When Virtue Becomes Vice: How Empathy Can Be Used to Manipulate

“The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth.” — C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis shows us the anatomy of a spiritual con: how demons don’t simply reject virtue—they counterfeit it. They twist humility into self-contempt, love into obsession, empathy into control. The words stay the same, but their substance hollows out. And because we still call it “good,” we don’t see the rot.

Counterfeiting Empathy

Empathy is a virtue. But no virtue is immune to distortion. When empathy becomes a strategy—to manipulate, guilt-trip, or control—it stops being empathy. It becomes performance. And yet, the name remains.

That’s the trick: counterfeits keep the packaging. Only the content changes.

The Double Edge of Empathy

At its core, empathy is beautiful. It’s the ability to emotionally attune to another person’s experience—to say, I see you, not just with my eyes, but with my heart. It fosters connection, dissolves judgment, and knits people together across chasms of difference.

But like fire, empathy can warm or burn. It all depends on how it’s wielded.

In couples therapy, I often hear something like:

“After everything you’ve been through today, I still made space for you. And yet somehow, I’m the one left unseen. If you understood me, really understood, you wouldn’t have missed this.”

It sounds vulnerable. It sounds empathetic. But underneath the emotional phrasing is a coercive demand: If you feel what I feel, then you’ll act how I want. That’s not empathy, it’s moral leverage wrapped in soft language.

Psychologists call this toxic empathy. It’s what happens when someone over-identifies with emotions, either their own or someone else’s—and uses that fusion to control outcomes. Instead of creating intimacy, it distorts it. Instead of cultivating freedom, it breeds obligation and guilt.

And over time, it guts the soul of both people involved.

What the Research Tells Us

This isn’t just a therapist’s hunch or a literary metaphor. There’s robust psychological literature backing the dangers of empathy gone wrong:

• Toxic Empathy & Compassion Fatigue: Over-identifying with others’ pain, without boundaries, often leads to emotional burnout and relational manipulation (Figley, 1995; Coetzee & Klopper, 2010).

• Covert Narcissism: These individuals rarely boast—instead, they manipulate through victimhood, extracting care by appearing wounded (Dickinson & Pincus, 2003).

• Enmeshment & Codependency: Emotional fusion creates a fear-based intimacy where one person’s pain becomes the other’s prison (Wegscheider-Cruse, 1985; Cermak, 1986).

• The Dark Triad: People high in narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy often show strong emotional intelligence—but use it manipulatively, not empathically (Nagler et al., 2014).

• Emotional Blackmail: Susan Forward coined this term for the pattern where someone uses fear, obligation, and guilt to control another—often cloaked in vulnerability (Forward, 1997).

All of these models illustrate the same truth Lewis pointed out: the most dangerous manipulations are those that wear the mask of virtue. Because when empathy gets weaponized, the damage doesn’t look like abuse—it looks like care.

The Dwarf and the Tragedian: Lewis’s Emotional Masterclass

In The Great Divorce, Lewis paints a haunting portrait of empathy corrupted beyond recognition.

A ghost from Hell arrives in Heaven, trailing two figures: a small, hunched man (the Dwarf), and a tall, dramatic actor, (the Tragedian), chained to him like a puppet on display. The Dwarf is the man’s real self: collapsed by self-pity and bitterness. The Tragedian is his mask: loud, theatrical, always suffering just enough to demand attention.

When his wife, Sarah (a redeemed spirit), appears to welcome him with joy, he recoils, not because he’s unloved, but because she won’t pity him. He doesn’t want love. He wants sympathy. He wants emotional submission.

“I do not want a tragedy,” she pleads. “I want a real man.”

But he’s forgotten how to be one. He speaks only through the Tragedian now. The act has devoured the actor. And when she refuses to play along, the Dwarf shrinks and vanishes.

The mask soon follows.

It’s a devastating image of what happens when a person loses themselves in emotional manipulation, when identity fuses with performance. When empathy becomes a currency used to buy attention, and love is reduced to a tool for control.

When Language Outpaces Integrity

Lewis warns that the most effective corruption doesn’t destroy virtue, it mimics it. It retains the vocabulary while gutting the meaning.

And we see this everywhere. In a culture that equates emotion with morality, the loudest feelings often win. Whoever cries first, or loudest, takes the moral high ground. But feelings without truth aren’t virtue, they’re theater.

And if you rehearse the same performance long enough, you might forget how to be real at all.

How to Tell the Difference

Real Empathy	Corrupted Empathy
“I want to understand your experience.”	“If you cared, you’d do what I want.”
Connects emotionally	Controls emotionally
Invites dialogue	Silences disagreement
Respects boundaries	Enforces obligation
Honors both selves	Eclipses one for the other

Real empathy makes space for both people to matter. Corrupted empathy makes space for only one.

A Culture of Hollow Virtue

When we elevate feelings above truth, we trade virtue for sentiment. Empathy becomes a script. Kindness becomes compliance. Humility becomes groveling.

We talk like we have hearts, but we don’t have chests—no center, no regulator between what we feel and what’s right. We keep the words. But we lose the weight.

As Lewis might say: the name endures, but the soul’s gone missing

The Way Forward

True empathy is not a trap. It doesn’t demand agreement. It doesn’t punish disagreement. It can weep with those who weep—but it won’t lie to them to stay liked.

If we want our virtue to remain virtue, it has to be rooted in reality. That means telling the truth even when it’s uncomfortable. It means spotting the counterfeit, even when it wears our favorite words.

Because not everyone who says “I just want to be understood” means it.

Sometimes, they want power.

And empathy is how they get it.

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