communication

Subtitle: When the People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation, and Guilt to Manipulate You

Recommended to me by: looking up FOG: Fear, Obligation, and Guilt

Susan Forward clearly analyzes emotional blackmail and blackmailers in relationships, as well as the characteristics of people who become targets of blackmail. At the end, she has suggestions for reclaiming integrity and communicating assertively with blackmailers to give them the opportunity to reform.

Emotional blackmail steps: Demand, Resistance, Pressure, Threats, Compliance, Repetition.

By contrast, setting limits involves defining a position, stating what one needs, saying what one will and won’t accept, and giving the other person a chance to say yes or no.

Blackmailers are divided into categories: Punishers (“Do it or else I’ll hurt you”), Self-Punishers (“… or else I’ll hurt myself”), Sufferers (“You know how much I’ve been through”), and Tantalizers (“I could help you”).

FOG (Fear, Obligation, and Guilt) keep blackmail targets from thinking clearly. The blackmailer skillfully pushes buttons to make the target react rather than stop and think.

Traits that make targets vulnerable to FOG and emotional blackmail: an excessive need for approval, an intense fear of anger, a need for peace at any price, a tendency to take too much responsibility for other people’s lives, a high level of self-doubt. These are survival skills that may be out of date, and cause problems when they run the show.

Suggestions: Make a contract with yourself to restore integrity and take action. Repeat your power statement, “I CAN STAND IT.” Reverse statements such as “I tell myself what I want is wrong” into “I ask for what I want, even when it upsets the blackmailer.”

Send up an SOS: Stop (“I need time to think about it”), Observe (one’s own reactions, thoughts, emotions, flashpoints), Strategize (analyze demands). Demands might be minor, partly okay, open to compromise, or non-negotiable. List what you need, and expand your options. Decide what the bottom line is to leave.

Interestingly, the book uses the phrase “powerful non-defensive communication” and its publication date (1997) predates Sharon Ellison’s book on that topic (2002). Don’t take up the bait of attacks, but clearly and consistently stay on-message. “This is who I am. This is what I want.”

To disconnect from fear, she suggests thought-stopping. To disconnect from obligation, add “WHERE IS IT WRITTEN” to one’s obligatory rules. To disconnect from guilt, write a fairy tale in third person about what’s going on.

Her suggestions are based on the idea that our emotions follow our thoughts. She explicitly excludes seriously abusive relationships, and people who have experienced serious trauma and abuse. She also elides any discussion of racism, sexism, classism, or other power dynamics at work that might put someone down and out for resisting a blackmailer.

While she discusses attempts at resistance that get squashed, she still seems to be saying that the blackmail targets just didn’t resist the right way. According to her, blackmail targets train their blackmailers by acquiescing. As someone who actively resists guilt and doesn’t acquiesce much, I’m here to say that path has negative consequences too.

She states that blackmailers themselves are frightened and unaware of their tactics’ effects on the target. In the cases where this is true, her suggestions will be useful. In the cases where blackmailers are simply indifferent, or coldly aware of the efficacy of their tactics, these suggestions inappropriately suggest that the target is at fault.

This is a great first book about manipulation and assertiveness. It is clearly written with lots of anecdotes threaded through the book. If it isn’t your first introduction to these ideas, it feels somewhat shallow, like it sidesteps the hard parts.

Available at bookshop.org.

Subtitle: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

Dr. Sue Johnson, creator of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, applies attachment theory to adult relationships, and everything suddenly makes sense. Attachment relationships provide an anchor and sense of safety in the world. They feel just as essential to our survival as attachment relationships do to children, so it makes sense we fight or flee when they feel threatened.

The seven conversations are:

1. Recognize Demon Dialogues – look underneath for attachment fears, and see how both people contribute to patterns.
   • Find the Bad Guy – casting blame for distress
   • Protest Polka – one person withdraws, the other makes demands, in a cycle
   • Freeze and Flee – both people withdraw, and the relationship is on its deathbed
2. Find the Raw Spots – identify triggers for attachment longings and fears.
3. Revisit a Rocky Moment – talk through a past conversation that didn’t go well, taking into account patterns, raw spots, and deeper emotions.
4. Hold Me Tight – emotional attunement, accessibility, responsiveness, and engagement. Each person tunes into their own emotions and shares what they are most afraid of, and then the attachment longing that is live in that moment. Hopefully the partner turns toward them and fulfills the longing, creating a new bonding experience. The person who usually withdraws goes first.
5. Forgiving Attachment Injuries – relationship traumas, usually involving some kind of abandonment, need to be healed, not ignored.
   1. The hurt partner speaks their pain as openly and simply as possible.
   2. The injuring partner stays emotionally present and acknowledges the wounded partner’s pain and their part in it.
   3. Emotionally connect around this, start rebuilding trust.
   4. Injuring partner takes ownership and expresses regret and remorse.
   5. Hold Me Tight conversation centered around the attachment injury – what is needed now to bring comfort and closure. Hopefully the injuring partner fulfills this.
   6. Create a narrative that captures the injuring event and how it is being healed.
6. Bonding Through Sex and Touch – bring emotional connection, communication, and trust to touch and sex.
7. Keep Your Love Alive – name ways to reconnect when a Demon Dialogue crops up, celebrate the positive moments, discuss attachment needs and issues, make rituals for separation and reunion, create an ongoing story of the living relationship, create a vision for the relationship in the future.

