Blackmail is a contract between two people. It only works when both agree to play. We should not accept emotional blackmail from others, just as we should not try to blackmail them ourselves.
A woman at a direct sales company I spoke to asked what she should do when she's going to work and her two-year-old says, "Mommy, I hate you because you're leaving." I turned to the audience for answers. One woman stood up and said, "You are allowing yourself to be emotionally blackmailed."
Another woman said, "I get the same thing, and I smile and hug her and say, 'I'm going to miss you too, honey. I'll be back as soon as I can.' It's up to you whether you interpret your child's fears as blackmail or not."
Another woman came up to me at the break because she did not want to share her thoughts with the group. She said, "If I can make my mentally retarded two-year-old daughter understand that mommy is going out to make money to help buy her 'pretties,' I think somebody should certainly be able to make a normal child understand."
Women seem especially vulnerable to emotional blackmail. Often society provides them with only a vague line between good manners and being taken advantage of, between being a caring, nurturing person and being a victim. It's up to the woman to make the line clear and strong, both for herself and for others. Joann told me that she used to be married to a man who treated her shabbily. Then one day she thought to herself: "If I were being treated this way by a man courting me, I wouldn't dream of marrying him." In a matter of days, she had filed for divorce and has never regretted that decision.
To teach people how we want to be treated, we must sometimes use a little muscle and refuse to be intimidated. We need to know that we deserve good treatment. If we don't respect ourselves, who will?
