When someone engages in a behavior that’s a problem, the reason they do it is irrelevant. If we try too hard to “understand” the behavior, before long we’ll find ourselves excusing it and eventually enabling it.

“Tuning-out” someone who’s trying to make a point, teach a lesson, or call attention to a problem is a principal way that the disordered character resists internalizing the values, standards, and controls society wants him to adopt.

Most of the time, when the manipulator casts themselves as a victim, they don’t really see themselves as victimized, they just really want the other party to see them as wounded, injured, or suffering in some way in order to elicit sympathy, cloud the picture about just who is the victimizer and who is the victim, and otherwise impression-manage the real victim.

Feigning ignorance is an effective tactic that manipulates the person confronting the behavior into having doubts about the legitimacy of the issue they’re trying to bring to the other person’s attention.

Side-stepping and misleading: rather than being accountable and responsible, what the issue-dodger and subject-changer really wants is to advance their own agenda at the expense of yours, while simultaneously managing your impression of them.

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

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.