Yesterday in part one, I lifted the lid on the deceptive and manipulative practice of the Drip-feed Manoeuvre, where the aim is “to control the information and control the reaction. Instead of being upfront and giving you all of the information, they make the private decision to only give you information that they think you can handle at that time. It also serves a darker purpose – ensuring that they don’t admit to more than they have to.”

So why do we do this?

When you habitually spend time around people who lie to you and you accept it, you’re inclined to live on illusions and in denial.

You’ll let these guys drip, drip, drip the information to you because you’re accommodating of dubious behaviour in the relationship. You’re keen to give the benefit of the doubt or to buy into the lies and the illusion because if you opt out, this forces a reality on you where you’ll have to take action. We often delay taking action because often we are afraid of looking closer to home at ourselves.

You always have to remember, that the fact that you try to stick with the illusion and make it real doesn’t change the fact that it’s an illusion.

There’s optimism and then there’s burying your head in the sand and trying to turn a battered pig’s ear into a silk purse.

Letting someone drip-feed information to you is a very slippery slope of behaviour because if you’re in a relationship with an emotionally unavailable man or assclown, you’re already accepting crumbs and now you’re doing that with the truth.

But I’ve been taught to ‘Stand by your man!’ Isn’t this what we should do?

I’ve seen women stand by men who are toxic from anything from a few months to forty years. It’s been ingrained to us over a gazillion years:

Men don’t know themselves. Men are like children that need a good woman to show them the light. A woman’s place is at the side of her man. A woman’s place is behind her man keeping it zipped. Brush things under the carpet. Turn a blind eye. Better to have a man than no man. If he’s not being the man you want him to be, it’s because you’re not doing enough for him. This is what men do. Men cheat. Men have to be taught to want a relationship and how to behave in one. Men this and men that. Without a man you’re nothing. Have a guy, any guy, just don’t be a ‘alone’. He’ll come round one day.

The list is endless and I must write more about this! But I digress…

Men are not children.

You’re not going to be putting Mr Unavailable or the assclown on the naughty step. You don’t withdraw his pocket money, make him do lots of chores, or sit him down and explain the difference between right and wrong and lying and the truth.

As my aunt explained to my young cousin, ‘When you tell a lie it is saying something that you know is not the truth’.

You have to stop trying to raise these men from the ground up and stop trying to teach them fundamental, basic decent behaviour.

This is not him telling you that Santa Claus or The Tooth Fairy exists so that you can retain your childhood innocence for a while longer!

He is repeatedly lying to you through omission, outright lying, and even trying to get clever with wording so that he gets to continue being deceptive, he controls the relationship keeping it on his terms, and he gets to continue to live in his little bubble where he can convince himself that he’s a great guy.

If someone is lying to you it means they are still being deceptive. If you keep accepting the lies which in turn makes rejectionable behaviour seemingly acceptable, you’re actually deceiving yourself.

I appreciate that you may want to be compassionate, not let go of your emotional investment, and yada, yada, yada, but at some point alarm bells really need to start ringing when you ask someone to tell you the truth or they claim to be approaching you with the truth, and then you discover that there’s still more to come.

Drip-feeding you the truth is extremely passive aggressive behaviour because they let you believe that they are engaging in.

And don’t think that this is just limited to out and out lies, or ‘white lies’.

Many a woman has come across the guy that takes months or years to admit that actually, he’s not ready for commitment and he doesn’t want a relationship…

Like I said yesterday, we spend a lot of time trying to get them to admit to this when the evidence is often sitting there right in front of us if we want to look at it and process what it means to the relationship and our ideas about it. We often know everything we need to know without having them say or admit a thing.

Even if you don’t know everything, often you know more than enough!

So what’s stopping you?

You have got to stop being afraid. Fear is what keeps us in poor relationships accepting dubious or even outrageous behaviour.

I’m afraid that if I tell him to take a run and jump because of his dishonesty that he’ll get better/healthy/return to the ‘old him’/become the guy I want, and because I have ended it, I won’t be there when he does ‘change’ so he’ll think I no longer want him, so someone else will get the better him. Why her and not me?

After everything I have been through, I don’t want to lose my emotional investment!

I don’t want to be alone!

What if it is something I did to bring about this behaviour?

Maybe if I love him enough and show him that I’m not going anywhere, he’ll realise how awful his behaviour is, feel remorse and reward me with a good relationship.

Let me spare you, it’s lost already and the more you dig your heels into the illusion is the further into negative equity that you slip.

The opportunity to drip-feed the truth to you shrinks when you’re not content to operate under illusions.

Back in the final Part three tomorrow. Check out  part one

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