Emotional Blackmail: Setting Boundaries with Parents Who Can’t Help It

Emotional blackmail takes on a complex dimension when it comes from parents who may not be intentionally malicious but are limited by their trauma, neurodivergence, or psychological limitations. Some manipulative parents may genuinely love their children and try their best, yet still emotionally blackmail their children through guilt, obligation, and fear. Their emotional blackmail often manifests through seemingly innocent phrases that exploit their children’s empathy and sense of duty. This creates a confusing dynamic where children must reconcile their parent’s genuine love and good intentions with harmful, manipulative behaviors, often leading to complex trauma and self-doubt.

 

Emotional Blackmail: When Trying Hard is Not Enough

In our current discourse, particularly in psychology and self-help circles, we’ve become quite adept at identifying the obvious wounds – those caused by narcissistic, emotionally neglectful, or explicitly abusive caretakers.

Yet there’s a more nuanced reality that we rarely address: what happens when our parents genuinely try their very best, but cannot help but resort to emotional blackmail repeatedly?

Perhaps more than ‘being limited’, they act in ways that are abusive, manipulative, and gaslighting. Maybe they make us the scapegoat of the family for not following their prescribed script, or they engage in emotional blackmail through constant guilt-tripping when we try to establish healthy boundaries and safe distance. Their emotional blackmailing strategies can include threats, fear-mongering, and adopting a vulnerable facade to maintain their control. 

This is often the case with, for example,  neurodivergent parents, who struggle to keep up with the world, let alone master the language of love, and immigrant parents carrying generational trauma who come to depend on us to fill the gaping holes in their psyche.

In these situations, we are confronted with a deeply perplexing, if not painful reality: that good intentions do not always translate into better behaviors. Even when faced with patterns of emotional blackmail from our caregivers, we’re caught in the confusion of their proclaimed love alongside their harmful actions. Growing up with such an unnamed dilemma creates a particular kind of complex trauma – one that accumulates in the background and gets carried for life – wondering if we are asking for too much, and whether our needs, anger, and disappointment were ever valid. The emotional blackmailing we endured taught us to second-guess our reality, making it even harder to trust our perceptions and honor our boundaries.

Setting boundaries with someone whose behavior is undeniably abusive, yet who isn’t intentionally causing harm could be considered one of the biggest challenges when it comes to managing family relationships and mental health. The dynamic becomes even more complex when emotional blackmail emerges, even unintentionally, from their unmanaged neurodivergent traits.

Consider, for example, when you grew up with a neurodivergent parent who was in denial of their traits – whether they had undiagnosed ADHD (which means they likely found it difficult to attend to anything you said at length, had a tendency to interrupt, or struggled to regulate their emotions), were on the autistic spectrum, or lived with other forms of neurodivergence. If they were unaware of or denied their diagnosis, their symptoms remained unmanaged. When that was combined with emotional immaturity, they could be so emotionally stunted or unpredictable that you had no choice but to learn to read them before any unexpected outbursts or changes exploded. From a young age, you have been trained to be attuned to subtle changes in them and to be sensitive to the atmospheric pressure of other family members’ needs. You became the best unconscious therapist, translator, counselor, and family guardian. You read the subtle shifts in mood weather, anticipated needs before they were spoken, and translated miscommunicated and awkward language. Perhaps you became an expert in their emotional language, yet an alien to your own.

What makes the situation even harder to bear is that these parents often present to the world with a sweet, endearing, and eternally innocent, almost childlike persona. Their clumsiness and efforts seem charming to outsiders. Everyone else considers them peculiar but in endearing ways; they see someone who means no harm and is constantly trying to get things right.

Yet you alone bear the burden of being the pseudo-parent of this forever child. You alone know how bad the role reversal has been, and how much of your childhood has been robbed. Their unconscious patterns of emotional blackmail – the guilt, the helplessness, the implicit demands for care – become your constant companions. Underneath that quirky charm goes not just your youth, but also your freedom, independence, and a life without the hum of guilt over everything. The loneliness of your predicament cuts deep: How can you ever explain to others, or justify to yourself, how someone can be both genuinely innocent and destructive?

