HOW TO ANALYZE PEOPLE

Dark psychology secrets to read body language and avoid covert

manipulation. Influence anyone to do what you want using mind control,
hypnotism and brainwashing techniques
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 Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: What Is Dark Psychology?
The Psychological Approach to Dark Psychology
An Example of Mind Control Using Dark Psychology
The Aspects of Dark Psychology and Mind Control
Chapter 2: A Brief History of Dark Psychology
Ritualized Behaviors in Human Society
History of the Study of Dark Psychology
Famous Manipulators throughout History
Chapter 3: Basics of Manipulation
Psychological Manipulation
Why People Manipulate Others
Typical Characteristics of a Manipulator
Chapter 4: Basics of Persuasion
How to Influence People
How You Can Condition Others (And Be Conditioned Too)
Chapter 5: Neuro-linguistic Programming
NLP: What Is It?
History of NLP
The Techniques of NLP
Chapter 6: How to Analyze People
Non-verbal Communication
Differentiating Fake from Real Emotion
Tips to Identify A Liar
Chapter 7: How to Read Body Language
Chapter 8: 10 Tips to Defend Yourself from Manipulation
Chapter 9: 10 Tips to Guard Yourself from Mind Control
Frequently Asked Questions
Conclusion

Introduction

Dark psychology refers to various techniques of mind control, coercion, and manipulation. It is
regarded by some as a human consciousness concept that can be utilized to manipulate and control
others for devious, malicious, or narcissistic purposes. Some consider it to be an art form that has
been used by human beings for thousands of years, even before recorded history. The individuals in
this latter group regard this skill set as one that falls within the normal range of human behavior and
which human beings would derive benefit from learning about.

Of course, to the person manipulated dark psychology is not so commonplace. Most people who are
manipulated by a narcissist or another person practicing the arts of dark psychology are unaware that
they are being preyed upon. This is really the key to understanding dark psychology: recognizing that
the persons targeted are prey whose interests and well-being are regarded as secondary to those of
the predator(s). Whether dark psychology represents a normal type of human behavior is a subject that
must be explored further as this is the foundation that many practitioners of this dark art rely on to
advocate for their practices.

The truth is, even simple persuasion and coercion fall under the umbrella of dark psychology. These
are the basic tools that practitioners use in their art for dramatic effect. One of the first things readers
will notice is that semantics quickly become an issue in a review of this subject. Dark psychology
practitioners engage in persuasion, which some may regard as being perhaps not so dangerous or ill-
intentioned as manipulation, but is there really a difference? Indeed, most definitions of manipulation
leave the distinction between this term and persuasion in murky waters.

HOW TO ANALYZE PEOPLE: dark psychology secrets to read body language and avoid covert
manipulation is designed to educate the reader about all aspects of the dark psychological art.
Although the term dark psychology may be of recent date, the practices that fall within the scope of
this concept include those that have been practiced since the beginning of human society. Even things
like hypnosis or mesmerism are considered weapons of dark psychology because they represent tools
that practitioners use to infiltrate the minds of their targets and potentially for purposes of mind
control. As the reader will see in the discussion of neuro-linguistic programming, hypnosis can be
used by a skilled operator to dramatic effect.

What makes dark psychology so dangerous (and so important to study) is the reality that these tricks
tap into natural human tendencies for the suggestion, groupthink, emotional synergy, and other forms of
imprinting that can easily be manipulated for someone who knows what they are doing. Indeed, some
people are so adept at tapping into native human weaknesses that they perhaps do not know that their
special brand of manipulation has a name and is actively studied by others hoping to learn the tricks
of the trade.

Dark psychology is studied both by those who have an interest in practicing its arts for their own
purposes and by those who hope to defend themselves from victimhood. Although there has been a
tendency to shy away from constructs of victimization in order to show the extent to which human
beings have agency in their own lives and in their interactions with others, the goal of dark
psychological art is to prey on those weaker in its practices so these individuals really are victims,
rhetoric or not.

What this means for the reader is that you need to understand dark psychology even if you have no
intention of using its weapons against others. The harsh reality is that dark psychological tactics are
more common now than ever before as human beings become more interconnected via television, the
internet, IoT, and even globalization and explosive population growth. Perhaps you might like to
imagine a world where everyone is kind to one another and there are no narcissists, liars, and
manipulators, but that world does not exist. It has never existed.

