Manipulative people don’t broadcast their bad intentions when they are looking for people to take advantage of. If they did, others would clue in as to what kind of people they actually are.
Weaponized niceness is a tool that manipulators use to lower the defenses of their target while maintaining plausible deniability. The most subtle manipulators can have everyone else fooled, thinking that you’re crazy or that you’re just being too hard on them.
Manipulators use that niceness to sow doubt, create confusion, and gaslight to help them hide their true intentions. Luckily, they’re pretty easy to spot once you understand their game. Here’s what you need to look out for.
1. They use apologies to manipulate or control.
Apologies are an important part of maintaining a healthy relationship with anyone. Fixing a mistake typically starts with an apology. However, as Makin Wellness informs us, an apology without change is just manipulation. A manipulator will use an apology as a means to dodge taking responsibility for their mistake by not doing any of the follow-up work.
“I apologized! Isn’t that good enough for you?”
“Why are you still upset!? I apologized!”
By asking these manipulative questions, they seek to put the blame back on you. They may also give back-handed apologies like, “I’m sorry you feel that way,” so they can minimize your feelings and the harm that they caused while avoiding responsibility.
An apology should be one step in a series of steps to fixing a problem that happened. It’s only one small part of it. People who weaponize apologies usually stop at the apology part. They don’t want to do whatever work is necessary to actually fix the issue because they genuinely don’t care.
2. They only practice transactional kindness.
Genuinely nice people don’t turn everything into a transaction. Nice people do nice things because they’re nice, and they want to be nice. They don’t do it with a focus on what they will get out of the interaction for themselves. That’s not nice. As Psychology Today tells us, transactional kindness is an unhealthy, manipulative behavior that can destroy relationships.
These people may seem nice, but you’ll never see someone who practices transactional kindness do something for someone else for no reason. They always need to have some angle. In many cases, it’s most obvious when they are asked to do something by someone who can benefit them.
For example, they’ll be quick to offer help to people in a position of authority with seemingly no strings attached, but there are already strings attached. The strings are the ability to say, “I did this for you, can you do this for me?”
3. They fake supportiveness.
Like most manipulators, these people are two-faced. They may smile at you and cheer you on to your face, but then turn around and badmouth you behind your back. Worse yet, they may actually undermine your efforts and make it harder for you to succeed.
Self-aware manipulators want to appear nice because they know they’ll suffer repercussions for their hostility. Niceness gives them a layer of plausible deniability if they are doing anything to undermine your success.
They can point back to their support and say, “Why would I say something bad about it? I was just telling him how great I think it’ll be for them…”
4. They feign innocence.
The niceness they project allows them to prop up other parts of their manipulation. If they are known as a “nice person”, they can often get away with feigning innocence, or make out like they didn’t fully understand what they were doing when they behave badly. Other people will give them the benefit of the doubt because they are such a nice person.
They will often act confused and hurt using statements like, “I didn’t mean to do it!” and “But I was only trying to help!” And yes, sometimes mistakes like that happen. However, this isn’t just a one-off issue. It’s a tactic they fall back on to avoid taking responsibility for doing things that they knew they shouldn’t have been doing.
Additionally, hiding behind innocence is an easy way for them to blame someone else.
5. They hide behind passive aggression.
Passive-aggressiveness can be hard to see at first, particularly if you’re not expecting it out of someone. A nice person using it as a weapon will be deploying it with smiles and a friendly attitude, but their words are designed to chip away at you.
They won’t address you directly, but do it through subtle jabs given in friendly ways, like, “Oh, you didn’t know that? I thought you would. No worries!” And clearly, there was no way for you to have actually known what was going on with the situation.
The easiest way to pick up on passive-aggressive behavior is to identify how it makes you feel. You shouldn’t walk away feeling confused about whether the person’s words were intended as nice or not.
6. They manipulate through kind guilt-tripping.
There are different ways people go about manipulating others, some more subtle than others. By “kind guilt-tripping,” we’re talking about the type of guilt-tripping that is less blatant about making you feel bad. Granted, the goal is to still make you feel bad to comply, it’s just done differently.
An example would be something like, “Oh! Well, I just figured you’d want to help me out because I did this for you…”
It’s not pouty, angry, or sad. The pushing of your boundaries is done with a smile, often framed through your friendship, and it takes advantage in ways that you may not approve of. The person employing it is using that positive relationship as a way to advance their own agenda at your expense.
7. They manipulate under the guise of helpfulness.
People utilizing weaponized niceness will often manipulate through helpfulness. That is, they will listen to you like a confidante, and then give you advice that either best suits their agenda or isn’t meant to help you. If they are trying to control you, the advice they give is to keep you under their control. They use the guise of caring about you to manipulate you.
I can give you an example from a previous relationship. At the time, my partner and I had been going through a bit of a rough patch, mostly due to life stresses, nothing terrible that would normally break a relationship. Naturally, she vented to her best friend, who would regularly tell her how she didn’t deserve this, and that she was so much better than I was and deserved so much more.
She used my ex’s distress as a way to drive a wedge into our relationship because she didn’t like me. Unfortunately, neither of us realized what was actually going on until it was too late, and the relationship was broken from her meddling.
In situations like this, the advice isn’t being given because it’s what’s best for you. That advice is to remove that romantic partner from the picture so that the person giving the advice can have better access to you. Unfortunately, it’s easy to fall for it if you think the manipulator is someone who has your best interests in mind.
Final thoughts…
In reading through this list, you will likely see that you have done all of these things at least once or twice in your life. People are imperfect, and we sometimes don’t do things for the right reasons. It’s normal to feel jealous and possessive at times, just like it’s normal to make bad decisions because of those feelings.
And yes, it’s true that this kind of behavior is not healthy or kind. However, the difference between human error and someone who is a manipulator is patterned behavior. These traits of a manipulator weaponizing kindness will happen repeatedly, likely among different audiences. They are just as likely to do it to you as they are to other people they are close to, so that they can have their way.
Don’t throw away a relationship or beat yourself up over a bad action or two. They happen because people are imperfect creatures just trying to get through life. Instead, be wary of the behavior as a repeated pattern. If it keeps happening, then there is a serious problem that you need to pay closer attention to.
