If you’ve ever wondered why you felt a connection with someone that turned out to be controlling and manipulative, you were probably being manipulated from day one.
Manipulative and abusive behavior are how some people are able to keep their control over you. And if you can figure out how they keep getting away with it (and how you’re continually conned into falling into their traps), you’ll learn what to watch for when it happens.
Understanding how manipulation works isn’t just about spotting red flags. It’s about recognizing the psychological principles that make us vulnerable to people who don’t have our best interests at heart.
These aren’t random tactics. They follow patterns that have been studied and documented, and once you understand them, you can protect yourself from getting trapped in relationships that slowly hollow you out.
Robert Cialdini wrote a book called “Influence” that breaks down six principles of persuasion. These principles explain how we can be influenced to do things we wouldn’t normally do on our own.
The principles of influence are not inherently bad. In fact, they work in healthy relationships too. But when someone uses them intentionally or even unconsciously to control you, they become the foundation of emotional abuse.
I’m going to walk you through each of these six principles and show you exactly how they play out in psychologically abusive relationships. Once you see the pattern, you’ll understand why you might have felt so committed to something that was destroying you from the inside out.
The first principle is reciprocation. When someone does something for you, you feel obligated to do something for them in return. It’s a natural human response. If I gave you a birthday card out of the blue, you’d be more likely to give me one when my birthday comes around. That’s reciprocation at work.
In the beginning of an emotionally abusive relationship, this principle shows up as love-bombing and gift-bombing. The person showers you with attention, compliments, and generosity. They’re giving you everything you could want. You’re getting more attention than you’ve ever received before, and it feels incredible.
But here’s what’s actually happening: They’re creating a scenario where you feel compelled to give back. And what do you give back? Your heart. Your trust. Your emotional availability. You open yourself up completely because they’ve been so wonderful to you.
That’s reciprocation working against you. They’re not giving because they’re generous. They’re giving because they know you’ll give back something far more valuable, your complete emotional investment in them.
The second principle is scarcity. We want what we can’t have. We want what’s limited. We want what feels like it might disappear at any moment.
The emotionally abusive person uses scarcity by being inconsistently available. They might not be fully emotionally connected to you all the time. You feel that distance, and it makes you want that connection even more desperately.
An example of scarcity is when they text you, and you respond to that text, but then they don’t respond back for hours or maybe even a full day.
What does that do? It creates the same urgency as a sale that ends in 24 hours. You want it so badly because you’re not sure when or if you’ll get it again.
This is why you find yourself constantly reaching out, constantly trying to reconnect, constantly hoping they’ll show up for you.
The emotionally abusive person knows this. They understand that if they don’t give enough of themselves, you’ll keep reaching for more. You’ll always have this fear of not getting enough love, not getting enough attention, and not getting enough of them.
And that raises your fears, which, unfortunately, they use against you to keep you in their control. Many abusive people use scarcity so that you’re always chasing what feels just out of reach.
The third principle is authority. We tend to follow people who seem to know what they’re doing. Leaders project confidence, and that confidence makes us feel secure. When someone seems to have it all figured out, we’re drawn to them.
Think about a narcissist walking into a room. They act like they know everything. That’s an extreme example, but the principle applies to any relationship where one person positions themselves as the one who has the answers, who’s in charge, and who knows best.
This leadership quality can be incredibly attractive to some people. Sometimes it feels good to let someone else take charge and handle things.
But here’s the problem. When you have a controlling, manipulative person in that authority position, and you let go of leading yourself in a healthy way, you start to diminish.
That’s what someone abusing their authority wants. They want you to become more submissive, looking to them as the alpha in the relationship.
And they make it look like you’re the one dragging yourself down; You’re the one lagging behind; You’re the one who needs to follow them and look to them for advice and support.
That’s authority at work, and it’s especially powerful with narcissistic people.
The fourth and fifth principles work together: commitment and consistency. When someone commits to you and shows up consistently, you’re more likely to be influenced by them.
All of these qualities, mixed with abusive intent, can make your life a living hell.
