Fallout: “Manipulative As Humanly Possible”

Written by Andi Bazaar, Yevhn Gertz | Nov 24, 2023

The power of abusers is the hold they continue to have even when we get away from them, we continue to resist them and continue to perceive situations as threats even after they are gone. That’s why processing that trauma and letting go of those survival skills can help a lot.

Clayton-Euridicé Schofield / Photographed Timothée-freimann Schofield / MHMTID 2023©

I wrote this article following a huge breakthrough in my mental health struggles, now I have devoted my life to helping others through their mental health journey. I hope this testimony is able to help your life and those around you, feel free to share.

I wanted to list some of the ways the freeze affected and triggered me as well as its continued impact to my audience on social media.

As a survivor of intimate partner violence, anytime my access to safe shelter and stability is out of my control 'I spiral.' — I had to find a home quickly when I was actively escaping a serious threat of fatal violence, if I don’t have a safe space I can’t really function.

I had panic attacks every day of the freeze and got around three hours of sleep that week, when I did sleep I had PTSD nightmares of all the abuse I suffered throughout my life (they get worse the more stress I encounter.)

The freeze triggered a sense of hopelessness and dread in me that many survivors experience, it made me feel even more helpless and isolated during my battle fight that had already exacerbated those feelings even weeks after the freeze I found myself dissociating and self-isolating. I still had trouble sleeping and had panic attacks more frequently.

I have to take two medications just to be able to sleep, I keep anxiety medication on me at all times in case I have another debilitating panic attack triggered by stress.

Clearly, all this wasn’t caused solely by the freeze and there have been other traumas I’ve suffered since but living through a mass-trauma impacted me in ways that will take months or years of therapy to fully process and understand.

Many others had it much worse, they watched their loved ones some children die of hypothermia and carbon monoxide poisoning. They went without dialysis, they froze to death. I grieve for them and am thankful that I was one of the lucky ones who came out alive.

“We are all processing the trauma of the freeze in different ways, though we can count the deaths we will never be able to measure the entirety of its impact. It hurt everyone who lived through it and whatever you’re feeling as we experience.”

TW: ⚠️ MANIPULATION/ABUSE ⚠️

Hello everyone, I wanted to use this final chapter by the end of November today to write about recognizing signs of manipulations and potential abuse specifically in relationships but all of this can also apply for family members, friendships, work relationships, etc…

The most important thing I want to stress out is to trust our instinct. Our minds are usually good at seeing these because subconsciously, we put together hints and develop a conclusion. It may not always be accurate but it is a good start to start a more thorough look at it.

NO VALIDATION:
"people who are usually manipulative will not give us a lot of praise or validation. this is because these things tend to increase self-esteem and confidence, the goal for a manipulative person is to decrease those because it is then easier to manipulate someone."

IMBALANCE OF GIVE AND TAKE:
"for some people, there is always going to be a little imbalance. some people are more empathetic and more giving than others but if the gap is staggering and the other person isn’t making any efforts then something could be wrong there."

PUTTING SOMEONE DOWN:
"if someone puts us down especially when it is completely unprovoked either because they are in a bad mood or because it is a habit of theirs, it is a red flag. sometimes they may pass it off as humour but saying “i was joking” doesn’t take away the words."

CONTROLLING EVERY LITTLE ASPECT:
"if someone tries to control every single aspect without asking the other person for feedback or input, that could be a bad sign even small things like choice of restaurant or activity when controlled too much can be a red flag."

OBSERVING THEM AROUND OTHER PEOPLE:
"people who are manipulative/abusive will only treat well people they feel they need. others are not going to be worth their time or kindness, they will be dismissive or abusive of wait staff or other they consider (beneath them)"

CRACKS IN THE MASK:

"when an abusive person tries to reel a person in, they will be very kind, very loving in order for other people to develop attachment to them. however, that mask takes a lot of energy and it will drop from time to time."

THIS CAN BE IN THE FORM OF THINGS LIKE:

• getting angry and then smothering it quickly.
• raising their hand to hit you/the wall/table, anything really.
• shout and then pass it off as stress.
• saying something mean or abusive and then quickly apologizing.
• taking out their anger on someone else in the vicinity.

The list goes on but this is to give a small idea of some cracks in the mask that happen when someone has to maintain that energy to keep up appearances at the beginning, they will even have different behaviours and levels of kindness depending on who they are interacting with.