The current psychology discourse loves celebrating the power of personal agency. While this can be inspiring, it often promotes an oversimplified belief: it is as though with sincere efforts everything is possible, and if the behavior does not change it is because someone has not tried hard enough.

But this does not apply to certain parents or families who, despite their best efforts, remain stuck in their ways, acting not from malice but from ignorance and continuous dissociation. These limitations—whether born of neurology, trauma, or deeply ingrained personality traits—persist stubbornly despite genuine effort and even desire to change. Even when there are moments of change or insights, the behaviors revert almost the next week, if not the next day or hour. This cycle makes it all the more confusing and traumatizing—you’re tempted to keep trying, like playing an addictive slot machine, holding out for the possibility of the ‘good parent’ appearing again. Yet more often than not, it’s the abusive, manipulative, gaslighting version that returns.

The abusive cycle — typical and widely recognized when it comes to domestic violence— becomes painfully predictable: their genuine attempts at change spark hope, their inevitable return to established patterns brings disappointment, and you are left blaming yourself for having ever hoped for something to change. The tragedy isn’t in the lack of effort – it’s in the gap between intention and ability, between love and capacity.

Growing up with such an emotionally blackmailing parent complicates your understanding of boundaries. Sure, they seem to be trying their best, yet their best consistently falls short, and each time it becomes more traumatizing than the last. Since their attempts seem so genuine, and trustworthy, setting limits with them can feel almost cruel.

They will unconsciously guilt-trip you for not rewarding their good intentions and behaviors, making you question whether you’re being too harsh or unforgiving, whether you’re the unreasonable one for not seeing their effort as enough. Then, shame follows guilt, and you begin to internalize the idea that you are the ‘bad person’ who is ‘too much,’ ‘too sensitive,’ who ‘makes a big deal out of everything.’ Without realizing it, you have carried their projective identification (the shame they carry but have projected onto you) throughout your life, unconsciously allowing others to step on your boundaries while you feel guilty for simply existing.

Perhaps your most profound challenge lies in accepting that someone’s best efforts might still not be enough – that love, no matter how genuine, sometimes cannot bridge the gap between what’s needed and what’s possible. This acceptance requires a particular kind of grieving from you – not for what was lost, but for what was never possible in the first place.

No matter what has happened until today, the path forward is in your hands. While this reality may feel heavy, it also holds the seeds of your liberation.  It gives you permission to stop waiting for change and start creating it yourself. It allows you to shift your energy from hoping they’ll be different to ensuring you can thrive exactly as you are.

The path forward is multifold, and seeing reality for what it is is only the first step. It requires practical efforts to manage these relationships in the present moment – such as setting boundaries and dealing with family members who may try to gaslight you back into the role of family caretaker – while undertaking the psycho-existential work of making peace with imperfect love without falling into nihilism or cynicism.

In this essay, we explore the delicate art of navigating the complex family dynamics of having a parent who, despite not being intentionally harmful, creates wounds through patterns of emotional blackmail.

Dealing With Emotional Blackmail

Once, when I was young and true,
Someone left me sad-
Broke my brittle heart in two;
And that is very bad.

– Dorothy Parker

Seeing Emotional Blackmail for What It Is

The first step in breaking free from the emotionally blackmailing abusive cycle is not, as one may imagine, a dramatic confrontation, but learning to trust what your heart and inner child already know.

This is about learning to see beyond the surface-level behaviors, beyond what others might dismiss as ‘not that bad,’ and trusting your body’s wisdom.

