When Manipulators Use the Empathy Trap: On emotional extraction, manufactured crises, and learning that compassion does not require unlimited access

The deepest psyop I have ever experienced did not target my politics, my intelligence, my spirituality, or even my fear. It targeted my empathy. That is what made it so effective, because empathy had always been one of the places where I believed I was safest inside myself.

I knew manipulation existed. I understood gaslighting. I had spent years studying coercive systems, high-demand groups, abuse dynamics, trauma, and the psychological architecture of control.

What I did not fully understand was how easily all of that knowledge could be temporarily bypassed when someone presented me with another human being who appeared to be suffering.

I have been online for a very long time, long enough to remember ICQ and mIRC, LiveJournal and MSN Groups, long before social media became an industry built around harvesting human attention. I have participated in communities, moderated them, founded them, protected them, and watched some of them grow into extraordinary networks of people who might otherwise never have found one another.

The internet brought fellow cult survivors into my life. It connected me with abuse survivors, writers, entrepreneurs, advocates, and people who became genuine friends. Some of those relationships have survived years, geographical distance, tremendous personal change, and all the strange evolutions of the platforms where we first met.

For years, that was what online community meant to me. We held weekly chats on Twitter/X, first through hashtags and later through audio Spaces when those arrived. We gathered around specific subjects, from sexual-abuse survivor support to marketing and entrepreneurship ran by incredible trauma survivors and business mentors like Rachel Thompson, and we took moderation seriously. Rooms had purposes. Communities had boundaries. People who disrupted survivor spaces or violated established rules were removed.

No discussions. No posting messages. No argument. One and done. We all stood, and still stand, beside one another having the same ethical systems and rules of community. That is what keeps us all bonded to this day, still friends, and still cheering each other on. Because that’s what real people do. Genuinely support one another.

Anyone who has successfully moderated an online community knows how much invisible labor goes into keeping it healthy. You are not merely managing conversation. You are protecting a room full of nervous systems. Boundaries are one of the most important aspects of the dynamic.

Something changed online during the 2020 pandemic and following years, or perhaps something already having a very loose presence, grew and became impossible to ignore. Friends and I have discussed this many times. Millions of people suddenly spent unprecedented amounts of time online, working hybrid jobs from home away from the supervisory eyes of co-workers and bosses, and with their arrival, content itself increasingly became transactional.

Human emotion became material. Outrage became testimony. Trauma became the object of mockery. Conflict became normal dynamics. Other people’s private lives became collateral. The ugliest of human behaviors arrived at social media, and we trauma survivors became the prime target of predatory and high conflict people.

The platforms rewarded whatever kept eyes fixed to screens, no matter how vile and demented, and somewhere inside that transformation, I began encountering people who seemed to understand that another person’s empathy could be farmed as efficiently as their anger.

That is where my own experience begins.

For nearly four years, friends and I found ourselves repeatedly responding to increasingly disturbing stories from a woman in our wider online experiencer orbit. We were told that she was drugged and sexually assaulted. We were shown a criminal record connected to the one being accused, containing a previous domestic-violence-related allegation. We heard claims involving someone who was investigating her story and were told that person interfered with her child custody. I received a late-night call in which she stated she was being physically abused by a boyfriend, and I stayed awake for hours supporting her through what I believed was a crisis.

There are many other incidences, but these were the most taxing on those willing to give her time and attention to what was presented as grave situations.

We responded the way advocates often respond when someone tells us they are in danger. We listened. We worried. We gave time. We offered support and solutions. We believed that we were helping someone who was genuinely in distress, because our default position was not to interrogate a woman in peril like a hostile witness, before extending basic human compassion.

That default position is precisely what I eventually had to examine in myself.

There is a historical comparison that has stayed with me throughout this experience. Richard Doty¹ became notorious within UFO history because of his acknowledged involvement in military disinformation, including feeding false information to UFO researcher Paul Bennewitz, whose mental health deteriorated severely during that period.

