Emotional blackmail

Emotional blackmail and FOG, terms coined by psychotherapist Susan Forward, are about controlling people in relationships and the theory that fear, obligation and guilt ("FOG") are the transactional dynamics at play between the controller and the person being controlled. Understanding these dynamics is useful to anyone trying to extricate from the controlling behavior of another person, and deal with their own compulsions to do things that are uncomfortable, undesirable, burdensome, or self-sacrificing for others.

The first known documented use of "emotional blackmail" appeared in 1947 in the Journal of the National Association of Deans of Women. "Emotional Blackmail Climate" was used to describe one type of problematic classroom control model often used by teachers.

Emotional blackmail typically involves two people who have established a close personal or intimate relationship (mother and daughter, husband and wife, sister and sister, two close friends). Children, too, will employ special pleading and emotional blackmail to promote their own interests, and self-development, within the family system.

Emotional blackmailers use fear, obligation and guilt in their relationships, ensuring that others feel afraid to cross them, obligated to give them their way and swamped by guilt if they resist. Knowing that someone close to them wants love, approval or confirmation of identity and self-esteem, blackmailers may threaten to withhold them or take them away altogether, making the person feel they must earn them by agreement. Fear, obligation or guilt is commonly referred to as "FOG". FOG is a contrived acronym—a play on the word fog which describes something that obscures and confuses a situation or someone's thought processes.

The person who is acting in a controlling way often wants something from the other person that is legitimate to want. They may want to feel loved, safe, valuable, appreciated, supported, needed, etc. This is not the problem. The problem is often more a matter of how they are going about getting what they want, or that they are insensitive to others needs in doing so that is troubling—and how others react to all of this.

Under pressure, one may become a sort of hostage, forced to act under pressure of the threat of responsibility for the other's breakdown. and could fall into a pattern of letting the blackmailer control his/her decisions and behavior, lost in what Doris Lessing described as "a sort of psychological fog".

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