THEY CONSIDER YOU A SIDEKICK IN THEIR LIFE STORY:

"it may sound silly but they will treat us as someone to use to get better at something/benefit in some way, they are not available unless it is for the thing they need from you and will not actively participate in helping you."

THEY DO NOT TAKE SERIOUSLY OUR PROBLEMS:

"they may not be empathetic or provide any significant help when it comes to things we may need or support for our life, they may not really pay attention or seem completely impatient when we are talking."

BE DISMISSIVE OF ISSUES THAT DO NOT AFFECT THEM:

“they won’t be aware of or agree with movements such as feminism, racism because they come from a position where they didn’t face that but will be passionate about things that directly impact them and use guilt if we don’t agree."

THEY JUSTIFY THEIR ACTIONS THROUGH A SYSTEM:

"they will say they are simply using these manipulations and other behaviours because in order for them to win, others have to lose, they see people in two categories: (those who can be used and those who need to be taken out of the way)"

THEY WILL USE ANY MEANS TO GET SOMETHING FROM YOU:

"they can use their physical/mental health, guilt even anger to get something from you whether it is making food, doing chores, anything that makes it easier to use someone. this is something that comes in the later stages."

THEIR FRIENDSHIPS/RELATIONSHIPS ARE VERY VOLATILE:

“they are constantly fighting with someone, insulting someone or trying to undermine them. there is no stability in their life when it comes to other people, someone could be a great friend today and an enemy tomorrow."

Let’s leave it here, those are some starting tips that can help us start to identify these behaviours and red flags and potentially get ourselves out before we develop feelings or the relationship becomes too serious.

I hope that these tips are helpful.

We live in a society where we have a hierarchy of control or trauma. We have normalized taking out issues on the person we have control over. Parents to kids, men to women, bosses to employees. Instead of treatment or cultural introspection, we simply pass problems to the next person.

"Hypervigilance-stems" directly from our trauma, it is a way our minds have to prevent that trauma from happening again. That’s why it can result in panic attacks in seemingly non threatening places. Subconsciously, our brain may have smelled/seen/heard smth that was a reminder.

Something a lot of people have been noticing when it comes to their mental health is time slowing down yet going fast at the same time since the pandemic, it almost feels like we are stuck in 2020 and have few memories after that. This a sign of a collective trauma!

Many people who have gone through individual trauma know that feeling of being stuck in the pre and post trauma. However, this time it is collective and therefore something most people can agree on. It is important to realize that this trauma is valid and we can get help for it!

We need to stop pressuring people into forgiveness, not only is it not the path to healing when it is forced but it can make us feel worse and aggravate the trauma and depression. We can recover and live a happy life without forgiving if that’s not something we are ready to do.

Let’s talk about bereavement, specifically in our culture. Unfortunately, given the pandemic we are losing more and more our loved ones. Each culture has certain ways of grieving and an expected response and appropriate timeline to recover.

Unfortunately, there are many individual ways in which different people can grieve that is completely different from the expected way. For example, in my culture we are supposed to show a lot of tears for the departed loved one in the first few days.

However, some people can’t cry at the beginning or even throughout the process. Some people may start to think that maybe they didn’t love the departed person, crying is used to show that we cared. However, crying has no relation to how much we loved the person.

We can deeply miss someone without necessarily crying. Furthermore, after the first few months we are not supposed to show outward signs of grieving. It becomes too much, some people may start to lose patience or not show empathy towards our grief anymore.

However, for many people it takes time for the initial shock to go away and for the grieving process to start or they may have been in the denial stage at first as a coping mechanism before they finally started grieving. Timelines for grieving vary greatly between people.

When it comes to bereavement, there are 5 distinct stages. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. So many of us think that we move through them in a linear fashion. However, it is not the case at all. We can go back and forth between these stages for a long time.

We can move through many of these categories even within the same day and it is completely normal. It may take time to make our peace with our departed loved one. However, structures in our societies do not permit that. Work may only give one or two days of bereavement leave.

Families expect us to go back to work or school and just continue with our life. However, it is not normal to expect someone to be operational again after such a short amount of time. Going back to daily tasks or closing that topic may make the grieving process even longer.

