Dark Psychology: Detecting Manipulation and Brainwashing

Hello, beautiful people. Welcome back to Out the Box Podcast. I'm your host, Jaylene, and I'm so excited for you to hear everything I have to share with you today. So today's topic is going to be dark psychology, and I'm going to be referencing the book Dark Psychology 101, which is written by Michael Pace.

And so on the cover of the book, it says, learn the secrets of covert emotional manipulation, dark persuasion, undetected mind control, mind games, deception, hypnotism, brainwashing, and other tricks of the trade.

Now in the very beginning of this book, Michael says that basically how you use this information is up to you. There's obviously people in the world that will use this information to brainwash people and to manipulate people. However, the purpose of me sharing this information is so that we

will have the knowledge and the skills to be able to detect red flags in our day-to-day relationships because we are all susceptible to these things and there are some people that have inattentions and hidden agendas. So with that, I'm going to be talking about the three different covert emotional manipulation methods, the law of state transference, and the three undetected mind control tactics. And as always, while you're here, make sure you download, like and subscribe.

Follow me on Instagram at otb underscore underscore podcast for information on future content. And you can also check me out at www.587fm.com for live streams of my episodes Monday through Fridays at 9 a.m. So first, I'm going to talk about why we need dark psychology. And I'm going to be doing a lot of direct reading from the text just because the information is so straightforward.

So dark psychology is at work in the world. You might not like this, but you obviously cannot change it. So you have a choice.

Either remain ignorant of something powerful and risk becoming its next victim, or take control of your situation and learn to protect yourself and those you love from people who will ruin you through ruthless psychological exploitation. Understanding dark psychology is not only a defensive measure, these are ideas and principles contained within the world of dark psychology.

that can help you get ahead in your professional and personal endeavors. No one is asking you to become a psychopath, but surely you could use a little more power in your day-to-day life. So this information is not too... make you someone you are not. It's more so to make you aware because we are surrounded by so many people on our day-to-day lives, working with people, family members, friends, relationships, and so many people have hidden.

agendas. And so many people do things to our minds that go so undetected because it's coming from someone that we're supposed to trust. And so this information is really important because these things are going to be here, whether or not we want to learn about it. So it may sound scary, it may sound heavy, but it's here and it's present. And so it's important for us to have this information so we can protect ourselves from people who use these kind of things against us.

Alright, so I'm going to get into covert emotional manipulation. And so the three methods of covert emotional manipulation in the book are love bombing, reinforcement, and reality denial. So what is... covert emotional manipulation. And just for time's sake, I'm going to call it CEM because those are obviously the acronym for it. CEM is the attempt by one person to influence the thoughts and feelings of another in an underhand way that is undetected by the person being manipulated. So the first.

CEM tactic that we have is love bombing. And again, this is coming directly from the text. Love bombing is a technique typically used by emotional manipulators at the start of their interaction with a victim. It involves the intense, sudden, and forceful display of positive feelings toward a victim. This may seem counterintuitive at first. If a person is trying to harm someone, why would they do something so positive? Because it's serving their own objectives.

So the theory behind love bombing is it creates an intense feeling of trust, affection, and compliance from a victim from their manipulator. The extent to which love bombing gets used and the people it is used on depends upon the manipulator's assessment of the situation. A victim who is lonely, desperate, and seeking support and comfort is more likely to be love bombed more intensely and overtly as a manipulator feels they will be receptive to it.

Similarly, a more grounded victim will require a less intense and more subtle outslide of positivity. So love bombing is when you first meet somebody, y'all are first in a relationship or your first friends or you're a new person at the job or whatever, whatever kind of relationship you have with this person, they are just showering you.

with all of this love and affection because who doesn't want to be loved who doesn't want to be complimented who doesn't want to be embraced it at all levels So love bonding is the very first step of manipulation and I think this is kind of similar to what people call the honeymoon phase in relationships when you're first with someone and they just seem like perfect and sunshine and like we're so mates like this is great and they do everything right they compliment me

They give me so much physical attention. They know my love language. They buy me gifts. They are just giving me everything that I need. This is not always. a sign that manipulation is coming but this is always the first sign like manipulators aren't going to just start by outright manipulating you because they don't have that rapport with you yet the rapport gets built

by the love bombing because you have to trust me first. You have to feel all this positive energy from me first before I start manipulating you. So it was always the first sign. But you don't want to think just because someone is quote unquote love bombing you that they're about to manipulate you, which is why it's very subjective in regards to whatever situation you're in.