Or perhaps you are on the other end of the spectrum. You have been manipulated and you desire to
learn more about dark psychology in order to fight back. Although HOW TO ANALYZE PEOPLE:
dark psychology secrets to read body language and avoid covert manipulation is not written from
the standpoint of arming the manipulator with a weapon-packed arsenal, this book does go into detail
on the various tools of manipulation, persuasion, neuro-linguistic programming, and dark
psychological arts. This allows targets of dark psychology to recognize when they are being preyed
upon. You may find yourself equipped to fight back in your own way.

HOW TO ANALYZE PEOPLE: dark psychology secrets to read body language and avoid covert
manipulation approaches the subject from the standpoint of education. This is a topic that is
presented objectively, with a review of the available data on the subjects contained herein. This book
will approach dark psychology from both a theoretical understanding of the concepts that motivate
this dark art and from a pragmatic standpoint: helping victims to recognize when they are being
targeted in the form of recommendations and tips.

The first step in defending yourself from the dark psychological arts is understanding what they are.
This is not as straightforward an endeavor as it may seem considering the degree to which some
practitioners attempt to conceal their tactics and their motivation making information occasionally
hard to find on this subject. Indeed, the more advanced (and dangerous) tactics are not readily found
on the internet or in most dark psychology manuals because of a desire to keep the tools of the trade
hidden, much as a magician hides the secrets to his tricks. That being so, the first chapter of HOW TO
ANALYZE PEOPLE: dark psychology secrets to read body language and avoid covert manipulation
will provide the data definitions that you need to understand in order to have a solid approach to this
subject.

The arts that comprise dark psychology are nothing new. From scrolls found in Ancient Egyptian
tombs to cuneiform tablets from Babylon and other regions of Mesopotamia, historians are well
aware that what we would today call dark psychology is a form of magic that has been around
probably as long as there have been human beings. If people had something that they wanted then they
were willing to use manipulation, persuasion, hypnosis, or other techniques to get it. In the second
chapter, the history of dark psychology as an art will be reviewed. This includes a survey of some of
the more fascinating minds that have delved into its waters, men like Rasputin who perhaps practiced
NLP before there was a thing called NLP.

Manipulation is the most basic form of dark psychology as it represents a practice that some men and
women do willingly, others do inadvertently, and yet others practice so they can have it available
when they need it. Manipulation is a term loaded with connotations, and the first step to addressing it
is understanding what it is. In the third chapter, manipulation as a psychological tool will be
explored, the question of why people manipulate will be answered, and a review of the major
characteristics of the manipulator will be examined.

Persuasion is perhaps the gateway drug of dark psychology. Persuasion is a tactic that most people do
without assigning any malign motivation to their actions. Truth is, a persuasion is really a nice form of
manipulation, without the negative connotations of the latter term. As it is not possible for this book to
rework the English language to make a clear distinction between manipulation and persuasion, it will
instead take the usual approach: viewing persuasion as something usually benign but with the
potential of being more serious. In chapter four, the basics of persuasion will be reviewed (including
how you too can influence others if you so choose) and it will be explained how you can be
conditioned by other people (or condition others yourself).

Neuro-linguistic programming is a field that has increased in popularity as psychologists, hypnotists,

public speakers, and others have learned the skills that men and women can use to induce mind
control. Neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP, recognizes the link between our words, our thoughts,
and our behaviors. Our words and thoughts serve as powerful motivators not only of our actions but
of our outcomes. In the fifth chapter, we will review the history, main components, and different
techniques of NLP.

Dark psychology does not have to be so dark. The arts of this school of practices can be used to do
things as simple as analyzing people to determine what their emotions are. In the field of emotional
intelligence, emotional accuracy is considered among the most important skills. This is the skill that
allows you to accurately determine what another person’s emotion is, something which is easy to take
for granted. Skills of analyzing people are important to defend yourself from becoming another
person’s psychological prey. How will you protect yourself if you cannot pick up on non-verbal cues,
recognize a liar, and distinguish real from false emotion? All of this and more will be explored in the
sixth chapter.

