Amber Hollingsworth breaks down how addicted loved ones manipulate through guilt, lies, and gaslighting. She uses a story about her half-sister to show how guilt enables repeated manipulation, then explains how managing your own emotions and self-confidence keeps you from being controlled by their tactics.
Chapters
If your addicted loved one is manipulating you, what that means is they are pressing on some button that you already have and they're using that against you. These are emotional buttons like fear, guilt, embarrassment, anger, shame. Your loved one knows exactly what your buttons are and which ones have a hair trigger, and their addiction will undoubtedly use those emotional buttons against you. For me personally, guilt has always been a huge button for me. I naturally feel really bad when I see other people suffering or uncomfortable, even if I know they did it to themselves. A lot of you know, I grew up in a very addicted family, and one of the people that was addicted in my family was my older half sister. And my older sister got pregnant at a very young age and she had lots of kids and she was always struggling. And I always felt bad because she had such a hard time paying her bills and having even regular life necessities for her and her kids. So not only did I feel bad for her for suffering, but I felt even extra guilty with the idea that her kids could be suffering. And that guilt held me hostage for a very long time. I would actually feel like sick at my stomach when I would see her phone number pop up, because I knew whatever was about to happen, I was gonna walk away feeling bad about it. It was so bad that most of the time I couldn't answer when I saw it ringing. I would actually have to, like, collect myself and get myself in a place that I could call back because I was always left with a dilemma. Say, yes, I would help and feel guilty because, you know, you're enabling and you're helping that way. Or say, no, I won't help and feel gu because you're allowing someone to suffer. It was like any which way I looked, I felt guilty about it. And that dynamic went on for years and years and years, like well past when I was an addiction counselor. And I didn't stop doing it until I hit sort of a bottom, I guess you could call it. I won't go into the whole story here because I go into it on other videos, but essentially what happened was my sister took advantage of my grandmother in a really big not okay way. And once that happened, I was just so upset and angry and resentful about it that I was like, that's almost had to get mad enough so that I didn't feel guilty anymore. What is it that's keeping you stuck and allowing you to be manipulated? Because that's going to keep happening to you until you get control of whatever that emotional button is for you. Hopefully it won't take you as long as it did me. Now, the second thing that could be facing is when an addicted loved one tries to lie to you. Now, the button that this pushes in you, it's actually your ego button. Because our ego, if we think, oh, my gosh, they think, I'm going to fall for that. And then our ego checks in, and then we feel like we have to call it out to prove our rightness. Now, it's not always a mistake to call out a lie, but you really have to stop and ask yourself, why am I wanting to call this out? Does it really matter one way or the other? Because a lot of times when you're dealing with someone has an addiction, lying is such a natural part of what comes along with it that they lie about little things that don't even matter. And does it matter if they had six beers or four beers? No, it really doesn't matter. So most of the time, it's not really necessary to call out the lie. If you're feeling like you have to call it out every single time, and it always starts an argument, then there's an emotional button being pushed with you. And that has to do with you're worried about what that other person thinks about you. Oh, they think I'm that naive? Or they think they can get away with that, or they think this. I gotta step up to the plate and say, I know you're lying. I gotta call you out. But you gotta remember, got to be strategic. Don't call it out just because your ego button has been pushed. I actually have several videos on dealing with lying, and I will link them up here and I'll put them at the end of the video. Now, gaslighting is a whole nother category. If you have an addicted loved one that tends to use gaslighting against you, then what's happening is your button is so doubt. They're making you doubt yourself, your choices, your boundaries. They're even making you doubt what you're seeing with your own two eyes. And if this goes on long enough, you can really end up in bad shape. Like, you don't know what to trust and what not to trust. And eventually you just stop trusting your own instincts altogether. And that might cause you to just give up and believe everything they're saying. Or it might cause you to turn into this, like, super investigator spy person, where you're constantly looking for proof and trying to show them that you know what's up. And you got to remember when that's happening, watch out for that ego button. If you don't want to be manipulated, lied to, controlled, gaslit. It's all about managing your own emotions. If you don't get in control of your own emotions, your own self confidence, what's going on with you, you are just going to be on that roller coaster with them. You're going to be on those ups and downs like a feather in the wind. If you really want to stop being manipulated, you have to get in control of yourself. Not only is that going to help you live a better life, but it's actually going to really helpful to the other person as well. So it's a win win situation. To learn more about dealing with lying, watch this video. And to learn more about getting control of your own emotions and understanding your side of the street, watch this video.