We talked about the importance of externalizing in order to make sense of our emotions, when people close those doors too quickly it leaves us feeling as if we do not have outlets but to repress that grief which means that it is then more likely to turn into something more.

That means it leaves the door open for depression and anxiety to set in, extending our grieving time even further. So what can we do? The first and foremost best thing we can for ourselves is take the necessary time to grieve, it may take you 2 months or a year.

It doesn’t mean that you didn’t love them if you finish your grieving process after a few months, you are not taking too long if you take a year. Your way of grieving is completely normal and deserves to be validated, no matter what others may say.

The second thing is to externalize. If there are people in your life who have empathy or are understanding, you can grieve in front of them. If you don’t feel comfortable doing it in front of others, you can grieve alone by crying when no one is around talking out loud alone.

You can journal memories that you have with your departed loved one, positive and negative ones, you can draw them, look at pictures or choose these things later as long as you take the time that you feel you need. I am still so surprised at how fast we are expected to recover.

If you feel you need extra support, please seek out a therapist to have that safe environment to externalize. While they may not be able to speed up the process per say, they can provide that environment for you to be open with it.

My thoughts are with those who have lost loved ones, going through their grief. I am sorry for your losses, please take the time and space you need, no matter how short or long it is.

“The power of abusers is the hold they continue to have even when we get away from them, we continue to resist them and continue to perceive situations as threats even after they are gone. That’s why processing that trauma and letting go of those survival skills can help a lot.”

Using mental health as excuses for manipulative or abusive behaviours, psychological abuse in the form of reducing self-esteem, isolating the person so they can’t get help, strong anger issues, deceptive behaviours to get what they want, etc…

Clayton-Euridicé Schofield / Photographed Timothée-freimann Schofield / MHMTID 2023©

Let’s talk about procrastination. A common theme, especially when our mental health is not doing well. We postpone very important tasks and blame ourselves for not being able to do them, further worsening our mental health. Let’s talk about why this happens or solutions.

The important thing to remember is that procrastination has nothing to do with our intelligence or capacity. We don’t lose these things no matter what happens, it is a sign that our brain is operating differently and allocating resources to other areas.

Our brains have evolved for surviva, when we are threatened resources go from higher brain functions towards survival. Let’s take someone who suffers from panic attacks, they may hyperventilate have a high heart rate and stiff muscles.

This is because the brain is allocating resources towards getting more oxygen and nutrients to muscles for fighting or fleeing and less for the brain and digestive systems because they are not as important at the moment, that’s why we feel that way.

We feel like we can’t focus on anything in particular, that our memory is fuzzy and we can’t connect well to our environment. It is because we are scanning for a potential danger, when this lasts a while it can become a pattern of frustration.

It is going to take us longer to accomplish even tasks we thought were simple. For example, if it took us an hour to read 50 pages and it may take 2-3 hours. Getting started on tasks takes a lot of energy and we always postpone it because we can’t get that energy to do it now.

SO WHAT CAN WE DO?

First of all, it is important to treat the underlying cause. We need our energy back for the tasks we need done. When our mental health issues take up most of it, we have very little left. Meds, therapy or a combination of both may be required.

Until our recovery happens, there a few things we can do to help ourselves a little bit, we are going to need to start small and start really slowly. Let’s say, I have to study for an exam or start a project I am not going to focus my goal on doing the full project.

First, I am going to lay down the materials I need the night before, charge the laptop, set out a notebook and pen, etc before going to bed. That way, I am not wasting precious energy the next day trying to find stuff and lose motivation.

Then we are gonna start slow, I mean snail pace slow. We are going to a very tiny part of it that day, we are also going to stretch the time it takes us to do that. We are going to work for 20 minutes and take 10 minutes break to recover our energy and rest from it.

During our breaks, we will do something completely different from what the activities we were doing for work. Let’s say we were working on a laptop, during our break we are going to engage different parts of our bodies and brain. No screens no sitting.

We can go for a small walk, drink some water or eat while standing, talk to someone, something that would be completely different from what we did before to give ourselves time to recover from the task we were doing.

Slowly overtime we may be able to do more and be more efficient even if our mental health is not back to where it should be yet, if we have many tasks that we procrastinated let’s start by taking the easiest ones and remove them before the longer ones.