Perhaps it is the tightening of the chest when your phone rings, the familiar dread that comes with their seemingly benign but cringy love bombing, the exhaustion that follows even just minutes of visits.
Perhaps it is that feeling of repulsion in your heart, the churning feeling in your belly, the lump in your throat, a sense of disgust— do not ignore them, or dismiss them; these may all be the silent scream of your long-suppressed anger.

Even when no one is there to support you, or agree with your perspective, you must be the first one to see through the innocent facade. The soft words, the seemingly harmless messages, the apparent vulnerability that can make you question your boundaries, but it is time you trust yourself rather than what a stranger observer may say.

Even when you stand completely alone, when no one else sees it, you must become your own first witness.

Your hunches are not paranoia— they are your survival instinct, and intelligence your body accumulated through years of experience. Stay alert and away, your instinct is calling out. Each message, each reaching out, is potentially another hook back into the cycle you’re fighting to break.

Consider those seemingly innocent messages that hit you right in your deepest vulnerabilities:
“I’m getting old, and I don’t know how much time I have left.”
“I just want to see you more before it’s too late.”
“After all I’ve done for you…”
“I don’t have anyone else.”
Or the most loaded one behind the most innocuous cover: “Family is always there for each other.”

Saying “I miss you” or “I will always love you, no matter what” could be genuine expressions of love and concern in healthy relationships, but here, they are unconscious yet potent tools of emotional blackmail that hook into your deepest scars.

No, they likely have not planned this maliciously or calculated each utterance – but these patterns have become such an ingrained survival mechanism for them, such a reflexive way to meet their desperate emotional needs,
they don’t even realize they are doing it.
These words are ‘unconsciously manipulative.’

When you look at these words with a crystal clear, healthy adult lens, you can see what they are designed to do.
These are designed to make you responsible not just for their feelings, but for their survival.

They are crafted to make you question yourself, and doubt your legitimate need for independence and freedom.

They play on cultural scripts about filial duty and family loyalty, tap into your inner child’s deepest fears about being the ‘ungrateful’ child, the ‘bad’ child, or the one who would be disowned and exiled forever.

Consider also how these words play on your sensitivity and deep empathy. Think about why they get to you more than your siblings. The crushing weight of obligation and morality make up the perfect bait for the most emotionally sensitive and empathic child in the family.
But your empathy is not a weakness and just because you have the biggest heart in the family does not mean you should be the chosen, exploited one.
Your sensitivity is not something to be used against you.

Thus, next time such a message comes, remember to take a deep breath and tap into it, not the external noise, not what they say they are doing or what it looks like to an outsider, but your body and heart’s wisdom.
If you feel the urge to run away and put the phone away, do that.
If you need to say no to a family gathering, do that.
Your clarity is not cruelty.
Your boundaries are not a betrayal.
Your freedom is not a failure of love.
Seeing these patterns does not make you cold or ungrateful.
You are not breaking up a family, but freeing yourself from inherited pain.

It’s up to us to break generational curses. When they say: “it runs in the family”, you tell them: ‘and this is where it runs out”. – Alfa

Setting Boundaries With Manipulative Parents

Perhaps from as far as you can remember, you were groomed to be the good child, the one responsible for your parent’s emotional well-being, trained to respond to their subtle cues of distress. You never had the chance to learn what boundaries mean. It makes sense that now, even when you try to set the most reasonable and benign boundaries, you feel haunted by guilt, shame, and the dread of being punished.

When your parent’s emotional blackmail isn’t malicious but born of their own wounds, the picture gets even more complicated. You are genuinely pulled by your deep sympathy and compassion for their struggles. You see their confusion, isolation, and loneliness. You fear that they will fall into utter despair if they lose you as their emotional anchor. You genuinely fear for their life should you walk away. Your love for them runs deep and true, and it speaks to the depth of your spirit as well as your bond.

At the same time, love does not mean succumbing to unreasonable threats and bottomless demands on your energy. As the Buddha taught, “Compassion without wisdom is dangerous.” It is only with the skill of discernment that love can be sustainable and real. Every time you override your own nervous system’s signals, every time you push past your own boundaries, you are chipping off time and vitality from your one and only life. And every time you sacrifice a piece of your soul, you pave the way for regrets and resentment, which ultimately does not serve anyone.

