Can Asperger people become emotional manipulators?

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^The word "manipulation" has connotations of subterfuge and underhandedness....In short, it has negative connotations.

what you are describing is something different. It is called "influence." There is a subtle difference.
Both may involve strategy, suspension of truths and indirect tactics.

Manipulation has far less savoury connotations than the tactics used by a suicide counsellor, to thwart someone's wish to end their own life.

diplomats? cannot comment.

Some people would disagree, some people would ask which group they were in

But seriously, it's very easy to manipulate someone. I used to do it all the time when i was younger. I'm very good at "pretending to cry" or "pretending to have a break down".... and don't even get me started on the fake manic-episodes or fake stimming.

Infact even with age i still manipualte people, if i know a conversation is going in a bad direction, i will display fake-anger and fake stimming. It's better to stop people in their tracks before i am develop real anger.

So, because people have bastardized the definition of manipulation to make it sound horrible, we should discard it as a tool for good? Manipulation is underhanded, but so is spying. Yet spying is a very important part of foreign relations in every industrialized nation.

The word manipulation receives a completely illogical and unreasonable gut reaction from people who do not understand what it means:

Which is exactly what, for example, suicide counsellors do, or diplomats.

Mr Loony, changes in language, vocabulary and their semantics isn't "bastardisation." It is the ESSENCE of language, which is never in a fixed state, but always in a state of flux.

There isn't a "fixed" meaning attached to any word. As soon as a dictionary is published it becomes obsolete....





now...back to the thread topic....
In my view,many ASD people are naturally very caring and quite 'wide-eyed" and innocent. And yet, as others have posted, there is the issue of "personality." I have seen enough variation here on WP regarding personality and presentation, to shake off previously held generalisations about ASD people. We are a cross-section of the population, with all the variations that entails.

True, but that doesn't change the fact that the word manipulation has been given a bad reputation because of how it is used in media and influential people. This alone does not change the meaning of a word, as manipulation is still used for times when it is not necessarily selfish or evil. Influence does not really describe the tactics used as well as manipulation does.

If i was a doctor, and i faked an image of someones lungs to make it look as if they had cancer. I would be manipulating them to stop smoking. Obviously a week later, there would be another scan and i'd say, "Looks like your first one was just a bad image"...

This isn't having an influence, it's manipulation

Michjo... That is not only a very good example of manipulation... It is also very illegal

I manipulate people all the time. You could say that when I talk to a person, I'm manipulating that person into liking me by choosing to conform to the conventions of NT conversation when it's not natural. That's usually how I feel. Although, you could also say it's like speaking to a person in their native language rather than your own.

I manipulate people in other ways too. It's not hard for me to try to think of what behavior to use to elicit a certain response from someone.

My parents say I'm manipulative quite a lot & that I'm very emotional & trying to get others to do things I can do myself because I'm lazy & extremely selfish. I think some of the problems are related to being Aspie & my physical disabilities. I'm very dependent & I don't like taking steps to be independent because I've screwed things up a lot. I also get overwhelmed & do thing much slower than others because of bad OCD. I think being manipulative is kind of a learned adaptation because I'm so dependent.

I don't know. I've been accused of it before and I don't know what the person was talking about *shrug*. I've even asked "exactly what am I trying to manipulate you into DOING" and they didn't have an answer for me. I find it offensive to be accused of something like that when it wasn't my intent, but whether other people with AS do it, I don't know.

~Kate

I do not have the social skills to be able to manipulate people lol. Apart from which I prefer to be direct, open and honest. Manipulation makes me feel uncomfortable.

Of course there are always outliers, but I think that only those on the lower end would be capable of emotional manipulation. Your typical, run-of-the-mill, aspie simply would not not consider it as it runs against an aspie's natural, almost blind, tendency to be straight-forward and blunt. It could be done, sure, I just do not see how an aspie would comprehend the proposed "benefits" of doing such a thing. It would seem pointless and irrelevant.

Sure, it can boost one's ego, but where is the logic behind such activity? There is none. Many aspies were teased or bullied. I cannot think of any aspie who would willingly trick another human being into some sort of emotional entanglement they otherwise would not have been in without feeling guilty.

