I have known any number of people being described as “manipulative.”
That would impugn most businessmen, lawyers and politicians. In business and politics it is not called manipulative. It is called competence, people skills and strategic thinking.
You want you and yours to have a monopoly over winning qualities. When anyone else has winning qualities they are not admirable, they are dangerous. Why are they dangerous? Because they may be in a position to help people you’d like to see downtrodden. Also because they form a refutation of your view that you and yours own winning qualities.
Hurricane Carter was seen as a dangerous person since his childhood. Why was he dangerous? Because he was a black man who was not a loser and refused to be treated as one. This made him dangerous to people who believed that black people were losers and should be downtrodden. He was right to be dangerous to such people, and I hope that more people be dangerous to such people, whoever and wherever they may be.
So we have my ex-wife’s father describing her as manipulative. No, she had competence and people skills. She used these to do a lot of meaningful good. That does not make her manipulative. It makes her an admirable person.
Skills and propensities should be channeled into places where they can do most good. If someone has emotional intelligence, she should go into fields where such a thing is in order. This realizes far greater benefit than portraying her as mentally ill. And it realizes in people benefiting from what she has to offer rather than wasting public resources on bullying her out of what are in fact winning qualities.