So the second CEM tactic is reinforcement. So intermittent positive reinforcement is a technique that often follows the bombing chronic. chronologically, and it is a way of controlling a victim without them realizing that it's occurring. So the next step after love bombing is often positive reinforcement. And this is a switch of behavior in which the manipulator no longer displays this relentless, unconditional positivity towards their victim.

manipulator withholds any positivity whatsoever until a time when the victim is performing a desired behavior. So at first they were showering you with all of this love and all of this attention. So now they've done enough lump love bombing and they have you exactly where they want you. Right. So now they're going to take it all away.

So when you're getting this love bombing taken away from you, it's a form of psychological manipulation because now they're going to use all of this positive attention that you've been getting against you. So back to the book. So says, for example, if the manipulator wants the victim to call them frequently, the manipulator will only show a positive response when this happens.

The victim will be unaware that the positive attention is being used strategically against them, but they will subconsciously comply with the wishes of the manipulator to experience the good feelings that they have to offer. So it's such an unconscious thing because we'll do it without even recognizing it because we had all of these great feelings in the beginning and now we don't have it anymore. And now we're unconsciously looking for ways to get that back.

So the unpredictability causes a deep subconscious craving for positive attention on behalf of the victim without the victim ever having conscious knowledge of what's happening. The victim will then begin to chase a good reaction from the manipulator by any means possible. The manipulator has their victim behaving in a certain way. the victim will have no awareness whatsoever of what they are doing or why they are doing it.

And so again, just to recap, it'll always start off with the love bombing and the showering with love and attention and affection. And then they will suddenly take that away from you and make you work for it. That is a form of psychological manipulation and exploitation. Because they've loved bond with you for so long, now you are more vulnerable with them. Now you trust them. Now you believe that this is the kind of person that they really are.

And so when they aren't giving you all of the love bombing anymore, you're going to automatically associate that with you've done something wrong. Because this has to be who they are because it's what they've displayed for so long. And that's how manipulators get us to question ourselves and how they get us to blame ourselves. So with questioning ourselves, that goes into the third CEM tactic, which is reality denial, in which a lot of people call gaslighting, including myself.

So reality denial refers to a range of CEM techniques that all have the same purpose, destroying a victim's sanity to serve the manipulator's own selfish aims.

So one of the main principles underpinning reality denial is the graduality Manipulators are unlikely to instantly aim for the total destruction destruction of a victim's sanity as such an outcome is almost impossible to achieve without being detected so manipulators always will use um tactics that will go undetected to someone who was not trained to see the red flags who's not educated enough to see the red flags and the things that they're doing

So instead, skilled manipulators tend to take the slowly but surely approach. This involves the gradual erosion of a person's sanity until their trust in their own facilities. is standing upon the flimsiest of foundations. So how does a covert manipulator begin the process of eroding a victim's sanity?

It often starts with a small-scale undermining of a victim's confidence in their own memory. The manipulator will engineer various situations in which a victim is left questioning their own recollection of events. So let's say, for example, you are out with your partner and you see them like flirting with somebody, like visibly flirting with somebody.

and y'all get in the car and you talk about it like that that didn't even happen i i never did any of that you didn't see me talking to anybody and you're like like but yes i did though like i know i'm not crazy and they're so good at convincing you that it didn't happen that you are really sitting there like am i tripping like did it like maybe it didn't happen like they sound really serious like maybe

Maybe I'm just tripping or I saw things the wrong way. So this will happen with small scale events in the beginning. So the manipulator to Kent will get you accustomed to questioning your own thoughts. So says the manipulator will always ensure that their own portrayal of what happened is the one that ends up seeming the most credible. So manipulators also have a.

a tactic of making themselves feel a lot bigger than their victim. So if you're in an abusive relationship with someone who is emotionally manipulating you, they're always going to make you feel small. And the smaller you feel, the more credible they become.

