Big Think｜How toxic people wage emotional warfare on others

High-conflict emotional warfare is something that I've slowly learned and realized exists everywhere that there are high-conflict people. This can be in families. This can be at the workplace.This can be in community and volunteer organizations.

So here's how high-conflict emotional warfare works. There are four parts to it. First, the high-conflict person seduces somebody. It may be one person or several people in an organization. They tell them what they want to hear, saying, "I am with you, I agree with you. We're a team on this problem."

Then they attack a target of blame. It's seduction and then attacking somebody over there. You know, it's us against that person or those people. People, everyone's familiar with this. In families, the workplace, community, there are people you can realize, oh yeah, they are doing that. They're seducing this person and attacking that person.

And then they divide the community by doing that. They get other people that agree with them to attack the people they're attacking. In mental health terms, it's called splitting, where you split people into all good and all bad. Splitting is associated with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. People honestly see the world in these all-good, all-bad ways.

But it's contagious. So they tell half the people, you're wonderful, and half people, you're terrible. And those people start fighting each other. While they're fighting each other, the high-conflict person gets to dominate the community.

So I'm calling this the community. It could be the family; it could be the workplace; it could be a neighborhood; it could be a volunteer group; it could be an athletic group; it could be a music group. We see this in all areas of life when there's a high-conflict person.

And we're seeing it more and more in politics. They divide and dominate that way at the highest levels - even smaller, you know, cities, states, school boards, homeowners associations. But this process of high-conflict emotional warfare - they attack people that usually are left alone, people close to them. And that's contagious and that's how they dominate.

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