Human beings are social creatures, which means that we evolved to be around one another and we
have the capacity to read one another without speech. This is perhaps a legacy of our primate origin,
although it is present in other animal species, as well. We use body language as a form of non-verbal
communication. This type of “talking” can accentuate speech or it can be a standalone means used to
get a point across. Even a dog can recognize when a person is angry or happy based on their body
language so it is about time that you developed some basic skills in this area too. Tips on how to read
body language will be explored in the seventh chapter.

If you are dealing with someone using the arts of dark psychology, or you just want to be prepared for
all the narcissists and manipulators that are swimming around out there then you need to be equipped
with an arsenal of recommendations that will come in handy in the interactions that you have. One of
the pitfalls of being human is that it is natural for us to become linked as people in an emotional and
psychological sense. We feed off of the emotions of others, and part of this pattern of thought and
behavior has to do with hormones. Of course, this is an area that science still has a lot of discovery to
clarify, but our tendency as people to be emotionally imprinted by others renders us very vulnerable
to manipulation and mind control.

Naturally, you cannot rewrite your DNA code to prevent you from being susceptible to manipulation,
but you can learn some tips to guard against the tactics that others are likely to use against you. In the
eighth chapter, you will learn the ten most powerful tips that any man or woman can use to defend
themselves from manipulation. As we as people may occasionally find that it is too late to defend as
we have already been manipulated, we also need to learn the tools necessary to break free. In chapter
nine, ten powerful tools of releasing the hold of the manipulator or narcissist will be revealed.

Dark psychology is an art that weaves seamlessly into the natural workings of the human mind. Human
beings are capable of behaving almost like a single organism: syncing up in ways so nuanced that
many people live and die without ever really realizing that they never had free will. If you are like
most people, you have a desire for some free will in your life, even if you do recognize the value of
being interconnected. Dark psychology can deprive you of your free will, but not if your defenses are
up. It all begins with understanding how these artists work, and that begins with educating yourself on
the subject.
Chapter 1: What Is Dark Psychology?

Human behavior can be approached from the standpoint of behavior being purposeful or behavior is
the result of imprinting or programming. This is an important idea in psychology because it analyzes
why human beings do the things that they do. Are we behaving out of a specific motivation to achieve
a goal that we are conscious of, or do we behave out of motivations that are unconscious and of
which we do not exercise control? What is interesting about the field of dark psychology is that it
represents the meeting point of purposive behavior and behaviors that are not a result of individual
motivation.

What this means is that the practitioner of the arts of dark psychology may be acting out of a conscious
motivation to do harm or to prey on another person while the victim is susceptible because their own
behavior is not entirely purposeful: they are vulnerable to imprinting and external control. On the
other hand, the argument can be made that the predator to behaves out of motivations that are not
completely conscious. Living in the individualistic world that characterizes the modern West it may
be hard for us to understand how acts that are harmful to others and malicious can be unconscious, but
this is an important concept in psychology and it is important to address it as sort of a preamble to
dark psychology.

It has been argued that all human beings possess the capacity to behave in dark or malicious ways.
Occasionally the term maleficent is used to indicate those behaviors whose motivations are malicious
and of whom the doer knows that they are malicious. Of course, the issue with dark psychology comes
when the question is posed whether people who give in to these dark motivations do it out of a free
will or if they act out of an unconscious tendency that represents a well of human behaviors that many
choose to ignore.

The question of whether human beings are inherently good or perhaps not so good is one that has been
pondered for centuries, although it perhaps as a particular area of focus in the Age of Reason that
reached its climax in the late 18th century. Writers like Rousseau, Diderot, Goethe, and Voltaire
pondered this idea of the goodness of man, and the conclusions that they reached were naturally an
extension of their own observations and experiences.

A common theme in these meanderings was a tendency to approach the issue of Man’s goodness not
from the standpoint of religious doctrine, but from the approach of critical observation and hypothesis
forming. This sort of approach represented a divergence from the prior scholarly debate on the
subject because society, even in the 18th century, still approached scientific study from the views of
the established churches in European countries at the time. Indeed, in many cases anatomical studies
of the human body for scientific pursuit purposes were not allowed, leading to an active black market
for body snatching.