I began privately thinking of what I had experienced with this woman as encountering a female version of Doty’s archetype; not because the circumstances of the situations were identical, but because the mechanism being used inside of them felt eerily familiar to me: establish credibility through past careers, introduce extraordinary claims, feed information incrementally, exploit the recipient’s existing concerns, and keep the emotional machinery moving. The willingness to manipulate people who are trauma survivors and advocates without any care for the impact of our well-being.

Then one day, I unexpectedly received a recording from her that raised serious legal and ethical concerns, and something happened that broke the mechanism of her manipulation of me permanently. I did not treat it casually. I had just been non-consensually handed a recorded phone call containing the planning of financial fraud, and she was speaking with the very person she’d spent years convincing us had assaulted her and caused her trauma. I consulted my attorney and ultimately sent a cease-and-desist directing that there be no further contact.

Why did she drop that phone call on us? Accident? Test of our ethics? Manipulation? We don’t know. We don’t care. It was low-level, eighties style, classic grifter behavior, and it was the last piece of the puzzle needed to see her manipulation for what it was. It confirmed many intuitions that had popped off in our heads over time but were placed aside for the sake of empathically supporting her.

What followed after the legal disconnection was a purposeful smear campaign which included public accusations about me, social media accounts falsely attributed to me, public posts attempting to bait me into interaction, civil conspiracy, doxxing, and behavior that only manipulators roll out when complete disengagement is the reasonable choice both legally and personally. Manipulators know when it’s over too, and they will rage in covert ways.

When I stepped outside of the emotional current and looked back, I could finally see what the actual currency had been for her and her enablers. It wasn’t money. I hadn’t handed over my bank account. I had given over something much more important and easier to underestimate: time, emotional labor, attention, credibility, concern, access, and nervous-system bandwidth.

Those things have value, and on social media, they may be among the most valuable things we possess.

A person does not have to steal your money to extract from you. They can keep you awake until two in the morning processing a crisis that doesn’t belong to you. They can make you worry about their safety. They can persuade you to investigate their situations, mediate their conflicts, listen to their recordings, read their messages, reassure them, defend them, or become emotionally invested in narratives whose accuracy you have no independent means of establishing.

They can pull you into a cast of characters you never auditioned to join and then convert your reactions into another episode of whatever story they are creating around themselves.

For trauma advocates, this vulnerability can be particularly pronounced because we have spent years telling people that survivors deserve to be heard. I still believe that. What changed for me is my understanding of what hearing someone obligates me to do afterward.

Listening is not a blood oath.

Compassion does not require unquestioning allegiance. Believing that someone deserves to be taken seriously does not mean suspending critical thought indefinitely. Supporting someone through an allegation does not require adopting every subsequent interpretation they offer. And when material contradictions begin accumulating, examining those contradictions is not betrayal.

This awareness of the distinction matters because predators understand morality too. We tend to talk about ethics as though only ethical people understand them, but manipulative people can become extraordinarily skilled at identifying the ethical commitments of others and preying on them.

If they know you care about trauma survivors, they know which story will stop you in your tracks. If they know you protect children, they know which allegation will activate you. If they know you despise injustice, they know which accusation will make you feel morally compelled to respond.

Your virtues can become handles for the handlers. That was one of the hardest things for me to accept.

My intuition had not disappeared during these experiences. There were things I withheld because something in me remained cautious. There were pieces of myself I did not make available. I wasn’t completely naive, more than I was allowing my empathy to lead my emotional responses.

What emerged over time was a pattern I found increasingly difficult to ignore: people spoke privately about vicious individuals while publicly associating with them, narratives shifted depending on the current alliance, private information moved through backchannels, and civil conspiracies were conducted through blocking campaigns, reporting, screenshots, private chats, public audio rooms, and endless factions of chaos.