Consistency: In the first few months, the abusive person is incredibly consistent. They’re calling you, wanting to be with you, giving you gifts, love-bombing you. It’s nonstop attention, and it feels amazing. You’ve never gotten this much focus in your life.
What they’re actually doing is establishing a foundation of trust and connection. But it’s scripted. They’re following a pattern so that you’ll follow along and believe this is how they’ll show up forever. They might even talk about marriage or kids or a long-term future together to make you think they’re in it for the long run.
Then everything shifts. Once they realize you’re in love with them, once they know you adore them, the commitment and consistency transform into something else entirely. They become committed to doing the abusive behavior. And they’re consistent in being unavailable, emotionally distant, and hurting you.
If that wasn’t cruel enough, they sprinkle just enough breadcrumbs to keep you wanting more. And when you’ve reached your limit of loneliness and need an emotional connection, where your heart is practically aching, they finally appear and show you the love you so desperately want from them.
And that love will feel like a surge of positive emotion filling your heart again. It may feel so good that you might start believing everything is going to be okay again. That moment of reconnection… but just another breadcrumb.
This back and forth, up and down cycle of connecting and separating, loving then controlling, is the cycle of love and abuse:
You love, then you feel hurt.
You love, then you feel hurt.
Over and over.
And the person doing this is very consistent about it. They’re committed to this relationship, but they want it their way, regardless of how you feel, and regardless of how they lie to you, manipulate you, or control you.
The sixth principle is consensus, also called social proof. That’s when we look to others to determine how we should behave or what we should believe. It’s based on the principle ‘If everyone else is doing or thinking something, we assume that must be what we’re supposed to do or think.’
I’ll give you an example. An older woman was walking into a Panera Bread, and I was sitting inside with a friend. I looked back and saw her stumble and fall. I immediately jumped up to help her, even though I was about 30 or 40 feet away. But nobody else did. There were several people much closer to her who didn’t move.
That’s consensus at work. The other people who saw this happen probably looked at the people closest to her and thought, “They’re not getting up, so they must know something I don’t. I guess I won’t get up either. They must know better than I do.”
Another example: I was at a conference once, standing outside a meeting room with a group of people. Someone tried one door and found it locked. They said, “Well, it must not be starting yet.” Nobody tried the other door. We all just stood there waiting.
Then someone came along and asked if anyone had tried the doors. The general consensus was yes, we tried the doors. But actually, we hadn’t – not both of them. We just assumed someone had.
That person tried the locked door, then tried the other door. It was unlocked! We all could have been inside already, but we were influenced by the general consensus that the conference hadn’t started yet, and they had not unlocked the room.
In an emotionally abusive relationship, consensus works against you in a devastating way. Almost always, family, friends, and relatives know your partner from a completely different side. They see someone who’s nice, charming, and couldn’t possibly be hurting you or making you feel bad about yourself, so there’s no way that person could be doing what you say they’re doing.
The general consensus is that your partner is a good person. And that isolates you. It makes you feel alone. You’re like the old woman who fell at the Panera Bread, but nobody’s coming to help because the general consensus is that you’re okay.
Sure, you can tell people what’s going on, but because everyone else believes your partner isn’t what they experience, you may not get anyone to hear you. That’s the power of consensus, and it’s one of the most painful aspects of being in an emotionally abusive relationship.
The last principle is Liking. We’re more likely to be influenced by people we like. That sounds obvious, but think about how it plays out. When you meet someone, and they’re nice to you, you like them.
When you like a person, you’re more likely to open your heart to them, spend time with them, and trust them.
You’re also far more likely to date someone you know and like rather than a perfect stranger who asks for your phone number in a grocery store. Most people build relationships with people they’ve gotten to know and genuinely like.
In a difficult relationship, you end up loving this “likable” person. And because you love them, you become committed to the love itself. You love the feeling of being loved! You want more of it! So that feeling of love becomes a huge influence on your behavior.
And when they give you what feels like love, you’re sucked back into their influence, their charm, their ways of keeping you on board. Those breadcrumbs keep you following them, keeping them in your life. You focus on the good parts, the parts you love. The toxic parts become things you hope won’t happen again, so you dismiss them.