What Voltaire and others had to do (and what writers on the subject today also do) is an attempt to
approach the issue of human motivation and human goodness without the baggage of doctrines that
perhaps attempt to color human beings as better than they are. The idea here is not to suggest that at
any particular religion is incorrect in its assertion that human beings are good and bad, but to allow
the subject to be approached objectively without being influenced by ideas that may actually be
dysfunctional for people attempting to navigate through the subject.

Indeed, the manipulator and the liar rely on the gullibility and “goodness” of their victim to allow
their lies and their manipulative arts to have a dramatic effect. Voltaire wrote Candide and other
works because he did not believe that the teachings of the established church adequately prepared the
sensitive soul from the pitfalls that they would face in the world. He was not alone in this
presumption. The much-maligned Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade, better known as the Marquis
de Sade, also believed that human beings behaved with dark motivations and his own writings
suggested that people would benefit from behaving more benignly towards one another.

It may seem strange to mention de Sade in the context of philosophers whose goal was to better
prepare people to handle the dangers of the world, but he came from a period where political
philosophers and writers were questioning established views in ways that could only be considered
transgressive today. Although the Marquis de Sade gave his name to sadism in the English language
because his writings were believed to indicate an interest in this practice, an objective review of his
work suggests that his approach to education of men and women for the world was not too different
from that of Voltaire, who lived and was writing around the same time.

Indeed, it is important to mention these men in the context of dark psychology because they understood
how deficits in education can make men and women gravitate to those who might manipulate them.
These men were idealists in their own way, although of a different make than the idealists of the West
today. It can be argued that the approach to life and behavior in the modern West is characterized by
the hypocrisy that is harmful to the sensitive souls that have the misfortune to be borne into it. As
divergent as their reputations may be, both Voltaire and de Sade believed that better education could
remedy the problem of men and women who were sensitive and who met unfortunate ends because
they were not adequately prepared.

Although the term dark psychology is of relatively recent origin, the writings of the French
philosophers of the 18th century suggest that they understood that human beings were capable of being
motivated by dark or maleficent impulses, whether as a group or as individuals. Indeed, in Justine,
the Marquis de Sade suggests that human beings are primarily motivated by impulses that would at
best be described as narcissistic today. Although this may seem ironic to those who have not read de
Sade’s writings, it, in fact, represents taking Voltaire’s occasionally conservative musings on the
subject one step further.
It is important to mention these writers because there has been sort of a societal backslide since the
Age of Reason which has produced ample prey for the predator using dark psychological arts. We do
not mean a technological step backward, but a philosophical one in which the beliefs of common
people are being influenced by doctrines again in ways that the philosophers of the Age of Reason
were reveling again. Doctrine does not have to be bad. In equipping yourself for defense against dark
psychological tactics you are learning a doctrine of sorts and using it to your benefit. The idea here is
that the particular doctrines of today rather than better preparing us for a world fraught with danger
(perhaps more danger now than there was even in 1770s France) render us more likely to be prey.

The Psychological Approach to Dark Psychology

The history of dark psychology will be described in the next chapter, but it is important to get a sense
of where the psychological interpretation of this subject comes from. As was touched on earlier in
this chapter, an important psychological concept to understand here is the idea of motivation and
whether human motivation is primarily individualistic or if it is group-based and unconscious.
Perhaps there are elements of both. Indeed, even casual observation suggests that human beings
occasionally act in unpredictable, highly individualistic ways while at other times they appear to be
tribalistic and lemmings.

Naturally, individual variations in people will mean that generalizations about human behavior are
both hard to make and inaccurate. Some psychologists and social scientists attempt to create a picture
of human behavior that falls within a narrow realm of normal, but the reality is that human behavior
often falls on a spectrum. This spectrum of human behavior often flies in the face of religious or other
conventions that establish behavior as being something that is simple, staid, and clearly divided into
right or wrong.

Most people have a sense of right and wrong that guides their behavior, but it is important to
understand that a dogmatic approach to life that does not adequately recognize how humans behave
naturally will create a situation where people fall easy prey to others. For example, assuming that
human beings are inherently good inclines people to be trusting of those who may lie to them,
manipulate them, or have other intentions to harm them. Voltaire understood that humans often are
motivated to do harm to others, and not as examples of “bad” people. His observations and the
observations of others is that “badness” is not merely the preserve of bad or evil people.

