One of the more subtle ways that a person hell-bent upon power and control can veil their will to dominate is to cloak it under the cover of subservience to a higher cause or the purported desire to be of service.

Disordered characters don’t want you to know what they’re all about or what they’re up to. Lying helps keep them one-up on you and a step ahead of you.

By habitually blaming others for his own indiscretions, the disturbed character resists modifying his problematic attitudes and behavior patterns.

Neurotics try hard not only to project a positive image, but also to do the right thing. Disordered characters know this very well. So, when the person with a disturbed character wants to manipulate a good neurotic, all they have to do is somehow convince them that they’ve done wrong or behaved in a manner they should feel ashamed of.

When he uses the tactic of minimization, the disturbed character is attempting to convince someone else that the wrongful thing he did wasn’t really as bad or as harmful as he knows it was and as he knows the other person thinks it was.

Effective manipulation tactics simultaneously put others on the defensive while also obscuring or denying the malevolent intent of the person using them. Such tactics are particularly effective on neurotic individuals — especially those who always want to think the best of people and who strive hard to understand what would make a person behave in a problematic way.

Disordered characters engage in certain behaviors that are so “automatic” that it’s tempting to think that they do them unconsciously. Besides that, on the surface, these behaviors so closely resemble defense mechanisms at times that they can easily be misinterpreted as such.