You may see the ‘risk’ and immediate cost of setting boundaries now— the relentless protest, the suffocating, soul-crushing guilt trips, all the strategies they would drive in turbo force to get you back into the loop. However, what you might be missing is that there is also a cost to not changing and maintaining the status quo. The risk of regret from not changing may be less ‘loud’ and immediate as it hums in the background, but it accumulates as existential guilt that eats away at you. The biggest regret will come, years down the line, not from the lack of boundaries itself but the heavy weight of knowing you have spent years dimming your light, postponing your becoming, delaying your dreams, sacrificing your peace and your chosen family’s. In the end, the most profound compassion must include yourself.

The truth is, your parent’s path is theirs to walk. Yes, their life might hold deep sorrow and loneliness. They may be trapped with a cold and neglectful partner, carrying immense resentment. They may bear years of unresolved generational trauma and anger. But you alone cannot heal these wounds — however much they try to make you responsible for their emotional survival.

The future is wide open for a new possibility: You can witness their struggle without drowning in it. You can hold deep compassion for their pain while honoring your own body’s wisdom when it screams “enough.”It is time to release the rescue fantasy many children have—  to ‘save your parent’, and reconcile with your human limits. This is not failure – it marks the moment you begin to truly live.

Consider what is more life-giving for both of you: For you to show up repeatedly under emotional blackmail but with resentment brewing in the background, or to be there, even if less frequently, but for genuinely meaningful time? At the end of the day, your parent’s emotional well-being and mortality are not yours to carry, no matter how masterfully they wield guilt as a weapon. Sacrificing your authenticity to their emotional demands won’t keep them alive longer or make their passing any less painful. In fact, in life, the goal should not be to avoid all regret – that’s impossible – but to choose which regrets you can live with more peacefully. Perhaps, between the regret of having maintained boundaries in the face of emotional manipulation, or the regret of having never lived as your true self.

 

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien 

Dealing With Family Backlash and Gaslighting

When you try to set boundaries with your emotionally manipulative parent, you will likely face resistance not just from your parent, but from other family members who have become comfortable with the existing system of emotional blackmail.

This can be understood in terms of family system theories: imagine you are all tied together by an invisible string of guilt and obligation, which makes you a system. When one person changes their boundaries or refuses to yield to emotional manipulation, it creates ripple effects, and others are forced to adapt accordingly.

Over years or decades, a particular ‘dance’ of emotional blackmail has been choreographed in your family. You are the ‘go-to person’; you are the one who caves to your parent’s emotional demands and manipulation. Perhaps you have played the role of the ‘golden child’, or the family scapegoat, but you served a particular role as the target of emotional coercion, and everyone in the family is used to you fulfilling this function. When you’ve spent years – perhaps decades – being the designated ‘handler’ of a parent skilled in emotional blackmail, you’ve unwittingly become the foundation upon which everyone else’s comfort rests.

While you were answering late-night crisis calls, managing emotional storms, and yielding to manipulative tactics, your siblings found ways to create distance. They probably did not do this intentionally or callously; it is just what everyone has naturally settled into based on their personality. This has been set up not officially but through an unspoken family agreement that crystallized over time.

You became the designated target of your parent’s emotional manipulation – the fixer, rescuer, therapist, and crisis manager. Your siblings, perhaps relieved not to be the primary target of such emotional coercion, stepped further into the background of your parent’s emotional needs. A homeostatic balance is achieved – albeit one that comes at your expense. Your parent’s manipulative needs get met, your siblings are relieved of being guilt-tripped, and you carry the weight of maintaining family stability.

