Emotional blackmail is a form of emotional manipulation in which the other person tries to make you comply using emotional pressure. Since emotions motivate action, strong emotions can motivate action strongly. Emotional blackmailers generate strong negative emotions in you that motivate compliance, and when you comply, you experience relief from those negative emotions. Emotional blackmail …
When you encounter a life challenge and believe you don’t have the resources to cope with it, you experience stress. Life, especially modern life, is filled with stressors. Stress tends to emotionally destabilize us. So do negative emotions that often accompany stress. The bigger the problem we face, the worse our thinking and emotions get. …
The phrase ‘emotional intelligence’ gets thrown around a lot. You see someone doing a social blunder, and people say, “He has no emotional intelligence.” Seems like emotional intelligence is an important type of intelligence to have and to develop if you lack it. But what does it really mean from a psychological point of view? …
To compartmentalize something means to divide it into compartments or sections. In Psychology, compartmentalization means dividing mental contents into separate compartments in the mind. These mental contents could be thoughts, emotions, feelings, motives, beliefs, memories, personalities, or identities. Compartmentalization is a natural consequence of how the mind works. By categorizing mental information, the mind can …
Where there’s need, there’s manipulation Humans have a deep need to be loved. Manipulators are experts at exploiting others’ needs for selfish gain. That’s why love bombing even occurs. It’s a manipulative technique where the manipulator bombards you with attention and affection. The goal is not to build a healthy relationship but to gain power …
Anhedonia is a reduced ability or inability to derive pleasure from activities from which you previously derived pleasure. It has two main types: 1. Physical anhedonia It’s the inability to derive pleasure from stimulating one or more of the five senses. For example, you may no longer find foods pleasurable that you previously found pleasurable. …
The terms ‘enmeshment’ and ‘codependency’ are often used together and sometimes interchangeably. That’s because the two concepts are closely related. Even though enmeshment and codependency are overlapping concepts, they have subtle but important differences. Enmeshment Enmeshment occurs when two or more people in a relationship setting, like a family, have a single, unified identity, which …
Thoughts can be conscious (voluntary) or subconscious (involuntary). If I ask you to solve a math problem, you’ll use your reasoning or conscious thought. The same is true for goal-setting, planning, and decision-making. All these require conscious thought. Conscious thoughts that arise from the conscious mind are a recent evolutionary phenomenon. The conscious mind is …
Have you ever wondered why the same situation affects different people differently? For instance, you may be able to handle rejection well, but your friend may get depressed and lose sleep over it. While humans have many genetically programmed universal behaviors, it’s not just our genes that program us. The environment in which we’re raised …
Emotion is one of the most complex, highly-debated topics in psychology. Even after decades of research, there still isn’t a consensus on what constitutes an emotion. You can’t define what you can’t clearly understand. As a result, there’s no universal definition of emotion.1 Still, a definition we can work with would be: Emotions are signals …