HealthyGamerGG - If they say this to you, RUN

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

In this episode, Dr. K explores the disturbing trend of weaponized therapy speak, where psychological language is used to manipulate others, dodge accountability, and exclude people from social groups,. He breaks down the "DARVO" framework and explains how people with "Dark Triad" traits use virtuous victimhood to control those around them,,. What to expect in this episode: The Weaponization of Healing: An analysis of how phrases like "you need to heal" or "cutting ties for my safety" are being used to blame others while playing the victim,. Understanding DARVO: A deep dive into the classic manipulative cycle of Denying the behavior, Attacking the person holding you accountable, and Reversing the roles of victim and offender,. The Dark Triad Connection: Why this behavior is often linked to psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism,. Virtuous Victimhood Signaling: How manipulators combine "being a victim" with "being a good person" to make their claims more believable to others,,. Asymmetric Resource Extraction: Why playing the victim is a highly effective way to get kindness, money, or support without having to give anything in return,. The "No-Engagement" Rule: Practical advice on how to handle a DARVO attack, including why you should stop trying to hold them accountable and focus on building one-on-one relationships instead,,.HG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3SztHG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey, chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Alokinoja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. Hey, y'all, if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. K's guide to mental health.

And so we start by understanding what literally, is meditation. How does experience shape us as human beings? How do we strengthen the mind itself as an organ? And so by understanding our mind, we understand a very, very simple tool, a crucial tool that we have to learn how to use if we want to build the life that we want to. So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. Hey, y'all, I'm seeing a disturbing trend as a psychiatrist, which is that therapy speak is starting to become weaponized. So here's an example of a DM that we just kind of found on the internet that was tweeted out, and let's take a look at this message. I need to talk to you. I've removed you from this Sunday's collab and from the server as a whole. Some of my friends have found

you to be extremely obnoxious, hyper, and all around too loud during our calls. I think you need to sit back and evaluate how you act in this community. Being loud and obnoxious is just attention-seeking. You can argue, but nobody in their right mind acts like this. You need to realize nobody likes you for this. Nobody wants to support someone who tries. I honestly don't think you were meant for this. I would step back and think about this. Until you get your shit together, I unfortunately will be cutting ties with you just to keep myself safe. I hope you heal and stop trying to be someone you aren't.

So this is happening more and more. People will receive a DM. You'll get a text message where someone lays out all of these claims, blames you in some way, plays the victim, and uses therapy speak. Oh yeah, the problem here is that you need to heal. I'm cutting you off. You can argue, but nobody in their right mind acts like this, right? they use all of these phrases to basically weaponize therapy speak to exclude someone from their social

group. They place all of the responsibility on you. And it turns out that this kind of behavior is actually potentially tied to things like psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellism, what we call the dark triad. So what's scary is really how common this is. One study found that 24 to 34% of people pretended to be hurt in some way to get something that they wanted. Another study found that about 80% of people have seen this happen. So this is happening increasingly commonly. So the other really scary thing about this is how textbook this is. So here's a paper from 2017 on something called Darvo, which is deny attack and reverse victim and an offender.

Darvo is a framework that basically people who have been manipulative have used for arguably hundreds, if not thousands of years. So this is when they sort of play the victim. So if you try to criticize them in some way, the first thing that they'll do is they'll deny that this ever happened. The second thing that they'll do is attack you, right? So they'll blame you for trying to hold them accountable. And the third thing that they'll do is reverse the victim and offender. So instead of like taking accountability for what they did wrong, they will somehow become the victim and blame you for creating the situation. So we're going to take a look at a questionnaire that literally goes over Darvo items.

We're going to show it on the screen. You all can pause to read if you want. But here's the really fascinating thing. If you look at this study, which has Darvo question items from 2017, we can map on these questionnaire items to this DM. So now what we're going to do is show these things side by side. And let's see, right? So let's see how many of the Darvo questionnaire items actually show up in this tweet.

Some of my friends found you to be extremely obnoxious, hyper, and all around too loud during calls. So this is something that people will do. They will not have a personal problem with you. They'll say, oh, yeah, all of these other people found you to be obnoxious. Okay. Being loud and obnoxious is attention seeking. You can argue, but no one in their right mind acts like this. You need to realize that nobody likes you for this.

Nobody wants to support you, right? This is nobody, everybody and nobody. Like, nobody wants to support you. Everyone thinks you're bad. It's not just me. I don't have a problem with you. It's everybody. Until you get your shit together, I unfortunately will be cutting ties with you just to keep myself safe. Once again, I have been hurt. I am the victim here.

