A liar cannot manipulate you unless you trust them. The first step toward making you one of their victims is to gain your confidence and trust so they can be exploited. That’s why it’s so important to be mindful of how someone acts when you’re first getting to know them.
In many cases, the manipulator will display certain behaviors and mannerisms that tell you they don’t have good intentions. If you understand how to read those behaviors, you can avoid falling into their trap and preserve your peace.
These are some of the ways that untrustworthy people will try to gain your confidence.
1. They give excessive compliments or “love bomb.”
A manipulative person wants to get past your defenses as soon as they can. Most people have a defensive guard up when they are first getting to know other people. It’s an unfortunate necessity just because there are so many bad actors out there.
Liars and manipulators understand this, and they may try to employ a sense of kinship and familiarity to get around it faster. They may lay on the compliments super thick, telling you how great you are, or how wonderful something you did is.
The Cleveland Clinic reminds us that this kind of behavior is what we know as “love bombing.” Everything is perfect, you are perfect and wonderful! By making you feel so positively, you’re less likely to be as skeptical as you normally would be.
2. They mirror your personality and mannerisms.
There is a common piece of advice on socialization that you should mimic some personality traits and mannerisms of someone to more effectively forge a connection. As an autistic person who struggled with socialization for decades, I feel like this advice is something that someone thought was clever, and no one questioned it.
Speaking as someone who tried to do this, all it actually does is alienate people when they notice you’re acting differently with different people. It’s a common strategy that liars, manipulators, and those who seek to control you will use to try to gain trust by making themselves seem as though they are just like their target. They aren’t being sincere or genuine about themselves.
3. They portray themselves as a victim.
Sympathy is a strong tool of motivation that the unscrupulous will use against you. They will portray themselves as the victim of whatever antagonist happens to feature in their story. It’s not that they caused a problem. It’s that they were just wronged, misunderstood, or mistreated by their coworkers, friends, family, exes, society, or whoever.
The goal is to create a fake connection. They want to make you feel special by making you feel like you truly “get them” and understand their pain. They are turning you into a false confidante, someone in on the secrets of the bad behavior of these people, to create a “special” connection between you.
4. They attempt to isolate you.
Isolation is a common tool of the manipulator. Collaborative Therapeutic Services tells us that the manipulator needs you isolated because if you’re around people who care about you, they may notice something is off. A third party will have a much different perspective on what they are saying to you.
Additionally, the manipulator chose you as a target for a reason. They may know that you probably don’t have the best boundaries or evaluate people well, and want to use that to their advantage without someone alerting you.
To isolate you, they may question the integrity of other people in your life, tell you that they don’t understand you like they do, or try to convince you that they care more about you. In many cases, it’s so effective because they wait until you’re at a low time or you’re emotionally vulnerable before doing it.
That’s one reason love-bombing and sweetheart scams can be so effective. The manipulator can safely assume that the person they are targeting is lonely and use that to try to build the trust they need for their ulterior motives.
5. They offer gifts and appear to be generous.
One way that manipulators ingratiate themselves is through gift-giving. There is a right and a wrong way to go about giving a gift. Any kind of major gift given too early is a strong red flag that something is off about the situation. Either there is something wrong with the gift, or they are working some kind of angle to get close to you.
Small gifts are okay. It’s normal to offer a little something to someone for a variety of reasons. But it’s always best to turn down major gifts so they don’t have leverage. The idea is that if they give you a major gift, they can then make a request of you later and use your guilt against you. “Well, I gave you this great gift! Why won’t you do this for me?”
They don’t give gifts because they want to do something nice. They give gifts to create a debt that they can then try to cash in on later.
6. They align themselves with the authority or status of others.
“Social proof” is a means by which one proves themselves to be trustworthy or good by other people thinking they are trustworthy or good. A common example of that is customer reviews. If another customer says a product is good, an undecided buyer will consider that as proof that it’s a good product. But reviews can be, and are, faked.
In social situations, people who seem trustworthy but are actually pretty shady do the same thing by aligning themselves with other people. They will name-drop others, flaunt specialized or insider knowledge, and exaggerate their connections to relevant people to help boost their credibility. They are hoping that you will just take their word for it and not do any checking to verify the truth.
By doing this, they are trying to manipulate you into believing they are trustworthy because they are associated with these other trustworthy people. Trustworthy by association.
7. They overshare personal stories early on.
There’s a time and a place to share personal stories. Manipulative people may do it far too soon because they are trying to use their stories to build rapport with you. They want you to feel special, like they trust you so much, so they are willing to share this difficult part of themselves. In turn, they hope you’ll open up and give something back.
It’s another way to create an emotional debt to cash in on. These people want to make you feel special so they can turn around and ask for something from you later. It’s a way that they subtly apply pressure to get you to lower your guard, making you more vulnerable to whatever it is they are working toward after.
8. They create a common enemy.
Sometimes, a manipulator will try to create a path in by commiserating about a mutual enemy. That may be a person, problem, or grievance that you have. By doing that, they present themselves as a trustworthy friend because you both have a problem with whatever the subject of your ire may be. In turn, they use that connection to milk information out of you to use against you later.
This particular strategy is effective because it doesn’t really require a lot of priming or previous connection. If you don’t like your boss, then that’s an easy direction for the manipulator to come from because, “Of course, I don’t like the boss either! Who does!?”
People love to commiserate, and a manipulator can take advantage of that.
A final word…
It’s unfortunate how many people don’t have the best intentions out there. Far too many are wolves in sheep’s clothing, looking for an easy way to get close to someone, not with good intentions, but to manipulate whatever they can out of them.
The good news is that these people are much easier to spot when you know the signs of the game they are playing. The behavior really stands out because it’s different than when a person wants to genuinely approach you and be close to you.
Keep your eyes open and your guard up until they’ve proven themselves trustworthy. That’s the best way to avoid being taken advantage of.