Why do human beings do bad things to each other? Well, this is a question that psychologists,
philosophers, and others have been attempting to figure out for hundreds of years. It appears that
human beings have a capacity to act in a primal way that inclines them to do malign things that they
may not due if they were behaving individualistically. This flies in the place of the school of
individual psychology that was established by Alfred Adler, a Viennese medical doctor in the 19th
century.

Dr. Adler was a contemporary of a more famous Viennese: Sigmund Freud. The climate of Vienna
(and of Europe) at the time provided ample fodder for psychiatrists like Adler to make observations
and create hypotheses based on their own approaches to human behavior. Although Freud is certainly
the more famous name today, it has been argued that Adler has influence psychology more deeply.
Indeed, his imprint on the study of dark psychology can still be felt today.

Individual psychology, as introduced by Adler, posits that humans are motivated by individualistic
approaches to the world. These individual approaches and experiences may be motivated by
imprinted experiences in early life, including the inferiority complex that Alder was particularly
interested in, but they are different from the motivations that were important in the Freudian school of
psychoanalysis. Freud believed that human beings were motivated by sex and libido, dividing the
human psyche into the id, ego, and superego. Adler distanced himself from these notions to create a
more individualistic approach to human behavior.

Adler’s approach sees human behavior as being purposive. Human beings are motivated to act based
on motivations that are purposeful or intentional. Of course, the issue becomes the extent to which
imprinted behaviors in early life can influence behavior and therefore make actions (and their
motivations) not purposeful. Indeed, one of the arts of the dark psychological practitioner is to
program or imprint their victim in such a way as to make them easy to manipulate and control.

The practitioner of dark psychological arts can teach their victim to trust them or to follow them by
exposing them to signals or cues that instill these beliefs and feelings. For example, a common tactic
of the narcissist or another practitioner of these arts is to send mix signals of love and hate, closeness
and distance, which are designed both to instill trust in the prey and to confuse them. Human beings
have a capacity to form emotional connections with other people, which means that those who are not
on their guard can find themselves easily manipulated by someone using their desire and the innate
tendency for emotional closeness against them.

Perhaps the best way to approach Adler’s individual motivation idea is to state that human beings
behave in a purposeful way, but that those motivations can be imprinted and accessed by others for
reasons that are unconscious to the target. If you are the victim of a practitioner of dark psychological
tactics, you may find that you are behaving in a way that you are motivated to do, but you do not
realize that your motivations have been accessed or imprinted by others.

For example, a skillful manipulator may convince you to dislike or even attack someone with such
aptitude that you do not realize that you dislike of the person is not something native. A common tactic
of a manipulator or narcissist is to spread a damaging rumor about someone that they dislike, feel
threatened by, or have a desire to destroy and sit and watch with a smile as one by one they turn
others against their target. In this example, the person who has been slandered is the target, but so too
are the others who heard the rumor, believed it, and were motivated to attack a stranger who they had
only heard a story about.

This is how motivations can be both purposeful and unconscious. You may be motivated to have a
negative opinion of someone or perhaps behave in an unfriendly way towards that person based on a
rumor that you heard, but is this motivation your own? We have seen how your own motivation has
been spurred by someone else’s motivation to damage someone else. We also might say that the
motivation to attack someone that others are attacking (or to gang up on them) is actually not
purposeful as it is part of human nature. Indeed, in some religions, this type of social ill behavior that
some describe as human nature is rather animal nature. Some believe that human beings behave with
animal nature ninety or even ninety-nine percent of the time.

This is a concept that has found a place in dark psychology. It allows the man or woman educating
themselves about the dark psychological arts for purposes of defense or for other reasons to
understand human behavior in a meaningful way. It must be accepted that human beings are often
motivated to behave based on imprinted behaviors or as part of a group. In other words, human
beings may be said to have individual, purposive motivations, but that at least some of the time we
behave based on imprinting or based on the sort of synching up with others that is not fully purposive.

In some schools of dark psychological study, the argument is made that human behavior is ninety-nine
percent purposive. This allows dark psychology to adhere with individual psychology theory as
hypothesized by Alfred Adler while also recognizing that the practitioners of dark psychological arts
are able to manipulate so well because they are tapping to aspects of the human psyche that are not
truly purposive. This is the startling truth about dark psychology: mind control can be affected so well
because many men and women believe that they behave with free will when they truly do not.