I hope you heal and stop trying to be someone that you aren't. You need to fix this problem. So this is crazy. This is like in one set of DMs, which is, I don't know, maybe like a dozen sentences, we see several textbook cases of Darvow. So what's going on here? This comes down to something called virtuous victimhood. So many years ago, there were.

lots and lots of problems like prior to the Me Too movement, where there was like, you know, generations of women that had been sexually assaulted by men in power, and we did not believe them. Here's a great example of Courtney Love talking about this back in 2005. Hi, Comic Central. Do you have any advice for a young girl moving to Hollywood? Um, I'll get live with us. Harvey Weinstein invites you to a private party and it's four seats. So after this Me Too movement brought.

around 2017, we started to believe victims. This is generally speaking a good thing, right? So what people have been complaining about like Weinstein and Epstein for many, many, many years and like no one believed them. And then we started saying, okay, let's believe victims. But then we run into a slight problem. Once we start believing victims, there are some people in our society who have dark triad traits. These are people who are psychopathic, so they don't care about the feelings of others. They're narcissistic. they're very self-centered, and they're Machiavellian, which means that they will use whatever means necessary to advance their own interests. And so here's what's really interesting. After the Me Too movement, being a victim was a way to advance your cause. Now, there are absolutely

cases where this is very justified, right? Like being a victim is an appropriate way to get resources from the society around you. If I get hit by a car, people are kind to me. They're more compassionate with for me. I may start a go fund me and raise some money, right? So it makes sense that we take care of victims as a society, especially in the West where we're like, taking care of people is like generally a good thing. Hey all, if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. K's guide to mental health. And so we start by understanding what literally is meditation. How does experience shape us as human beings? How do we strengthen the mind itself as an organ? And so by understanding

our mind, we understand a very, very simple tool, a crucial tool that we have to learn how to use if we want to build the life that we want to. So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. Being a victim is an effective way to do something called asymmetric resource extraction. It's where I'm a victim and I don't have to give you anything, but I can receive something. And these resources can be both material and non-material. So it can be stuff like money from the GoFundMe and it can be stuff like kindness and compassion and psychological. resources. So we live in a society where we're believing victims more. That's generally speaking a good thing. And when we're a victim, people take care of us, right? So then we have a problem, though,

because there are some people in our society who will camouflage themselves as victims. This happens all throughout nature. Take a look at this clip from David Attenborough. Another mantis is shaped and colored like a flower and gets a reward for the resemblance. So if there are resources to be extracted, some people will take advantage of this system. And this is where there's a really fascinating study that looked at the correlation between dark triad traits. These are things like narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellism, with something called virtuous victimhood signaling. Okay? So this study basically found that, first of all, victims get stuff, which we've already talked about.

There's an asymmetric resource extraction. Then they also discovered something really interesting, which is that generally speaking, human beings, even if someone is a victim, people have like mixed feelings about that. Okay? So like on the one hand, we want to support victims. And so I will take care of you if you're sick, if I'm well. Like that makes me feel good. But we generally speaking have a tolerance or a limit to that, right?

We don't want to take care of someone who is chronically ill and is sort of chronically crying wolf and like we don't want to be like overly invested with them for extended periods of time. So people who fit dark triad traits engage in another piece of this victimhood signaling, which is virtuous victimhood signaling. So this is where our society has a really interesting perspective on virtue, on being moral, on being a good person. First thing to understand is this is independent from being a victim. We have good people and we have people that we pity, right? The victims. Interesting thing is when you combine these two traits, being virtuous and being a victim, it increases the signal that you receive.

And the reason I'm going into this is because if y'all are living in today's world, you will encounter these people. These people are anywhere between 24 to 34% of people admitted doing it, right, who are consciously aware of it. There's another group, I'd say about another 25 to 35% that do it quite regularly, but are not consciously aware of it. So like, a lot of people are doing this. And it's important for you to understand

what this pattern looks like, right? How to tell whether someone is sort of like doing this to you or not doing it to you. And this is where virtuosity comes in. So not only are they playing the victim, but they will virtue signal outside of that. So they will pretend to be virtuous. So virtue signaling is defined

as the conspicuous expression of moral values done primarily with the intent of enhancing one's standing within a social group. Okay? Portraying oneself as a moral person can provide supporting evidence for the credibility and legitimacy of one's victim signal. So this is what these people will do. They will virtue signal. They will pretend to be good. And this lends credence and legitimacy to when they claim to be the victim.

And this is why it's so hard to fight against them, right? If I say, hey, you need to, you know, hey, can you please pay me back? When I hold you accountable for something bad that you did, if you virtue signal, along with crying the victim, other people are more likely to take that victimhood signal seriously. And these are the techniques that these people use. Turns out that when we study people who do this, we do find a really interesting association. People who are psychopaths will pretend to be the victim, but they won't version. So if you're just straight psychopathic or sociopathic, you lack the empathy to be virtuous, right?

You don't pretend to be virtuous, but you're all for playing the victim. What's really interesting is being narcissistic, these people will virtue signal a lot, but they won't play the victim. Now, why is that? Because if I'm the victim, that means I'm weak. That means I got taken advantage of. And if I'm narcissistic, I'm not someone who gets taken advantage of. Here's the really interesting thing.

