When you raise concerns about someone's addiction, they often flip it back on you until you apologize. Amber Hollingsworth breaks down four manipulation tactics: gaslighting your reality, turning your concern into an attack on you, making you doubt yourself, and constantly moving the goalposts. Recognizing these patterns lets you stop taking the blame.
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Have you ever walked away from a conversation with someone who drinks or uses feeling like somehow you were the problem? Like you started the conversation with a concern, but you ended up apologizing in the end? Or maybe you tried to talk about something that you're seeing and you're being told that you're crazy or you're too sensitive or that you're the one that's making things worse. If any of that sounds familiar, you're in the right place. This is the video for you and you're not crazy. You're not oversensitive and you're definitely not imagining it. It actually has a name. And today we're going to talk about how it plays out in real life. Now, before we go any further, I do want to say this. When I use the word manipulation, I'm not saying that the person you love is an evil person. I'm not saying they're a bad person. I'm not saying that they don't love you. What I am saying is that the addiction changes their brain. And a brain in active addiction is a brain that's wired above everything else to protect the addiction. It's not always conscious or intentional. Think of it this way. The addiction is running the show and that addiction will say whatever it needs to say to survive. Now, that's not an excuse. It's an explanation. And understanding the difference is what's going to let you stop taking it so personally and start responding strategically. All right. So let's get into what this really looks like in an everyday situation, not just what you see in the movies. One of the things that I see all the time is a tactic I'm going to call reality distortion. This is when you bring up a concern or suddenly you're being told that that's not what happened. You're remembering it wrong. You're exaggerating. I only had 2 drinks. That conversation never happened. You're making a big deal out of nothing. This is sometimes called gaslighting. And here's what makes it so insidious. It's because it doesn't happen all at once. It's gradual. It's like small corrections to your memory, small minimizations of what you saw until one day you don't even trust your own perception anymore because that's what happens when someone is consistently rewriting reality for you. Now, a second pattern of manipulation is what I'm going to call emotional inversion. And this happens when your concern becomes their wound. Like when you try to talk about their drinking and suddenly you're the controlling one. You try to express that you're scared and suddenly you're the one causing the stress. If you didn't, like, for example, they might say, if you didn't nag me so much, I wouldn't need to drink to relax. Or you're so negative, you stress me out. No wonder I drink. Do you see what's happening there? You came in with a concern and you walked out with guilt. That's how they flip it. And it works because you love this person and you don't want to be the reason why they're struggling. So you back off, you apologize, you try to be less stressful in the conversation about the real problem. It just never happens. You never really get there. Now there's a third pattern and it's one that I'm going to call manufactured doubt. And this one does the most long-term damage. It sounds Sounds a little something like this: Nobody else thinks there's a problem. Even your friends think you're being dramatic. You're the only one who has an issue with this. What this does is it slowly cuts you off from your own judgment and from the people around you, because if everyone else thinks you're overreacting, why would you reach out to them? Why would you say anything to people in your life? You start to feel completely alone in your reality, and that situation makes it so much harder to see things clearly. If you've ever stopped talking to friends about what's going on at home because you're afraid they won't. believe you or they wouldn't understand. That's not an accident. Now, a 4th manipulation pattern that you might've run across before is called moving the goalposts. This is a pattern of promises that shift just enough to maintain your hope without ever actually changing anything. Like, I'll stop after the holidays. I'll switch to beer. That's better. I've really cut back. You just don't notice. Each one of these feels like a small win, like a little progress. So you wait and then the holidays pass and then the beer turns into a case a night and the cutting back lasts for 3 days. You see, the goalpost just moves again. This pattern keeps you in a permanent state of waiting and waiting keeps you from taking action. And that's not an accident either. Sometimes when people are doing that, they're really just bargaining with themselves and sometimes they're conscious about it and they're really just trying to get you off their case. Now, with all these patterns, there's something I want you to notice. Almost every single manipulation tactic we talked about gets triggered the moment you try to confront the behavior directly. The moment you try to bring up what you found, the moment you say you need to talk about their drinking, using, or smoking, that is when the reality distortion kicks in. That's when they flip the script on you. That's when everything gets flipped upside down. And it either ends with everybody leaving mad or you end up apologizing just to keep the peace. But there actually is a way to bring up the problem, to address the issue without stepping on those landmines. A way to start to break through the denial without it turning into a giant thing every single time. And I teach those tactics in our Denial Breakthrough Challenge. I teach you how to influence without triggering defensiveness, without the argument, without losing yourself in the process, without even having to bring up the substance. Now, we only do this challenge every 4, 6, 8 weeks or so. I'm going to put the link to the description for those of you who want to reserve your spot to the one that's coming up. This can genuinely change how every conversation goes from here on out. Love to get your feedback in the comments below. Now let's move into why you keep falling for these manipulation tactics, because I know what some of you are thinking right now. You're thinking, Why can't I just see what's happening and stop it and quit biting the fishhook, quit falling into it? The thing is, these tactics work because they target your best qualities, your empathy, your loyalty, your love, your hope that things will get better. You don't fall for it because you're naive. You fall for it because this is someone you love and that love makes you want to believe them. Being manipulated doesn't make you gullible. It makes you human. But there's some good news here. The moment you can name what's happening, everything starts to shift. Like for example, when you know what's coming at you is reality distortion, you stop internalizing it. When you recognize the emotional inversion, you stop apologizing for having a concern. When you see the moving goalposts, you stop waiting and you start focusing on what you can actually do. You don't become cold. You don't stop loving them. You just stop getting lost in the chaos of it. And when you stop getting lost, and eventually you become someone who can actually influence change, not by fighting the addiction, but by refusing to get pulled into the games. If this video gave you language for something that you've been living with, I want you to drop a comment below and tell me which one hit closest to home. Because sometimes the most powerful thing is knowing that what you experienced has a name, that it's real, and that it is not your fault. And if you're ready to go deeper and learn how to actually respond to these patterns in a way that protects you and gives your loved one the best chance to change, I've linked some resources below. And lastly, if you're not already subscribed, please do that now because we talk about this stuff here in a way that doesn't shame you, doesn't shame them, just clear, practical, and I'll see you in the next one.