When you begin to set boundaries – perhaps declining to respond to emotional blackmail, refusing to be the emotional dumping ground, or stepping back from crisis management – you’re not just changing your relationship with your manipulative parent. You are disrupting an entire system that has organized itself around your vulnerability to guilt and emotional pressure.

The resistance you will face may come in waves — first, they escalate, but should eventually settle. Your parent would likely be the first to intensify their emotional blackmail through increasingly desperate measures – from calculated guilt trips to weaponized health crises that mysteriously intensify when you are less available, or even explicit threats designed to manipulate you back into compliance.

Then, perhaps surprisingly, comes resistance from your siblings and other family members who have benefited from your role as the family’s primary target of emotional manipulation. They may start criticizing you for ‘making things difficult’, question your efforts to escape the emotional blackmail, or lecture you on the importance of love and family bonds – ironically using the same manipulative tactics your parent employs. They might even attack you personally by saying you are ‘too sensitive’, ‘dramatic’, or ‘making a big deal out of nothing’. They may minimize your experience by saying your parent’s emotional blackmail is “not that bad,” start taking your parent’s side in their manipulation tactics or invalidate your need to protect yourself from such coercion.

Their resistance is not necessarily conscious or malicious. From a systems perspective, it’s a natural homeostatic response, as your change is felt as a threat to them. When you step back, they are now confronted by the raw reality of your parent’s behaviors. If they fail to pressure you to resume your old role, they know they have no choice but to either step up or face the suppressed guilt of not doing so. They will do whatever they can to reinstate things as they were, perhaps not out of cruelty, but out of the human tendency to resist change and avoid discomfort.

Understanding this dynamic through the lens of family systems theory can help depersonalize the backlash you receive. Just because they are saying all these things to threaten you or make you feel bad does not mean they are the truth. They are simply acting out of desperation and their own anxiety around having to now manage your parent.

Throwing around ideas about love, compassion, and loyalty works particularly well perhaps because it taps into your core values, as well as deep empathy which is a core trait of yours. The idea of ‘family takes care of family’, sometimes with added cultural pressure around filial piety, might be one of the most potent hooks that are hard to ignore. These attempts weaponize the very real importance of family bonds against your legitimate need for self-protection. But real family care is reciprocal and respectful – it does not demand one person bear the entire emotional burden while others watch from a safe distance.

Also, boundaries and safe distance do not have to be radical or black-or-white. There might be ways or middle ground you could find where you sufficiently protect yourself and maintain a safe enough distance while holding love and enough respect for them. 

Setting boundaries is not abandonment – it is an invitation to create healthier patterns. By standing firm in your limits, you are modeling what genuine family care could look like: one that honors both connection and individual wellbeing, that balances giving with self-preservation, and that allows everyone to show up as their whole, healthy selves.

Remember: your boundaries are not a betrayal of family values – they are an expression of what sustainable family relationships require. You’re the best role model for everyone in the system by demonstrating the most mature form of love: where everyone can remain loving while being bound, supportive while being separate, and connected while being whole.

 

“Beyond speech and silence there is a way out.” – I tuan

Healing From Emotional Blackmail: Mourning as a Spiritual Journey

Indeed, every time I write about coping with parents who use emotional blackmail, the words ‘mourning’ and ‘disenfranchised grief’ inevitably surface. There is a reason for this – it truly is the most important, yet often under-discussed part of healing from invisible complex trauma. You can work through your anger, express yourself, and learn to rebuild your life outside of manipulative family relationships… but without truly grieving, a part of you will likely remain stuck, somehow always going back to those who emotionally blackmail you, hoping for the love and support you deserve but never received. Unless you truly allow yourself to sink into grieving, walk through the churning ground, and emerge on the other side, you will struggle to truly be free.

The grief we are talking about here differs from the traditional understanding, where one loses something they once had. Here, you are grieving something that never existed at all – a fantasy of unconditional love without manipulation, a hope, a dream, a parallel reality that your soul recognizes as home, yet a home you never had to return to. You may be grieving the collapse of a core belief – that with enough love and effort, you could overcome your parent’s emotional blackmail. Or perhaps you are grieving the shattering of a core value – that family should always love and be there for each other, without using guilt and manipulation as weapons.

