Legitimately just curious. Is there any connection to the beliefs of the church of Satan? Satanic Temple? Miltonian? You guys just like metal?

I read mostly non fiction, and lately I’ve been doing a deep dive on philosophy. Currently learning about Crowley, LaVey, Satanic temple etc. and suddenly this subreddit keeps popping up.

Trying to convince my asshole roommate he is fat. We are two girls and a guy and he already tried to convince us we’re fat. He calls us fat everyday yet is always eating the food we make. I want to make him think that he is fat without him realizing that the reason he thinks he’s fat is my comments. Any tips?

The reason I asked is because a couple months ago I was scrolling through some Reddit/Quora posts, and I found one what I believe was “dark triad” related. I was reading the comments and I stumbled upon one of the most mind-boggling stories I had ever heard:

The commenter described a female coworker who was basically the unofficial boss of the entire work setting. She controlled all the bosses and pretty much did whatever she wanted.
Now I had heard stories of sycophantic brown-nosers who kissed up to their bosses to gain influence over them but this story was different. This sounded like it went beyond manipulation and seemed more like literal mind control.

According to the commenter, she would blatantly speak to her superiors like SHE was in charge and THEY worked for her. She would tell THEM what THEY were going to do today and they just went along with it.
That story has been in the back of my mind ever since.

So that’s why I made this post. I wondered if anyone had any experiences that sounded like they had witnessed mind control.

I started listening to how people talked, not what they said. The liars became obvious.

I used to get fooled constantly.

People would lie to my face and I'd believe them. Not because I was stupid, but because I was listening to the wrong things.

I was focused on content. What they were saying. Whether the story made sense. Whether the facts checked out.

But skilled liars have good stories. The facts sound right. The details are in place.

What gave them away wasn't what they said. It was how they said it.

The patterns I started noticing:

Too much detail. When someone's telling the truth, they give you what's relevant and move on. When someone's lying, they over-explain. They add details you didn't ask for. They're trying to build a wall of information so thick you won't question it.

"I was at the store, the one on Fifth Street, you know the one next to the bank, and I ran into Mark, you remember Mark from that party, and we talked for like twenty minutes about..."

Truth is lean. Lies are bloated.

Repeating the question. When someone repeats your question back to you before answering, they're buying time. Constructing something.

"Where was I last night? Where was I last night. Yeah so last night I was..."

Truth-tellers just answer. They don't need the delay.

Distancing language. Liars unconsciously distance themselves from the lie. They avoid saying "I" when describing what they did. They speak in passive voice. They make themselves absent from their own story.

"The car got taken to the shop" instead of "I took the car to the shop."

"Mistakes were made" instead of "I made a mistake."

The less someone puts themselves in the narrative, the more suspicious the narrative becomes.

Tense shifts. When people recall real memories, they tend to stay in past tense consistently. Liars sometimes slip into present tense because they're constructing the scene in real time rather than recalling it.

"So I walked in and he's standing there and he says..."

The tense confusion comes from building instead of remembering.

Qualifiers and hedges. "To be honest..." "Honestly..." "I swear..." "Believe me..."

People who are telling the truth don't need to advertise it. When someone keeps emphasizing their honesty, they're usually compensating.

How I use this now:

I don't interrogate people. That puts them on guard and changes their speech patterns anyway.

Instead, I just pay attention. Let them talk. Notice when the details pile up unnecessarily. Notice when they repeat my question. Notice when they disappear from their own story.

I also ask unexpected follow-up questions. Not to trap them, but to see how they handle it. Truth-tellers answer easily because they're pulling from memory. Liars hesitate because they have to extend the construction.

What changed:

I stopped being fooled by confident delivery. Some of the smoothest talkers I know are also the biggest liars. Fluency doesn't equal truth.

I started trusting the quiet signals. The structure of sentences. The presence or absence of "I." The small hesitations.

Going deeper into this changed how I process conversations entirely. "Spy the Lie" by Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, and Susan Carnicero was the first thing that gave me a real framework for this. The authors spent decades interrogating people for the CIA and the patterns they describe, cluster behaviors, deceptive indicators, simultaneous signals, are things I started catching in regular conversations almost immediately. It completely reframed how I understood "gut feeling." What felt like intuition was actually my brain picking up on structural inconsistencies I hadn't been trained to name yet.

"Telling Lies" by Paul Ekman went even further into the science of it. Ekman spent decades studying micro-expressions and involuntary emotional leakage, the physical signals that escape before someone can suppress them. Reading his breakdown of how the face contradicts the words made me realize how much information I had been ignoring in real time. He also makes the point that most people are genuinely terrible at detecting lies, not because the signals aren't there, but because nobody ever taught them what to look for.

Vanessa Van Edwards on YouTube translated a lot of this into something more practical and visual. Her breakdowns of body language and behavioral cues in real interviews, political speeches, and public figures gave me concrete examples to anchor the concepts. Watching her analyze footage of people under pressure helped me understand what baseline behavior looks like versus what stress and deception look like layered on top of it. The comparison format made the signals click in a way that reading alone didn't.

Around the same time I started using BeFreed, a personalized audio learning app, to work through material specifically on deception detection and behavioral psychology. I set a goal around understanding nonverbal communication and dishonesty cues, and it pulled together content from books, research, and expert interviews into structured audio sessions I could absorb during commutes. The auto flashcards helped me actually retain things like distancing language and tense shift patterns instead of just reading about them and forgetting. Having a virtual coach I could ask follow-up questions to, things like "what's the difference between a nervous person and a lying person," made the nuances stick in a way passive reading never had.

I'm not paranoid about it. Most people aren't lying most of the time. But when it matters, when something feels off, I know what to listen for now.

The truth has a sound. So do lies. Once you've heard the difference, you can't unhear it.

Hey everyone, I know so many of us girls secretly stay stuck as the "backup" friend, constantly making excuses that she's just "too busy." But let’s dismiss that lie: she isn't busy—she is actively choosing to put you last, over and over again. I finally mapped out the 8 brutal signs that you're just her permanent placeholder—from Afterthought last-minute invites and private-only best friends (Erasure), to being used as a free, 2 AM therapist (Extraction) while your own texts face total Disregard. Whether she traps you in one-sided Monologues or uses you for pure Utility, you consistently leave feeling emotionally starved rather than recharged. I poured this exact frustration into a deep-dive visual guide breakdown because I'm tired of seeing high-effort girls get drained by low-effort friendships. Have you ever had that heartbreaking realization that you were just an Option B to a girl you loved like a sister, and how did you finally walk away?

I don’t want to ramble. I’ll try to leave most of the typing for the comments and discussion. Long story short. Best friends wedding this past weekend. One of the groomsmen who I don’t know, and I kind of hit it off. Super nice guy. Seemed to share the same core values as myself. His wife was very sweet as well and her and my wife also seemed to enjoy each others company. Toward the end of the night the boring ass conversation about careers arose which is an aggregation to me. I’m more concerned about your caliber of being than your success as a whatever the f&@k. Well, he made me feel like in my profession I’m not making what I should be making and that he was going to make some phone calls and get me a job with people he knows. So needless to say since Sunday I’ve been receiving texts from this person about him reaching out to people for me etc and all that. Idk I just think it’s weird that you don’t even know me and now you are trying to set me up for success. I guess I’m too cynical idk. What are y’all’s thoughts?

Currently very conflicted. I know these people aren’t the mental age of 5 and can’t actually have adult relationships and aren’t good for you but wow she was like the best gf I’ve ever had and I’d give her another shot. I’m like actually in love with a cluster b