Emotional blackmail (fear, obligation, guilt)
Getting what you want by threatening, openly or by implication, to make someone suffer if they refuse, working through fear, obligation and guilt (Forward's 'FOG').
What drives it
It secures compliance without having to make a case or accept a no. Forward described four styles: punishers (threaten harm), self-punishers (threaten to harm themselves), sufferers (make the other responsible for their misery) and tantalisers (promise rewards that keep receding).
How it shows
Work
'After everything I've done for you, you're leaving now? The team will fall apart and that's on you.' 'If you take that to the board, I can't promise your role survives the restructure.' 'I suppose I'll just work the weekend again, then.' A founder dangling a partnership that never arrives is a tantaliser.
Relationships
'If you go on that trip, don't bother coming back.' 'If you loved me you would.' 'Fine, I'll be alone at Christmas, don't worry about me.' Threats of self-harm used to stop someone leaving must still be taken seriously and directed to crisis help, with the decision about the relationship kept separate.
Self
As target: a knot of fear or guilt when you think of saying no, and you comply to stop the feeling rather than because you agree. As actor: you find yourself listing what you've done for someone when they disagree with you.
What tells it apart
Boundaries: Both state consequences; a boundary protects the speaker, is proportionate and stands whatever the other does, while blackmail is designed to hurt and disappears the moment the other complies.
Coercive control: Emotional blackmail can be a single demand; coercive control is an ongoing system that restricts the whole of someone's life.
Passive aggression: Passive aggression hides hostility; blackmail names, or clearly implies, a price.
A test
Say no calmly and hold it: a disappointed person accepts it with feeling; a blackmailer escalates the threat, the guilt or the suffering until you give in.
Questions to carry
- After a calm no that held, what came next, disappointment that settled or a threat that grew?
- Which fear, obligation or guilt makes me give in fastest, and whose voice is it in?
How strong the research is
weak. A clinician's popular description with no research programme behind it; the tactics it names are well recognised in practice.
Where it comes from
Susan Forward with Donna Frazier, 1997 (Emotional Blackmail)