To go with that, aspergers shares a few common traits with histrionic personality disorder. A person with HPD most definitely would emotionally someone. And they would not be aware of it, either, as the action would seem normal to them. It could be posible that someone is confusing someone with HPD with one of aspergers.

Last edited by Crucial_BBQ on 30 May 2012, 8:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Actually from what I've read its not that people with BPD are not nessisarily manipulative, its more that's how they come of without meaning to be...its more the stigma that suggests people with the disorder are nasty manipulators that should be accused of 'attention seeking' when they need help but the reality is not quite like that. Yeah my Psychology professor finds that sort of stigma more harmful then good for people with that disorder.

But it doesn't change the fact that the word 'manipulation', without specifying a specfic case, has high probabilities of being referred to a unfair demeanor. An 'emotional manipulator' is supposed to be a person who manipulates often, and does that in order to change people's decission, not to support them (otherwise it would be 'supportive'). Though manipulation can be possitive, a person who manipulates systematically is very likely to be unfair.



I couldn't agree more.

Sure. Nothing surprises me anymore what aspies can do. I have seen aspie trolls, aspie bullies, aspie manipulators, aspies being as*holes, aspies being ignorant about aspie traits, and an aspie playing games in court with the judge to alienate her son from her ex by using manipulation and taking her ex's posts from here to use against him in court. So an aspie being a emotional manipulator wouldn't surprise me and I would think it's possible.

i think it stems from the fact there's no innate good or bad, once you decide to become amoral, you can push justification beyond and beyond what NT's consider unpalatable. those examples seem extreme, but i imagine because there's no backlash, the "scott tenorman" example, which is fictional, is quite palatable,

i'd choose not to be sociopathic, because it sounds like too much work to maintain, but if it was part of my job, i might have to work at it.

then again, i learned to sell knives, door to door as my first real job (sigh)

once you get over those tactics, and your own phobias and anxieties, you meet all kinds of human examples of success and sociopathy and it rubs off on you, as to how far you can go. or become. Sales, is confronting, but if you're good, the mask you put on to deal with people, can do quite a lot more harm if you realise what people do and are. it makes me deeply uncomfortable to start a conversation i know is going to be deceptive, but i can also lie like a champion now.

i.e. "Hey, i understand, i used to think the sky was blue, but really, the sky is green, just look at it, it's sort of blue, but not really blue. yeah ? my friend james here, took a great photo, can't you see the green in it now ? just there. have a look. see how it looks kind of green, and when you think about it, it's always been green, right ? i can't believe other people can't see the green in the sky as well, right ? we can laugh about this now, and how amazing is that, the sky, being green, right ?"

i just can't maintain the passivity or the ruthlessness for long enough to be successful, or friendly, or emulate NT tactical approaches. i can do it, it's just mindless to do it, and drains you over time.

however, the most dangerous aspect i've found, is core belief. if you spend enough time, you can route yourself into sociopathy, to believe anything, which makes you able to convince people of anything at all. of course its easy to manipulate people. NT people barely spend any time working on emotional recognition in others, they assume everyone sees the world they do, and that makes them dependent on others to agree with them, and think, for them.

confidence, sells truth and untruth. all it takes is a brief tweak to push someone into an emotional state to make choices you want them to make, and there really is six/20 words, to create an emotional state, or create a state of fear and anxiety in people who have no training or exposure to emotional manipulation.

sociopathy, good or bad, is relatively easy, but hard to maintain for aspie's, because it also requires constant presence and upkeep, much like any relationship. as for guilt, the problem of dealing with NT's means we have to put up a face that NT's can understand. once you learn that, you can unlearn it and make it into something else too...

that's the only way that i can fathom behaviour in my mind, that NT people have this capacity to project and not absorb emotional states, they don't need the full gamut of relative empathy, they redirect it to another persona that can feel, and swap personas in public and private, work and social environments, etc. i can only envy my sister who has about 8 faces she doesn't even really recognise, her voice, hair and face muscles change, makeup changes, clothing, vocab, etc. other people, have less, and some have more.