Operation Warp Speed: Moolah Edition - Money Magnet 5.11G

[Shannon]

Manipulation ALWAYS benefits the person doing it in some way.  The question is, does it benefit you from a conscious point of view, or a subconscious point of view?  A lot of people like to play innocent at a conscious level (and they may even actually believe themselves to be, consciously), while they connive and manipulate like crazy subconsciously and in subtle ways.

Creating such a distortion without benefit isn't manipulation.  It's usually insanity and self destruction, in my experience.

I like having words to summarize complex separate concepts; that's where I'm wanting the semantic distinction between "A & B & C" and "A & B & not C", in your opinion. You've distinguished between people who distort and benefit and those who distort but don't benefit; then your response seems to indicate that a distortion always benefits the distorter.

So if 'not benefitting the person doing it' makes it 'not manipulation', I might argue that a parent will benefit indirectly from misleading their child because the child could hurt themselves because their internal sense of reality (their inner playing field) is distorted and constantly shifting, and the parent would suffer in such a situation. The parents benefit, by that logic, so is that manipulation? Do you have a separate word to parse out benevolent vs. malicious distortions?

Lots of moving parts, I know, and some of it will come down to our opinions and individual experience. Would love to hear your opinion.

What you seem to be missing is that those who distort without benefit are not manipulating, but broken.  Humans who are not broken always act in their own self interest, as they understand it to be.  This may be at a conscious or subconscious level, but it's almost a universal law.

In the case of parents, we have to separate them, therefore, into healthy parents and "broken" parents.  Healthy parents will do their best to guide and shape their children and their children's minds and awareness into what makes them a healthy, functional, successful, independent, contributing adult.  "Broken" parents will try to control their children too much (helicopter parents), undermine them, leech from them, make them experience "unnecessary*" guilt, shame and fear, limit them, weaken their self esteem, self respect and sense of self worth, and generally produce children who are going to turn into adults who are also "broken".

Note that "healthy vs "broken" exists on a spectrum, it is not black and white.

* In raising a child, you have to form boundaries within which the child operates, or it will become a tyrannical brat in most cases, and/or a criminal adult.  At the earliest stages, the easiest boundaries are set using guilt, shame and fear.  Note that these can be used positively, if they are used sparingly and specifically.  For example, when I was 4 years old, I thought nothing of taking a pack of gum off the checkout counter and putting in my pocket and taking it home.  When my mother found it, she took me back to the store and forced me to apologize, which was very embarrassing for me.  This experience led me to understand, before I would have done so, that "stealing is an undesirable course of action", and I did not do that again.

Was my mother manipulating me, or was she guiding me to understand a concept before I could have the brain capacity to understand it at a logical level, in a way that would work?  It benefited her to do this because then her son would be more likely to succeed in life, and that is the goal of any healthy parent.  Children are a huge investment in time and energy for any parent worth their salt.

Another example.  My mother instilled in me a sense of responsibility for certain family members which eventually led me to almost literally work myself to death at one point trying to take care of them.  Even their doctors told me I needed to stop, that I was risking health issues from the exhaustion and stress.  Was this manipulation?  You might think so, initially, but in fact it was not something she instilled in me on purpose; it was a learned behavior and response from observing her actions and reactions, and those of others.  In fact I was learning from her the results of a manipulation perpetuated decades earlier by her mother, my grandmother.  My mother, therefore, committed no manipulation; she was just doing what she understood to be the "right thing", which I observed.  My grandmother was famous among our family for her manipulations and attempts thereto.  Ironically, when my grandmother attempted to manipulate me directly, I detected and shut down those manipulations, hard.  But her manipulation of my mother became a successful manipulation of me through a passive approach of simply learned behavior and responses.

Does this help any?