Because now they seem like the person that knows everything. They seem like the one that has the best recollection of memories. But in hindsight, they're really just gaslighting you or denying reality of what really happened to make you question yourself. So the process of mind and confidence erosion serves two covertly manipulative purposes simultaneously. First, it reduces the victim's trust in their own powers of recall and understanding. Second,

This trust is transferred onto the manipulator instead. It is important to know that this will never seem like a big deal at first. The manipulator will simply come across as a person with a slightly better memory.

The victim will even be thankful that they have someone whose recollection they can rely on. Over time, the covert emotional manipulator will increase the severity of these events. of the events that they make the victim question. What starts as seemingly harmless and insignificant will be amplified into a victim losing all confidence in their own cognitive powers.

So this can be so strong and so impactful that you lose all confidence in your ability to think for yourself. You lose all confidence in your ability to make decisions for yourself because you have someone that has convinced you. you that you do not know anything and that you cannot recall anything and that everything you recall and everything that you think is wrong The most insidious element of this process is the victim's tendency to blame their own mind for the loss of ability.

Skilled manipulators will also be the ones pulling the strings, but never ever letting the victim become aware of what is taking place. So a skilled manipulator, and I have dealt with one before. Um, which is why I was so interested in this topic because if, if I hadn't known these signs, I would have been like, you are a sociopath. Like you're literally manipulating me right now, but I had no idea.

I had no idea. And so many people don't know that they're being manipulated at such a large scale. And you start to blame yourself. it just goes so undetected to you because you've been through this love bombing and then you've been through this reinforcement and you have this person who seems so trustworthy incredible to you that the only reason that things could be going wrong is because of me And that's exactly how manipulators get you to question and deny your own reality.

Now, before I get into the mind control tactics, I did want to talk a little bit about the law of state transference, even though this is something that is under the dark persuasion section, which I'm not going to be talking about. I think it's still a really important topic for people.

So if someone is trying to carry out persuasion and they are aware of the law of state transference, there is a particular technique that they can use to influence the level of control they hold over their target. the technique is as follows. Initially the influencer will force their own state to match the natural state of their target.

If the target is sad and talking slowly, the influencer will force their own state into the same format. By doing so, they create a rapport on a deep, subconscious level with their target. So for someone to manipulate you or to persuade you to do something, they will meet.

your they will match your energy so they will if you are happy and you're excited they're going to be happy and excited if you're in a mellow move they're going to be in a mellow move and this is tapping into your subconscious and making you more of a target So after a quote unquote state match has been carried out, the influencer will begin to subtly alter their own state to assess how much compliance they can get from their victim.

For example, the persuader may slightly speed up their tone of voice to judge whether their victim will match their own pace. If the victim shows signs of compliance, then this is a clear indication that the influencer has reached the hook point. Once the hook point has been reached, the influencer will change their own state to the one they wish their victim to have. This could be a happy and positive or angry and indigent.

depending upon which state will best serve the influencer's aim at the time. This technique shows the impact of subconscious cues on the success or failure of any given persuasion. So state matches. So it's basically like somebody will match your energy. Once they match your energy so much, you're going to subconsciously match theirs. So I know we all have or had someone in our life.

where when they come around if they're sad and they're down and i wasn't even in a sad mood before and i was having a great day but they just came over and they like sad It's going to make me sad, too. And so now we're matching each other's energy and you're tapping into my subconscious and making me and creating a state match. And so that's how people manipulate you.

because they know how to now i know how to control your emotions because now i know that if i want you to be in a happy mood i know how to turn that on because i know that you're going to match my energy every time i come around because i unconsciously could um conditions you to do so so the last two undetected mind control techniques are through image and sound and with image um i just want to give the example of us

voluntarily watching a scary movie. So you decide to watch a scary movie. You know that it's a movie. You know that it's not real. However, when you watch this movie, you still get scared. You still jump. You still scream. Your mind and your body still has reactions to these things, even though you volunteered. to watch it. So when we experience things and when we see things that we didn't necessarily volunteer to see, our minds and our bodies are still going to react to that thing.