There is more than one gay couple in this book! And one couple of Asian descent. Women and men are individuals, not stereotyped caricatures. The client stories are realistic, practical, and encouraging.

Despite the pop-psych title and Overuse of Capital Letters, this book is solidly researched and makes a lot of sense. Highly recommended.

Available at bookshop.org.

Also read Dr. Sue Johnson’s more recent Love Sense, which covers a lot of the same material, with more information about the neurochemistry of attachment. Oddly, she leaves out the disorganized attachment style entirely. There is an extended example of a couple repairing their relationship.

Subtitle: The Complete Guide to Restoring Trust in Your Relationship

This book really is what it says on the tin. Mira Kirshenbaum is a couple’s therapist who shares both her own and clients’ stories to illustrate the stages of responding to betrayal and rebuilding trust.

• How to evaluate whether the relationship is worth investing in
• How to manage the anger which is a natural response to betrayal
• The need for evidence that the betrayer cares
• The need for the betrayer to see the situation from the betrayed person’s point of view.
• Reconnecting with the good aspects of the relationship
• Discuss root causes without (hearing) blame
• Discuss needs and how to meet them
• The (eventual) decision to forgive

The book is compassionate to both sides. Yes, big mistakes happen. They are sometimes not forgivable. The betrayed person naturally feels a strong need to re-establish safety, and may not use the most skilled techniques to achieve that.

There are no “shoulds” about leaving or staying. While the book naturally focuses on relationships that are worth rebuilding, there are also clear call-outs for danger signs, such as people who are power-seeking for its own sake, or people who are suspicious for its own sake, or relationships that don’t have enough good in them to be worth the work.

Small ongoing betrayals such as unreliability are addressed, as well as big betrayals like affairs or squandering shared money. Ongoing power imbalances can also be a source of mistrust. There is an in-depth discussion of differences in being open or hidden causing mistrust.

I winced at the section title, “Sleeping in a Nazi’s bed.” As a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I am emphatically not a fan of metaphorical Nazis. But the author meant real Nazis! Her mother was a German Jew who survived the Holocaust, and brought her safely out of Germany afterward. When she went back to Germany to visit as a young adult, a sudden illness caused her to accept the hospitality of kind strangers who were admittedly Nazis during the war. She talks about how trust can make sense, even though we have reason to be mistrustful.

Sadly, all the couples in this book are heterosexual, and there’s no indication they’re anything other than white. And it was published in 2012! On the positive side, the men and women are depicted as having a variety of frailties and strengths, and a variety of relationships together.

Recommended for a better understanding of trust, betrayal, and relationship dynamics.

Available at bookshop.org.

Subtitle: A Developmental Approach to Diagnosis and Treatment in Couples Therapy

Recommended to me by: Robyn Posin

This is a carefully crafted book about effective, compassionate couples therapy, including a clear theoretical framework and practical suggestions for diagnosis and treatment. I’m guessing the title was created by a marketing department, because it doesn’t fit the book at all (to my relief).

Their framework is that relationships go through stages just as children do. The stages are named symbiotic (we are so alike), differentiating (how do we work out differences), practicing (turning outward independently), and rapprochement (turning back toward the relationship). The members of a couple can be at different stages, for example symbiotic-differentiating, or symbiotic-practicing. All the stages are important and valuable. The symbiotic stage is expected and helps create a strong foundation for the relationship.

Diagnosis is made through talking with the couple, questionnaires about problems and goals, and through a “paper exercise” – giving a couple a blank piece of paper and telling them, “This represents something very important to each of you. You have 5 minutes to work out who will get to hold it.”

There are a lot of case histories, including one lesbian couple and one couple with a woman of Japanese ancestry. I would have liked to see more diversity, although I suppose this isn’t bad for a book from the 80’s.

The therapists are perceptive, compassionate, and direct. They name inappropriate behavior, and teach their clients healthier alternatives.

Recommended for people interested in couple dynamics and effective therapy.

Available at bookshop.org.