Strategies and tactics for dealing with manipulative people: DrAlexVasquez 13may2026
At various points in my life—whether in school, work or personal relationships—I have encountered different types of manipulative people, and because of these experiences and the occasional horrific consequences, I have been forced to study the topic of manipulation, gaslighting, and psychopathy to a reasonably deep level.
1. Primary psychopaths—10%of the population: The first step in dealing with manipulative people and human predators with psychopathic traits as to realize and accept the fact that these people actually exist. For honest people who try to deal with the world in a straightforward way, they have no idea that these human predators exist among us, although the research is quite clear that at least 10 to 20% of the population carry psychopathic traits and approximately one percent of the population is severely psychopathic to the point of criminality and incarceration. Without awareness and acceptance that these people exist, a person is going to be naïve, socially incompetent, and always vulnerable to attack by psychopathic people. A common misperception is that psychopaths are “crazy” and obviously violent/antisocial (ie, low-functioning psychopaths, approximately 1% of the population) and therefore easy to identify; this is clearly untrue as most “high-functioning psychopaths” (10% of the population) are savvy enough to “learn the rules” and manipulate their ways into positions of power, even after being successful in school and “climbing the corporate ladder.”
2. Secondary psychopaths: sociopaths—65%of the population: Another very important point to understand is that about 65% of the population doesn’t have a true internal moral compass and is therefore vulnerable to manipulation by one of the psychopathic people mentioned in the first category above. The classic psychological experiments performed by Milgram starting in the 1960s demonstrated that among any group of the general population, you can extract about 65% of those people who will conform to (false) authority even to the point of abusing and hurting other people. So a very important point to understand when dealing with society a large is that any individual or nucleus or small group of psychopathic people can easily gain control over a larger group and this can occur in the general population or in a church, a business or any type of other environment. In an organizational setting, one single psychopath can easily overtake an entire department and then the entire organization, because one manipulative person can influence the other larger group that does not have an internal moral compass and firm identity. These people are the “empty vessels” and “sheep” that are easy to manipulate into political violence and religious cults.
3. Trust your discomfort early and don’t wait for hard evidence because more time and more engagement becomes more vulnerability and more exhaustion: For me, what I would say is the third step in this process after acknowledging that primary psychopaths exist and secondary sociopaths exist is to basically learn to follow cliché and “trust your gut” because when a situation starts to feel weird, it’s usually feeling weird for a reason. The reason it’s usually feeling weird is that the other person isn’t engaging with us honestly, but they are trying to gain some type of advantage over us. They use 1) manipulation, 2) intimidation, 3) bullshit rules that they make up to their advantage, and 4) gaslighting – which is a strategy used to make other people feel like they’re crazy so that they won’t trust their own perspectives and they will shrink into the corner where they can be easily manipulated. Manipulators use exhaustion, hopelessness, and despair to weaken their targets and force their targets into submission; the longer you stay engaged with a manipulator, the weaker and more confused you will be, which is exactly the strategy being used against you.