So the book says that traditionally media production was in the hands of companies and institutions. These manipulative entities were able to pioneer the use of visual subliminal mind control. Examples. Includes split second pictures of a product or a person inserted into a seemingly innocent movie. Such split second images with the person perceives as.

as nothing more than a flash of light are able to take powerful control of a person's emotions and may have been used as recently as 21st century presidential elections. So in reality, everything that we watch, everything that we see is some. form of entertainment is really brainwashing and controlling us. There's a universal law that says that you cannot enslave an entire race of people without letting them know.

so what happens is all of these things get put into entertainment it gets put in children's movies and cartoons and things that are supposed to be fiction and just imaginative and creative when really it's a direct representation of things that are going on around us right under our noses but it's put in entertainment so we are already desensitized to it and we've already seen these things so when they manifest itself in our physical reality

It's not truly a shocker because we've already seen it. We've seen it in movies. We've seen flashes of these things that we haven't even we haven't even noticed. We haven't realized. So I'm just going to recommend a couple of shows. Black Lightning on Netflix, Midnight Gospel on Netflix, Above Majestic on Hulu, and They Live on Starz. Those are just some really good things to watch and look for.

the symbolism and the representation of the world that we really live in. And so we really have to watch what we watch. From the news to these reality shows and movies and music videos. When you turn the TV on, what are the shows called? It's called a program. Because these shows are programming us to be desensitized to certain things. It's programming us to view the world in a certain way. Propaganda is programming us.

It's programming our mindsets. It's programming our expectations and our view of the world and how we move in the world. Everything that we watch has a purpose. Nothing is strictly for entertainment. Nothing is strictly for entertainment. Everything that's given to us has some kind of. mission or some kind of goal behind it. If you really watch music videos and the symbolism that's in it and the things that people say in these songs.

There's so much brainwashing and mind control going on that is going so undetected by us because it's something that we have been susceptible to from birth. There's kids one and two years old that know how to work smartphones and know how to get on YouTube and watch music videos. We're being programmed so early. There's so many things that's being put in our entertainment.

I'm not going to go too deep into it because it gets really, really deep, but I am going to go into that on a different episode. But we should just all be very conscious of the things that we use as a form of entertainment. Alright, so my last undetected mind control tactic is sound. So it says sound is another way in which a person is vulnerable to undetected mind control. Both experiments and personal experience will confirm this for you.

Have you ever had a song stuck in your head? How easy was it to get rid of? The sound had a powerful influence over you even though you knew it was present. The power of audio manipulation is even greater when it is undetected. Experiments have shown that if restaurant customers are exposed to music from a particular region, they are more likely to order wine from that country.

When questioned, they had no idea that something as simple as sound has steered their decision. One famous example of media mind control using sound is hiding words of phrases in songs and other media containing a soundtrack. There have been lawsuits aiming to prove that musicians hide occult references in their work and to ban them from doing so. This has also happened with more serious impact beyond the world of entertainment media. And so I've actually had, I do this quite often.

where I go about a week or two without listening to music because I have this thing where songs get stuck in my head for so long. And it's crazy because I literally told somebody like, I feel like this music is brainwashing me. Because it just would not get out of my head. Like I will wake up with songs in my head and it just would not go away. And I'm like, how do I get this to stop? Like, I really feel like this is controlling my brain and it's brainwashed me in a sense.

everything that we intake everything that we look at everything that we listen to has some kind of control over us everything that we eat literally everything that we do which is why we have to be very particular about what we let.

into our energy and into our space because this stuff has so much impact over us and it lowers our vibration so much and it brainwashes us so much but it goes so undetected because it's such the norm music is great music helps people through things you know but it can be a real detriment to people in the same breath

So governments have sometimes used audio mind control as a form of brainwashing. For example, in North Korea, people are forced to listen to patriotic songs at regular intervals. These embed themselves deep inside a person's mind. mentality and affect an unseen influence. For a less extreme example, think of advertising jingles. If a person is prompted by the sound of a famous jingle like the McDonald's I'm Lovin' It melody, the person usually repeats the advertising message on autopilot.

Audio undetected mind control can also be used by individual manipulators. There is a range of interpersonal influence tactics using auditory mind control of varying types. Even if you know the tactics, it is difficult to recognize them being executed. This is because of their stealthy, underhand nature.

So that's all I have for you all today. Again, that was Dark Psychology 101 by Michael Pace. It's definitely a recommended read. It has so much good information that we can use in our day-to-day lives. Again, this is a space where we use critical thinking to free our minds from the conformity and norms of the world. And I really hope you all learned something from this episode today. This is Out The Box Podcast. Until next time.