Have you heard this phrase before?

It means to take the strengths of the enemy, and use those strengths against them. Set up scenarios where their own approach is the very thing that ruins them.

This tactic is everywhere, because it's very powerful. It creates the appearance of a self-inflicted problem, which looks like a 1-person victimless crime. This keeps people from pointing the finger at who may have actually caused the issue.

We see this tactic in online forums, where those looking to destroy conversations will seek to get others in a highly emotional state, which can take hours to calm down from, and then accuse them of being emotional. And all the emotionalization in the forum may cause people to avoid the conversation altogether, effectively muddying the well of conversation by adding emotional content where there should be substantive content.

This again goes back to the pyramid of debate: http://fablegod.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/disagreement-hierarchy.jpg

When playing competitive poker or video games, a common phrase for this phenomena is being "on tilt". If someone gets so emotional they cannot play correctly because they cannot think clearly, they're said to be "on tilt". This comes from pinball machines going "on tilt" and locking up when they sense the machine being bumped, to prevent cheating. People sometimes would get upset out of frustration and hit the machine, which would cause it to go on tilt, which would cause them to lose the the ball.

Another example of hoisting someone on their own petard would be in a sumo wrestling match. If a smaller wrestler is going against a larger one, they cannot win by weight and strength alone. So as a result, a common tactic is that the smaller wrestler will trick the larger one in to throwing his weight in a bad direction that throws him out of the wrong. Perhaps the larger one is goaded in to rushing forward, and instead of engaging, the smaller one quickly dodges out of the way, and the larger one cannot stop in time and falls out of the ring, losing the match.

Another example would be central banking. A government may be in a financial crisis situation, and have ties with a wealthy lender who will financially stabilize the country through a tough period. The idea being that hopefully they can become stable and regain the wealth they had earlier, and then pay off the central bankers. However this money that is given all at once and seems like a strength, ends up being the means by which the government is controlled and/or destroyed, if governmental income doesn't recover, or when there is inflation/deflation cycles controlled by the central bank, or when the central bank's lending rate increases. In this way the billionaires can give the "gift" of supporting the country and government to keep it stable and financially solvent, while using that same money to control it, as the Rothschilds did repeatedly in European countries throughout the 1860s-1870s, and as many have done since.

So the lesson is to be mindful of your power. Just because something is a strength, doesn't mean it cannot be used against you. So we must tread somewhat carefully, even when we think we have the home-field advantage, lest we be hoisted on our own petard.