Perhaps for the first time in your life, you can see that sometimes there is a hidden danger in hope. Hope, although normally seen as a positive thing, can be the very thing that keeps you vulnerable to emotional blackmail. As Ernest Becker noted in “The Denial of Death,” your deepest hopes often mask your deepest denials – they become sophisticated forms of resistance against accepting painful truths.

Perhaps, through no fault of your own, you keep hoping because to stop hoping would mean facing a truth too painful to bear: that some parents will never stop using emotional manipulation as their primary language, that some wounds cannot be loved into healing, that some gaps cannot be bridged by understanding alone.

The danger of hope, in these cases, lies not in the hoping itself but in how it can become a form of self-betrayal – a way of avoiding the necessary grief that would allow you to truly move forward. Like a siren’s song of “if you really loved me, you would…” it keeps calling you back to possibilities that exist only in your imagination, preventing you from building a life grounded in what is rather than what might be.

All your life you have walked the path of love, empathy, and loyalty. As an emotionally sensitive and empathic person, you have carried the implicit belief that with enough effort, enough love, and enough dedication, you could overcome any emotional blackmail and reach others’ wounded souls. You have tried again and again, hoping to be the healer, the helper, the one who makes things a little better in the world.

When that moment of awakening comes – especially through dealing with a parent who masterfully wields guilt as a weapon – and you realize their emotional manipulation simply cannot be loved away, it can be heartbreaking. Here, your sensitivity, great empathy, and deep capacity for love and change can become your enemy: because you can usually make things happen in other parts of your life, and you can so deeply imagine the possibility of change, accepting the permanence of their manipulative patterns feels like a betrayal of your nature. In these moments, you must understand that this is not an indication of your failure, nor is it due to any lack of love or compassion. Some patterns, such as your parents’ emotional blackmail, simply are. They are ancient, stubborn, with their origins dating back generations into your ancestral history, and entirely out of your hands.

Winnicott speaks of the necessity of disillusionment – the gradual process by which an infant learns that the mother is not omnipotent. Perhaps this second, adult disillusionment is equally necessary: learning that your capacity to love, understand, and hope cannot override every human limitation or break through every pattern of emotional manipulation. This surrender of your hope for omnipotent human potential marks the true beginning of emotional maturity.

Of course, just because this is a necessary process does not make it any easier. The journey moves in spirals rather than a straight line, and you will likely feel as though you are constantly moving three steps forward and two steps back. Just when you think you have accepted your parent’s manipulative nature, they shock you with another calculated guilt trip. Just when you believe you have reconciled with being the target of emotional blackmail, their tactics escalate. Each cycle comes with its heartbreak and each time it demands its surrender.

You may be hit with despair when feeling this might be endless. But it is not. Ultimately, these spirals will transform into wisdom, where you learn to hold life’s paradoxes: loving without yielding to manipulation, caring without being trapped by guilt, and remaining open-hearted while maintaining firm boundaries against emotional blackmail.

Eventually, you will develop the wisdom of expansion – your heart will grow large enough to hold both their good and their manipulative tendencies, both your compassion and the skill to resist emotional coercion.

You need not fall into nihilism, cynicism, or lose all hope in humanity.

You will finally be equipped with the ability to love without illusion while maintaining your capacity for tenderness.

When you finally put your feet down and set appropriate boundaries with parents who – despite not being inherently cruel – cannot help but use emotional blackmail as their primary tool for connection, you are not abandoning them. You are rising above. This is not a moment of defeat, but an act of radical grace – one that liberates both the child who needed protection from manipulation and the adult who can finally provide it.

 

“For long years a bird in a cage. Now, flying along with the clouds of heaven.” – Toyo Eicho