Everyday Canvas

Life's Lessons and Manipulators

Prompt: Is what people learn in schools enough for living this earthly life? Or what are some of the things you learned in life that the schools didn’t teach you? And what would be important to teach young people before they start on their own?

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I was very lucky with who my teachers were, especially during my teen years. I attended an accelerated school that hired retired college professors, most having had a good amount of life experiences under their belts, and they didn’t hide their experiences or advice from us. Most of them talked to us when we needed help and even when we didn’t. Especially our Home-Economics teacher Miss Lindsay (RIP) was an excellent teacher. She not only taught her subject well but also went above and beyond the course requirements. For example, one of her advises was how to get along with in-laws. These and her other tips weren’t large psychology tomes but little pointers that helped me greatly in my life. My higher education teachers weren’t like the ones I had in my junior high and high school years, but they were all good knowledgeable people in their own areas.

Still, as lucky as I have been with my schooling, life had many more areas that I had to learn on the job, and that learning never stops, as I assume, even to the last breath.

What would be important to teach young people? On top of morals, integrity, and a quest for wisdom, young people should be taught how to use money and manage their finances well. Even with subjects like Finance and Economics, students are not taught the fundamental day-to-day dealings with transactions. I also find, both in my own children and others, that young people rarely understand the value of good economics and the ruin impulsive spending may bring. Also, they need to understand that goodwill, generosity, letting go of biases, and smooth interpersonal relationships are more important in the long run than they might grasp during their young lives.

Prompt: If you have ever met a highly manipulative person, what are the characteristics, actions, or feelings of such a person? Or if you haven’t met one, can you imagine what they’d be like, and could you use such a character in your fiction? Can you make him or her the protagonist, antagonist, or a secondary character?

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Manipulation means exerting unwelcome or unexpected influence on others through mental or emotional exploitation, intending to control the other person or people.

In itself, manipulative behavior is toxic; however, many well-meaning people use those tactics on people they want the best for, namely parents and teachers. Their designs, according to them, work in the victim’s favor, but also theirs, too. Who as a parent or a teacher would want to be associated with a wild and misbehaving son, daughter, or student?

This supposedly positive manipulation can take the form of insincere flattery to appeal to the ego or vanity, promises of acceptance with a catch, fake closeness, and offering support, rewards, and rights and then, taking them away as punishment for noncompliance. Then, such people present to their victims a helplessness designed to exploit the offspring’s or any other person’s goodwill, sense of duty and obligation, or guilty conscience.

Other modes of manipulation can be finding excuses for themselves and blaming the other person and everything else, changing the truth and exaggerating it, giving mixed messages to unhinge the mental well-being of the other person.

Manipulation can also be administered through all kinds of abuse, bullying, intimidation, brainwashing, tantrums, and oppressive rules and restrictions. In fact, the more I think of this, the more I can come up as to the ways of manipulation.

Have I met a manipulative? Yes, and countless ones, in fact. First in my family, then in the wider world. They all left me not trusting them, feeling alienated, disappointed, betrayed, sabotaged, coerced, and mostly cheated. I also observed such people’s reputations damaged and their words not taken seriously. This loss of integrity adds on to their low self-esteem and still triggers their egocentrism, narcissism, and passive-aggression tendencies. Some manipulators may feel great stress for having to cover up and for to not be found out and exposed. In the long run, the manipulators themselves are the ones who end up having a difficult time because of their own shortcomings.

Having said all that, in creating fiction, manipulators are priceless to invigorate the plot of a story, and they don’t even need to be the villains. They can be allies to the protagonist or just secondary characters whose actions may act as catalysts to many twists and turns.