's more often coming to us, at us, out of their pain, out of their discomfort, out of their dysfunction, and again, in soul recovery. I just want to really state the importance of the belief in soul recovery, that we are all whole, that we are all whole, that we are all worthy, that every human being, regardless of the level of their pain underneath, is a divine child of the universe that can remember who they are if they're willing to see it. Not everybody wants to see it, not everybody wants to do the soul recovery process, not everybody wants to step into a spiritual journey, not everybody wants to take responsibility for themselves. And again, there's no judgment in soul recovery. So we just let that be and we turn to ourselves and we say how do I care for myself? How do I attend to my soul's journey? How do I heal myself to my fullest capacity? How do I do that? That's the direction that I want to be coming from.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 25:51

And gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse where a person causes someone to question their sanity, memories or perception of reality, and it says people who experience gaslighting may feel confused, anxious or unable to trust themselves. Now, this is and possibly will be, and should be, an episode entirely to itself. But what I want us to start to look at from this perspective of the gaslighting as a form of manipulation is that when we start to see things for what they are, what starts to happen is you start to realize that when people come at you or you come at somebody else from anything other than love, anything other than your higher self, you're coming from a place of pain. And so when we can recognize that the people around us, in our relationships, are coming from a place of pain, and we quit trying to be right and we quit trying to understand why we take that energy, and there's nothing to push against. So when you start to recognize gaslighting and you start to see these things happening, what it can allow you to do is to take your power back and to just see it. Ah, that's what they're saying, that's what they're doing, and instead of fighting back and trying to explain or trying to be justified or trying to have your side be seen, you let it go. You let it go. This is the beauty of not having to share everything that you think, not having to have an opinion about everything, not having to say your two cents and every single thing. We are letting everyone have their own experience, and when there's a bumping up against each other and you quit bumping and you quit being on the battlefield the emotional battlefield the other person doesn't have anything to fight.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 28:01

So here's some examples of gaslighting that maybe you can recognize. If it's happening to you or if you say, oh, I actually do that to somebody else, it's out of pain, so we're here to work on our own pain, and we're here to let go of them to work on their own pain if they so choose. So some examples of gaslighting are so we're here to work on our own pain, so we're here to let go of them to work on their own pain if they so choose. So some examples of gaslighting are someone questioning someone's memory. So maybe you're sharing an experience or something that you remember and the other person says, oh, I don't remember it being like that, or you must be wrong, that's not how that went down, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. This is that part where we go to fight and we are, in turn, then trying to manipulate them to see it and remember it the way that we felt it, the way you felt. It is all that matters. All that matters, even if the way that we experienced it nobody else experienced it that way doesn't matter, because in soul recovery we're looking at how did it feel for you? What was your experience?

Rev Rachel Harrison: 29:05

Another example is refusing to listen or faking confusion to make someone doubt themselves. Again, all of these are defense mechanisms of somebody else feeling uncomfortable or us feeling uncomfortable. It's about seeing this belittling or disregarding someone's feelings. This is a huge one, right? So this often is around us from old patterns of having certain feelings and somebody saying you don't feel that way. Yes, you do feel that way and you have every right to feel that way. How we connect with the other people in our lives, of them seeing it or taking responsibility for it. That's the part that we're trying to get, something that we can't get. But when you see that they're behaving that way and you stop needing them to be for you and they can belittle you or disregard your feelings and it doesn't affect you it takes their weapons away and they're left standing in their own discomfort because they can't hurt you. The truth is, when we're in our healthiest, strongest self, nobody can hurt you. When you're coming from integrity and you're coming from your kindest self. That is the strength, that is the best. So just to run through more of these refusing to take responsibility for their actions, changing the focus of the discussion by questioning someone's credibility, using negative stereotypes against someone all of these are ways of seeing that this relationship is somebody trying to manipulate you, and those examples are just a few of many.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 30:57

So we will do an episode that's around gaslighting. But what I want us to look at in this episode around manipulation is just to see how complex it is and how many different ways that it can be showing up. And it's about starting to recognize for ourselves where are we using this tool and what is the pain or what is the outcome that I'm trying to get out of it. How can I attune to myself, how can I do my sole recovery process to not use this defense mechanism as a way to be in relationship with others and then to have the strength that, when somebody is manipulating you from whatever that aspect is, that you don't give it power, that you can see it from their pain perspective and not judging them, not labeling them, not being aggressive towards them, but just having compassion really for the fact that this is their communication style and not taking it personally and not making assumptions and letting it hang there in the air without claiming it onto yourself, you take the energy away from it and when we don't come back with a desire to force our side, there's nothing for them to push against and we can see it for what it is.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 32:30

Is this a healthy situation to be in? Is an unhealthy situation to be in? Can I accept this for what it is right now? Can I draw boundaries? Can I ask for what I need? Can I allow other people to have their experience so that I'm not feeling like I'm trying to manipulate them? It's complicated. Relationships are complicated. Being human is complicated. But the more that we do this work to connect to our inner selves, to allow everybody to have their own experience, to stop holding onto the pain of resentment and grievance, the more we can connect to our higher power, the more that we open to the truth of who we are, the more that we open to the flow of the universe, the more that we learn who our higher self is and live from that part of us that healed whole part of us. That is what we're striving for, that is what we're growing towards. That is who we are, who we remember, our wholeness.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 33:33

If you want help with this or the soul recovery process in general, this is what we do in the coaching sessions and in our groups and soon to come courses. So check out the other episodes in this four part series and we will be doing our last of these four parts on martyrdom next. Until next time, namaste, or an Apple Podcast subscriber. Once you have subscribed, you have access to a whole back catalog of episodes as well, if you would go to the website recoveryoursoulnet, and I would love for you to subscribe to email updates so that you can keep posted with everything that's going on. Different events, what dates are coming up, any reminders? There's only a couple emails each month.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 34:48

I hope you follow Recover your Soul on social media. You can find us on YouTube, instagram, facebook, the private Facebook community page, tiktok and if you want guided meditations, look for Reverend Rachel Harrison on Insight Timer. I really encourage you to take advantage of the one-on-one coaching. This is a unique, intuitive connection between the two of us. There are nine steps to soul recovery and I do use those nine steps to loosely guide us through whatever you're coaching that you need, but really it's about creating a way for you to feel comfortable around your healing of your past.

Rev Rachel Harrison: 35:30

Looking at the situations in your life what are the patterns, what are the beliefs that are holding you back? Breaking free from those patterns, breaking free from those beliefs, letting go of control, letting go of the people around you and taking your power back, discovering who you are and who you want to be in the world, and how I can support you to do this. And also you're sharing this podcast with your friends, putting five stars, leaving reviews. Really sharing this with others is growing the community. Thank you for being part of this community. Thank you for supporting Recover your Soul and I know that together we can do the work that will recover your soul.