Someone who doesn’t have your best interests in mind but wants to control you by making you like them or love them has incredible power over you. When you’re in that space, you become vulnerable to their behavior. They take advantage of that vulnerability and make you do things you normally wouldn’t do in a relationship.
You probably wouldn’t normally stay with someone who continually hurts you. But they disguise the hurt as love. You feel loved by someone who’s hurting you, and you stay because you keep seeking that love. You want to see what you saw in them at the beginning of the relationship.
The hard truth is that you can’t find the person they were in the beginning once the abusive behavior has started. At least not until they realize they’re hurting you and they’re empathetic enough to change.
If someone is hurting you now, they will not stop until they feel bad for hurting you.
The sad truth is that most abusive people do not empathize with the suffering they are causing you, so they may never feel bad for doing bad behaviors.
But if they do genuinely feel bad about hurting you, then there’s a chance that the relationship can heal and progress. But until they’re empathetic, until they get to that space where they think, “I feel so bad for hurting that person. I better do something. I better work on myself. I better heal myself,” you may never see change.
Without empathy, an abusive person does not change.
CONCLUSION
Understanding the principles of influence doesn’t mean you’ll never be influenced again. We all get influenced. I study this stuff, and I still find myself becoming influenced: I was one of many people standing outside that conference room who didn’t try the second door to see if it was locked.
But awareness helps. When you know what’s happening, when you can recognize these patterns, you can avoid getting in your own way. We become so enmeshed in relationships sometimes that we don’t see the toxic behavior right in front of us, right under our noses.
If you don’t see it, if you don’t know why you feel the way you do, you’re more likely to continue down a toxic path. And that will continue to eat away at you from the inside out, where you eventually become a shell of your former self.
The six principles of influence work together to create a trap in an emotionally abusive relationship:
Reciprocation gets you to open your heart.
Scarcity keeps you chasing.
Authority makes you defer to them.
Commitment and consistency build a foundation that shifts into a cycle of abuse.
Consensus isolates you from support.
And Liking (or loving) keeps you emotionally invested even when you’re being hurt.
Not everyone who uses these principles is consciously manipulating you. Some emotionally abusive people inherently know what works, and they repeat what works without thinking about it. They don’t call it the six principles of influence. They just know that certain behaviors get them what they want.
But whether abusive people are conscious of their behaviors or not doesn’t change the impact on you. The result is the same. You end up committed to something toxic, unable to see clearly, feeling like you’re going crazy when everyone else thinks your partner is wonderful.
The way out from under someone else’s influence starts with seeing the patterns. Once you recognize how these principles are being used against you, you can start to question your own responses:
- You can ask yourself why you feel so compelled to give back when someone love-bombs you.
- You can notice when scarcity is being used to keep you chasing.
- You can recognize when you’re deferring to someone’s authority instead of leading yourself.
- You can see when commitment and consistency have shifted from building connection to maintaining control.
- You can understand when consensus is isolating you instead of supporting you.
- And you can recognize when your love for someone is being used to keep you in a relationship that’s destroying you.
Recognizing the principles of influence in a relationship isn’t easy. These principles are powerful because they tap into fundamental human psychology.
But you’re not powerless. You can learn to see what’s happening. You can learn to trust your own experience even when everyone else says you’re wrong. And you can learn to lead yourself in a healthy way instead of deferring to someone who doesn’t have your best interests at heart.
The most important thing to understand is this: You can’t change other people. You can only change how you respond.
And sometimes, the healthiest response is recognizing that you deserve better than a relationship built on manipulation, even if that manipulation feels like love.
 | Paul Colaianni Paul Colaianni is an Emotional Abuse Expert and Behavior and Relationship Specialist who has been analyzing complex relationship dynamics since 2010. As the creator of the Healed Being program and host of the top-rated Love and Abuse and The Overwhelmed Brain podcasts, with over 21 million downloads worldwide, he specializes in helping people recognize hidden manipulation, navigate emotionally abusive relationships, and empower themselves to make informed decisions. |