How Psychopaths Exploit Empaths

By Tom Ewall

I’ll mention one thing, which is unconscious to the psychopath. When someone without empathy interacts with someone with empathy, the automatic result, 100% of the time, is the person with empathy will be manipulated to do what the person without empathy wants.

So if you want to be able to manipulate someone else, just turn off your empathy, find someone with empathy, and voila! you’ll have a victim you can manipulate at will. All you have to do is decide you want something, and you don’t care what the impact is on the person you want something from. It’s very simple, the manipulative tactics flow like water.

Obviously this isn’t specific to psychopaths. Anyone without empathy is able to manipulate others. Indeed, anyone without empathy cannot avoid manipulating others, unless that person doesn’t have empathy either.

This is because we’re hard wired to trying to help other people in need. Empathy is such a powerful force that many have given their lives to save perfect strangers from disasters like floods or fires. If we see someone in need, we try to fix their problem, over and over and over again, to the point of utter exhaustion and only finally giving up when we come to the realization that there’s something wrong with the other person, and we just can’t make them happy. This is where the concept of walking on eggshells comes from.

Besides empathy, there’s also the concept of shame. Psychopaths don’t have shame, which creates an inequality in the relationship which works in their favor as far as manipulating others is concerned. A lot of the manipulative tactics emerge simply from the shame inequality.

So there are two secrets if you want to manipulate others like a psychopath; eliminate your shame and empathy.