Only sociopathy means that we virtue signal. Only narcissist means that we virtue signal. But if we have the dark triad personality, if we are both narcissistic and psychopathic and are Machiavellian, then we will do both. So how do we spot this? Look for people who are both virtue signaling and victim signaling. Look for the language, right? So you all can use that Darvo questionnaire.

When someone uses this language with you, that means that you're in the realm of someone who is probably weaponizing therapy speak. And then we get to the biggest problem, which is what do I do? And this is what's so hard about this is like, if you try to defend yourself, oftentimes you will get outgunned. And people are really confused. They're like, I don't understand how this person gets away with playing the victim. Like, I'm the person who said, hey, this person borrowed money from me.

and they didn't give it back. Like, I'm actually the person who is wronged here, and somehow this person is turning it around on me, and people are believing them and not believing me. And that's because they are combining, they're using the synergy build of virtue signaling with victimhood, which allows the people around you

or makes the people around you more likely to believe their victim signal than your victim signal. Make sense? All right, so if this is happening to you, simple question is Dr. K, what do I do? step number one is notice it right and even this is a little bit difficult because how do you know if someone is pretending to be the victim or claiming to be the victim and said you did all of this stuff wrong

how do you know if they're gaslighting you which is commonly something that they will do or whether they're right right so are you out of line or they gaslighting you which one is it and that's why we showed you the darvo questions literally what i would recommend you all do is look at those questions and look at the way that they speak to you how many of those things do they engage in Second thing, once you figured out that you are indeed being gaslit, you've got a slight problem because this is usually happening in a social situation. And if someone is doing this to you, this is the way that they work, right? This is like the way they've been trained. This is happening maybe subconsciously. Maybe it's happening consciously. So oftentimes you can sort of get into

this competitive virtue signaling victimhood kind of thing. Like, no, I'm the victim, no, I'm the victim. I mean, if you're good at that, you can try to beat them at their own game. But chances are they've been doing it longer than you have. Chances are they do it quite a bit, so they will outgun you there. And so this is where the, unfortunately, like the best answer as a psychiatrist is to not engage with them. Now, a lot of y'all may have problems with this because you'll say, but Dr. Kay, I have no choice. They're at my work. They're in my family. They're in my friend group. Are you saying I should abandon the friend group? That's not what I said. Don't engage with them in a meaningful way as best as you can. Now, sometimes you have to. Sometimes you can't avoid it. There's a certain amount of like,

social surfing that as you get better, you can sort of step away from them. You can still interact with them, still be civil with them, but certainly don't try to hold them accountable for anything. Stop loaning the money. Try to pull back from them. And here's the reason why. If they are really good at this, they are not just doing it with you. And in social circles, we oftentimes try to engage with someone who's like a good punching bag for RBS, which means that as they burn the bridge with you, you're pulling back from them. And then if they're really in the wrong, and if they are personality-wise, psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian, if they're doing this a lot, they will then start to do it with

other people in your friend group. As long as you are presenting yourself as a target, they will target you. But as you start to step back in any normal friend group or any normal family, there is some kind of conflict, right? That happens between human beings. Always happens. But as long as you are the focus of that conflict, you're not giving them the opportunity to burn bridges with the people around you. And that is absolutely something that they will do, which is why we move to this third thing that you should do, which is engage with people one-on-one who are in your social network.

And this is what you should do. You can do a couple of things. One is you can ask them, hey, I just had this thing happen with this person. We had this conflict. You know, I thought they owed me money like they do owe me money. but when I asked them for money, they started to say all this stuff. Am I crazy? So ask somebody else for their opinion. Really good opportunity for a temperature check. If you want to go hard, I wouldn't recommend doing this out of the gate, but you can forward them text messages. You can even forward them the Darvo

paper and be like, hey, I know this is kind of insane, but I, you know, I recently learned about this concept. Do you think I'm crazy here for thinking that these two things are lining up? Don't ask them to take sides. You know, you have to be careful about them, then forwarding that crap to the person who is attacking you in the first place and they're going to even play the victim even more. So you have to be careful about these particulars. The key thing, though, is that you want to form a one-on-one relationship as well as you can. And the reason for that is, as the person who is narcissistic Machiavellian, et cetera, gaslighting everybody around them and always playing the victim, they will burn additional bridges.

And when they burn additional bridges, you can reach out to that person or even preemptively say, hey, look, this happened to me. I don't know who's in the right. I don't know who's in the wrong. I feel like this person is out of line. I feel like I'm in the right. If they do this to you, I'm here for you. And that's ultimately the best thing that you can do.

And over time, what'll happen is they'll burn the bridges and you are there to reform those relationships. So be on the lookout for weaponized therapy speak because it's happening a lot. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoy the conversation,

be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other. Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything, like packing a spare stick. I like to be prepared. That's why I remember, 988 Canada's Suicide Crisis Helpline. It's good to know, just in case. Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a train responder anytime. 988 Suicide Crisis Helpline is funded by the government in Canada.