A Dating Coach Describes Turning Vulnerability Into Leverage

An unnamed guest described intimacy not as mutual disclosure but as a way to acquire leverage. She said she sometimes tells people she likes them and performs vulnerability so that they will reveal their own. Once she knows where someone is emotionally exposed, she said, she may give deliberately bad advice or lead them astray. She specified that these were not clients.

She said she believes she knows how people’s minds work and can “make them or ... break them.” Seeing a grown man cry, beg to be seen, or submit emotionally gives her satisfaction, she said. Asked by Chris Williamson what the sensation was, she called it a thrill: adrenaline and the realization of what another person is willing to do for her. Williamson suggested “power”; she agreed.

The mechanism, as she described it, is an unresolved emotional need. She said she can leave an “emotional gap” that makes someone run in circles trying to please her or obtain closure. She said she does not offer that closure because she believes it preserves control over the person for the rest of their life. People from as long as nine years ago, she claimed, have told her they still dream about her.

She distinguished this enjoyment of emotional submission from her romantic preferences. Outside sexual or romantic relationships, she said, she finds submissive men disgusting. But she said she enjoys observing emotional pain.

The guest’s examples extended beyond manipulation in personal relationships. She said that as a child she enjoyed watching people be injured or bleed. As an adult, she said, the prospect of being charged for physical crimes or fraud constrains her behavior.

She recounted stealing a woman’s credit card at university, spending the woman’s money, then comforting the woman while she complained that someone had gone on a shopping spree with the card. The guest said she hugged the victim and said that people were despicable while concealing that she was responsible. The appeal, in her telling, included watching the woman’s distress from inside a trusted role.

Williamson asked whether the cardholder had done anything to justify the theft. The guest said no: she “just wanted to.”

Williamson did not suggest that retaliation makes cruelty acceptable. He said outsized revenge can still be horrible and painful, but it at least has a recognizable psychological shape: someone believes they were wronged and inflicts disproportionate harm. The theft disturbed him because the guest offered no grievance or retaliatory logic at all.

She drew a different moral boundary around another woman she said she had “ruined” and then watched descend into what appeared to be severe depression. That episode felt righteous to her, she said, so she felt less bad about it. The credit-card theft did not carry even that claimed justification.

The guest said she has cultivated an audience unlike the one she wants. She described herself as conservative and said she would prefer a conservative base with whom she could discuss politics and other subjects she cares about. Instead, she said, her audience has placed her in a role where she must pretend to care about behavior she regards as “ridiculous,” degrading, and degenerate.

The contradiction is financial as well as cultural. Content about psychopathy, she said, brings more women into her inbox. She considers that good when they buy her book or book coaching sessions, but said she hates them.

“I've cultivated this, and it pisses me off,” she said.

Her account of the relationship was explicitly transactional: people either provide her use or they do not. She said she does not understand why she supports women generally, whom she characterized as causing the most harm, or why she expects empathy from others when she cannot reciprocate it.

She also identified what she called narcissism or grandiosity in her difficulty accepting that people she does not know can be in relationships with someone other than her. Logically, she said, she knows those people do not know she exists. Emotionally, she remains confused by their attachment to anyone else.

Asked how someone might detect a sociopath or psychopath, the guest offered a set of informal signs: the eyes; a failure to yawn, smile, or laugh contagiously in response to another person; mirroring another person’s stated positions; conspicuous attentiveness; remembered details; and compliments directed at obscure traits. She also pointed to unusual moral justifications for harmful conduct, citing serial killers who treated refraining from one form of violence as evidence of fidelity or restraint.

Her broader rule was that psychopaths help people only when it is useful to them. If they help when they receive nothing in return, she said, that may indicate a successful relationship with one.

She applied the label to a range of public figures, including Candace Owens, Justin Trudeau, Gavin Newsom, JD Vance, Angelina Jolie, Ariana Grande, Kevin Spacey, and Mark Zuckerberg. She exempted Donald Trump, whom she called a narcissist rather than a sociopath. The point of the list, in her account, was not merely political or celebrity judgment; it was an assertion that these traits can be read in conduct and presentation.

The Zuckerberg claim brought the clearest challenge. The guest called him “like a lizard” and said his failure to blink was something to notice. Williamson said he had spent two or three days around Zuckerberg, watching him interact with family, children, staff, and Jocko Willink, and found him “outstandingly normal.”

The guest replied that Williamson could not know what happens behind closed doors. He accepted that limit, but maintained that sustained observation of ordinary interactions counted for something. Zuckerberg struck him as highly intellectual and distracted, he said, but not as someone displaying the traits the guest claimed to detect.