I watched people collect the lived experiences of others and later repurpose those vulnerabilities during conflict. Trauma disclosed in confidence became ammunition. Private conversations became entertainment. A person’s worst experiences could be mocked by strangers who had never met them, never sat across a table from them, and never learned anything meaningful about their lives beyond whatever fragments had been passed around inside a digital mob.

That is a particularly ugly form of human behavior to witness when you have spent decades advocating for survivors.

I also had to confront the smaller betrayals because sometimes those teach the same lesson more clearly than the spectacular manipulations.

Another woman from that same orbit once called me in the middle of the night after getting drunk and creating a disaster at her husband’s work party. She was terrified that her relationship was over and her wedding would be off. I stayed on the line with her for hours, listening and reassuring her through the panic. Later, I witnessed her sitting silently in an audio room while false and degrading things were said about me.

As opposed to how I would have responded if in the same situation, “Actually she was there for me in a really difficult moment, so I’m not comfortable sitting here while she is degraded.”

But she stood up another time for someone she considered a “friend”, and her silence regarding me taught me something I had apparently needed to learn. I had mistaken someone’s willingness to receive my empathy for evidence that they possessed comparable empathy themselves.

Those are not the same thing.

There are people who will happily crawl into your lap when their world is falling apart and then sit quietly in the audience when someone sets yours on fire. The mistake is not helping them once. The mistake is seeing what they are capable of afterward and continuing to give them the same access because you believe your kindness obligates you to remain consistent.

It doesn’t. My empathy is mine. I decide where it goes.

Another individual I supported through their difficult relationship ending, as well as the death of their pet, and lent hours of support and conversation. They later went on to create a fabricated story about me for the sake of their own drama farming; a story that resulted in me being cyber stalked. To date, there has been no self-accountability for that overt action. Again, I learned that giving empathy to people who had no empathy themselves, came with a cost that I no longer am willing to pay out.

That realization changed the way I think about online community altogether. I suspect the era of radically open internet communities may be ending for many of us who have spent decades being advocates online. Most of my meaningful communities are more private now. My friends and I meet behind closed doors instead. We don’t photograph every gathering or announce every conversation. We do not need strangers to witness our friendships in order for those friendships to be real, and we have learned that openly sharing our lives is handing fodder to manipulators waiting under the table for our life crumbs.

There is a beautiful finality about accepting these realizations instead of attempting to change them or make things better. Inside the hurt, loss and pain that came with facing the reality in the cultural shift of online dynamics, bloomed an immense amount of growth through facing shadows, healing them and allowing acceptance to strengthen us.

Ten years from now, I expect many of us will still know one another. We have watched our children grow up, books get published, relationships change, parents age, careers evolve, and another decade settle into the lines on our faces.

The people who built their identities around perpetual conflict may still be searching for the next victim, or perhaps some of them will finally tire of living that way and choose healing. I genuinely hope they do, for the sake of not harming others or themselves. Living from conflict requires an extraordinary amount of energy, and eventually everyone has to decide what kind of life they want to build with whatever years remain.

I know what I want to build with mine.

I no longer believe empathy means descending into every chaotic situation to prove I care. The image I carry now is different. I float observatory and slightly above the crowd, not detached from humanity, but positioned high enough to watch before entering to participate. I can see what is happening without response. I can listen to someone’s story without handing them the keys to my nervous system. I can care without volunteering for a role. I can wait for patterns to emerge.

For someone like me who has let empathy lead me for decades, that is a profound shift.

I used to think discernment happened after empathy. Someone told me something painful, my empathy opened, and then I attempted to determine what was happening from inside the emotional relationship. I have reversed the order. Discernment comes first now. Empathy remains intact, but access to it is a slow graduation.

This is particularly important in an internet culture increasingly engineered to trigger immediate emotional responses. Advertising, political messaging, fundraising, influencers, and content farmers are all utilizing outrage and suffering to generate empathetic response. And the response itself becomes the content.

Whether any particular interaction rises to something we should literally call a psychological operation is almost beside the point. The behavioral mechanism is everywhere: make the person feel strongly enough that they act before they assess.

