I just made my mother cry.

[Aspychata]

And your mother is a master manipulator and she has used her sobbing to guilt you in behaving and offering sympathy by her playing the victim role, and you are sucked into her wormhole. She probably uses other emotional gaslight tricks to get you to respond. But now that you have learned to look for her manipulations, you have shut her down, she has very little control of you.

 

[Shevek]

I don't know if people like this turn on the waterworks just as actors, or if they arise from challenges to their self-delusions. I suspect that things like selfishness or altruism are baked into our genes as much as AS is.