Is your partner’s behaviour Confusing, Bullying or Manipulative?

There are people who are confusing and bullying and manipulative, and you begin to see a pattern that emerges that these are the things that they do regularly.

Now, one thing about these people who have these patterns is that in the beginning they didn’t seem to have them. Did they? They were simply intriguing, mysterious, delightful, maybe a little quirky. Uh, and you kind of let things go in that wonderful hormone haze that biology gives us. When we’re meeting somebody as a potential partner, we tend to just let things like these traits go by.

We think:

• Oh, they didn’t mean it.
• Oh, that they must be having a bad day.
• Uh, Oh, maybe it’s something I did.
• Maybe it’s some way that I could have been better.

And then we started looking at ourselves and beating ourselves up. Like, was I not paying attention? Wasn’t I listening well? Didn’t I understand how they need their needs met?

And you start contorting yourself into a pretzel and still nothing changes.

Is this starting to sound familiar to you?

Now, some people are confusing. That means that at one moment they want one thing and another moment they want the exact opposite. At one moment they have an opinion about something. The next moment they’re the exact opposite. Those are what we call high conflict traits because those people have to win no matter what. They have to be right and if they have to contradict themselves from one moment to the next, they will and they don’t worry for a minute about it.

So that’s the confusing aspect. The bullying aspect is that they always want to control you. They always want to have the last say. They want to tell you how to do things, how to do your life, how you should think, look, dress, sound, what you should like and want.

They’re always wanting to tell you exactly how you should be and why they’re doing that is because they don’t want the spotlight on themselves. Nothing will ever be their fault anyway. And so if they can continue to make you the person who needs to change, they don’t have to look at themselves.

Another tricky thing you’ll see with these folks is that they blame you for the things that they’re doing. Like even if it’s something, a personality trait or a feeling that they might have and they don’t like having it, they’ll tell you that you have it … and that may ring a bell for you immediately.

And then we get to the third, the manipulative people. These are ones that not only want to be controlling, but they’re devious about it. They will play on your feelings, play on your emotions. They will get really angry if they need to. They’ll be very, very consoling if they need to. Anything to get you to do exactly what they want so they can appear absolutely charming to everybody else.

And then at home they are nothing but one hurdle after another, one obstacle after another and you begin to feel tied in and more constrained and more constricted and you really don’t know where to turn in the relationship.

These are three kinds of high conflict trait patterns that you really need to know more about if you’re experiencing them on a regular basis in your relationship. Now, fortunately, we have some help for you around that.

Please browse around my website, there are lots of blog posts about high conflict, narcissistic people – the ones that I call Hijackals®.

I have lots of videos on YouTube. And you can engage with me in with my books and with my writing and come to work with me, as a one-on-one client if you like.