That’s because the smaller ones will give a sense of accomplishment and relief that will help us get motivated for the larger ones, I hope that this explains it a little bit and can provide some help. There is no shame in procrastination, it can happen to all of us.

Many of us introspect and look at parts of our life we would like to improve. If mental health is one of them, here is a guide on things that you can implement and guide you towards a process of recovery. Let’s get started.

The most important thing for recovery is going to be treatment, that can come in two forms (therapy and medication) both are good options and can work well. Medication for mental health is generally safe and not addictive, despite the stigma that still exists around it.

This is especially true for antidepressants, if our mental health issues is severe and/or we do not have access to therapy because of our location or affordability issue antidepressants are generally much cheaper because they exist in generic form and can help.

As for therapy, it is going to be essential at some point or another because it is going to help us look at what is happening, why it is happening and ways we can cope and recover from what we are experiencing. If affordability is an issue, there may be some low cost options.

Some universities offer low cost or free programs so that students who are almost done can get experience, these students generally have a supervisor that is helping them navigate and guiding them through their caseload. They can be amazing and eager to start their experience.

There are also either agencies or individual therapists who may offer a few slots with low cost therapy, it may be worth checking online and seeing what options are available or even asking people you know you can trust about whether they know about such options.

What are things you can do yourself at home that can kickstart that path of recovery until you find treatment, the main one is going to be self-care. Yes, it has almost become a buzzword and it can be vague but at its core, it just means engaging in healthy relaxing activities.

Each person is going to be different with their preferences for self-care, it can range anywhere from going for a walk, skincare routine, meditation, video games, etc… We can also do a trial and error to see what we prefer and what we don’t like as much and adjust.

Another very important aspect is going to be externalizing, we tend to keep so many emotions pent up within us and they just remain inside of us eating us from the inside. Externalizing through journaling, talking to other people, talking out loud to ourselves helps so much.

It allows us to take emotions that were inside of us and putting them out there even if we don’t find solutions for them, we get to express them in a raw way whether it is by crying or any other way that is safe. Another important point is going to be patience.

Every second we are struggling may feel like an eternity and we may be hard on ourselves for feeling this way, we need love and empathy towards ourselves even more now. Let’s use that limited energy towards ourselves and show through our actions that we can be kind to ourselves.

If you are used to helping and being there for other people and feel drained, it is okay to take a step back and turn that help towards yourself until you feel better and go back to your amazingly empathetic self for others later on. Getting better also takes some time.

Our mental health didn’t get worse overnight and it won’t get better overnight either, there will be better days and truly awful days during our recovery process. The awful days are not an indication that we are not recovering or getting better, recovery is not linear.

Another important point is going to be to lower expectations, I see this a lot with the arrival of new year. Our mental health may already be low and we have all these goals but before we know it, we are working against ourselves and frustrated we cannot accomplish them.

We need to start small and work our way up. Sometimes, it is as small as having a goal of taking one or 2 showers a week that’s it. We have that positive reinforcement that we accomplished them and can start to slowly build on these small victories.

Finally, let’s look at people who may be toxic or draining us. It is okay to take some distance from them or even cutting them off when it gets to a certain point, some people including family members can be very toxic and manipulative overtime leading to worsening mental health.

It is okay to move out, reducing or eliminating contact with them either forever or until we have strong boundaries and coping mechanisms in place. I hope that this chapter can help you in seeing how to start your journey of recovery.

Have a good weekend and tons of love everyone ❤️

A SPECIAL THANKS TO:

• Andi Bazaar (Writer)
• Mark J. Levstein (Co-Editor)
• Yevhn Gertz (Director Photography/Co-writer)
• dr Oliver Schofield, MD (Consulting)
• dr Seth Gryffen, MD (Consulting)
• dr Khaan, MD (Consulting)
• Timothée Freimann schofield (Photographed)
• Clayton Euridicé Schofield (Editor/Journalist)
• Scott Wynné Schofield (Publisher)
• Henrie Louis Friedrich (Analyst)
• Jwan Höffler Conwall (Art Interior Design)
• Hugo-licharré Freimann (Ass Director)
• Shot at GQ’s Studios by José Schenkkan and Benjamin Schenkkan Joseph
• In appearance by "Clayton-Euridicé Schofield" (Model)
• In collaboration with "The Me You Can’t See UK" (TMYCSUK) / @tmycsuk