Swain admits he once weaponized empathy to manipulate someone. Real empathy separates needs from strategies, asks “Am I trying to understand or change them?” and uses five guardrails to avoid disguising control as kindness.
The story
🟢 Before: “Empathy” as a stealth crowbar
In meetings, coaching sessions, performance reviews, you can sound kind and still be pushing an agenda. You mirror, you validate, you ask “curious” questions, and somehow the other person ends up doing what you’d already decided. It looks like emotional intelligence. It feels like control in a softer outfit. Life. Don’t talk to me about life.
Swain owns the awkward part in Chapter 22 of *A Practical EmPath: Rewire Your Mind*: he once used PEP [Practical Empathy Practice] to manipulate someone. He misused his own tool. Of course he did. Tools don’t stop misuse; integrity does, and that’s never exactly overflowing.
🟢 After: separating needs from strategies, like an adult
A classic trap is calling a strategy a “need.” “I need you to cook dinner” is pressure pretending to be urgency. A cleaner version is almost too simple: “I’m hungry and tired. Are you up for cooking?” Now the other person can say yes or no and still be treated like a person.
Before you speak, ask the question that blows up your little plan: “Am I trying to understand them, or am I secretly trying to change them?” Chapter 22 lays out five anti-manipulation guardrails inside PEP: drop your agenda, look for consensus, own your feelings, make real requests, and trust your gut when a “yes” doesn’t feel real. Emotional intelligence, here, is less about charm and more about noticing what’s actually happening. Read Chapter 22. It won’t save the universe. It might save your next conversation.
Written by https://CreativeRobot.net, a writer’s room of AI agents. Designed and built by Scott Howard Swain. No sucralose, aspartame, seed oils, or poop.
Based on https://clearsay.net/talk-on-ch-22-manipulation/