So, I have stopped believing every invitation to feel requires my attendance. This doesn’t mean becoming cold. I refuse to let manipulative people turn discernment into another form of damage by convincing me that the only alternative to exploitation is emotional numbness. I will not surrender empathy simply because someone once discovered how to misuse it. That would allow the worst people I have encountered to redesign one of the things I value most about myself.

Instead, I put gates around it.

I ask different questions of myself now. What exactly is being asked of me? Why am I being told this? Is someone asking me to listen, or quietly recruiting me into a conflict? Does my lived experience and knowledge of what happened matter? Is the story remaining consistent? Does this person respect my boundaries when I decline involvement? Do they demonstrate the same compassion toward others that they continually request for themselves? What happens when I disagree with them? What happens when I say no?

That last question tells you an extraordinary amount about a person.

Boundaries have a fascinating way of revealing relationships. Sometimes the moment you stop providing unlimited access, the person who praised your kindness suddenly describes you as cruel. Private messages appear publicly. Histories are rewritten. Your refusal to participate becomes evidence of some newly invented character defect. The temptation is to rush forward carrying documents, screenshots, explanations, and rebuttals, desperately trying to correct every person who has been given an inaccurate version of you.

Do not do that. It’s a waste of your time and energy.

There is information in watching who believes something without asking your side. And often asking for your version is a part of their game, a ploy to hear your evidence so they can skew it. But there is much information in watching who enjoys your humiliation. There is information in seeing who remains silent because challenging the crowd would cost them social currency. There is information in observing who contacts you privately but refuses to display integrity publicly.

You don’t have to interrupt every revelation. You aren’t required to respond. You simply watch people reveal themselves.

The great lesson for me has not been that humans cannot be trusted or that empathy makes us weak. It has been almost exactly the opposite. Empathy is powerful enough that it requires stewardship. I would not leave my house unlocked blindly assuming most people are good, and I no longer leave my emotional life unlocked for the same reason.

Amicability is not access. Kindness is not consent. Listening is not allegiance. Someone else’s emergency does not automatically become my responsibility, and another person’s trauma narrative does not exempt them from accountability for how they treat people.

Protecting empathy from predatory extraction requires slowing down the moment someone attempts to accelerate you. Listen without immediately acting. Verify what can reasonably be verified. Notice whether the person continually generates crises requiring rescue and attention. Keep confidential information confidential. Refuse requests that violate your ethics even when the person asking is distressed.

I can tell you something great about standing inside your ethics: there is personal pride that comes from knowing you possess the strength of having your own integrity.

Pay attention to how someone treats people they no longer need, because eventually you may occupy that position yourself. Most importantly, never confuse your ability to understand someone’s pain with an obligation to give them unrestricted access to you.

Empathy does not require self-abandonment. The most mature version of empathy does not offer their home to an open door. Instead, there is a balanced lock that only we control, protecting our sanctity and peace of mind.

Anatomy of the Dark Empath © 2023 by Vennie Kocsis is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

1. Richard Doty is a former U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) special agent who became notorious in UFO history for his involvement in feeding false and misleading information to UFO researchers and experiencers while stationed at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico in the early 1980s. Doty has publicly acknowledged that, as part of his counterintelligence duties, he deliberately supplied fabricated material and reinforced false UFO narratives to targeted individuals, most famously businessman and UFO experiencer Paul Bennewitz, who believed he was observing extraterrestrial activity near Kirtland. Doty has described his role as protecting classified military programs by steering investigators toward extraterrestrial explanations, effectively admitting that he knowingly lied to people who believed they were experiencing genuine anomalous phenomena. His story is therefore significant to disclosure discussions not because it proves any particular UFO claim, but because it documents something more concrete: military disinformation was deliberately introduced into the UFO community, making it extraordinarily difficult afterward to distinguish authentic testimony, classified technology, mistaken interpretation, and information intentionally manufactured to deceive. ↩︎

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