[The Cloud]

Because they want something, and they think that they can get it by making you feel bad for them feeling bad about not having it.

Most people see allowing emotional pain in a person as almost tantamount to causing physical pain. Fundamentally, this is a faulty belief because emotional pain is a direct result of individual beliefs, independent of direct influence by the actions of others. However, most people do not understand or accept this, and so they believe that they have a direct affect on the emotions of their peers. This gives their peers the opportunity to extort them by claiming that to do other than what the person desires would be to cause them pain.

Most people believe that causing harm to others is bad, and placing physical injury and emotional injury in the same category (under the assumption that both are directly caused from an external force), they give in to the demands in the interest of not causing emotional injury to the other party.

The defense against this is to realize that nobody has direct control over another's emotions, and that each person is responsible for their own feelings. If you cut somebody, they cannot avoid bleeding. However, if you yell at somebody, it is their decision what they feel about it. No amount of yelling can hurt somebody if they decide that your yelling is unimportant to them. It's not right to hurt others intentionally, but neither is it right that they dictate what constitutes "hurt."