An Example of Mind Control Using Dark Psychology

The last woman to be hung in the United Kingdom was a startlingly beautiful nightclub hostess named
Ruth Ellis. Her execution eventually leads to the end of the death penalty in the United Kingdom in the
1960s, and it is also an example of the destructive power of dark psychology. Of course, the man who
manipulated Ruth Ellis would not have called himself a dark psychology practitioner. He would not
have read any books on the subject or have gone to internet forums to discuss his tricks with others of
his ilk. He merely was motivated to destroy the life of someone else in a narcissistic way and he
ended up destroying Ruth in the process.

The life and story of Ruth Ellis demonstrate several important ideas about dark psychology. Ruth
lived in the early 20th century when the cult of individualism was just beginning to take its hold on the
West. But Ruth’s life course did not take the direction it did because she was heedless and
headstrong. Ruth had faced numerous challenges and manipulators were able to weave their way
seamlessly into her life. Ruth was not executed unjustly or as a case of mistaken identity. Ruth was a
confessed murderer and her sentence was perfectly legal at the time. But what the general public did
not know, but which we know now today, is that Ruth had likely been manipulated by a skillful
narcissist.

Ruth had been born Ruth Neilson in Wales in 1926. Her father was a musical performer who appears
to have been in and out of the family’s life. Finances were strained at home and this, combined with
Ruth becoming pregnant by a Canadian soldier at 17, pushed her to attempt to make her own way in
the world. Ruth would become a model and nightclub hostess, her singular looks and sociable
demeanor making her practically a natural for this line of work.

By the late 1940s, Ruth was living in London where she worked as a nude model and hostess. She
worked at numerous clubs, some of which had a well-heeled, money clientele allowing Ruth to
interact with men much outside her typical social circle in North Wales. At one of the clubs was Ruth
worked, her manager is alleged to have blackmailed the hostesses as his club into sleeping with him.
The hostesses may also have been encouraged or forced to sleep with customers, although for many
women it would have been a choice.

In 1950, Ruth married George Ellis, a divorced dentist who was nearly twenty years older than she
was. He already had two children, and it is alleged that he was an alcoholic who was abusive to
Ruth. The relationship between the two quickly soured and Ruth left her husband numerous times.
Ruth appeared in an uncredited movie role around this time and gave birth to a daughter months later.
Indeed, in Lady Godiva Rides Again Ruth was already four months pregnant. As Ruth may have been
engaged in prostitution at this time, George Ellis refused to acknowledge Ruth’s newborn daughter as
his own and Ruth moved back in with her mother.

Ruth became manager of a popular nightclub in a swank part of London in 1953. It was here that she
would meet David Blakely, the man she would later murder. He was a few years younger than her and
he belonged to the well-connected auto racing set. He was well-educated and he and Ruth hit it off.
As manager of the Little Club, Ruth had an apartment above the nightclub to allow her to perform her
club duties. David moved in with her weeks after meeting even though he was already engaged to
another woman.

Ruth and David’s relationship were doomed from the start as Ruth continued to the hostess, which
brought her into contact with celebrity admirers and other men. David would have been aware of the
sort of behaviors that Ruth was engaged in and that she met many handsome or wealthy men. Not long
after David moved in, Ruth began dating a man named Desmond Cussen. Although he may not have
been as well-educated or connected as Blakely, Cussen would have held his own attractions for Ruth.
Cussen was a former Royal Air Force pilot who was now a partner in a successful tobacco business.
Where Blakely’s expensive racing pursuits often left him broke (to the extent that he was living above
a nightclub with Ruth), Cussen was an established businessman with his own property.

Ellis moved in with Cussen though she continued to see Blakely. Indeed, David and Ruth continued to
see other people. David offered to marry Ruth, much to the disapproval of his aristocratic friends the
Findlaters, who saw Ruth as beneath him. Ruth became pregnant in 1955 but lost the pregnancy, the
second miscarriage she had had while with David. Around this time, Ruth was actively seeing
Desmond Cussen who harbored a dislike for Blakely and who taught Ruth how to fire a gun.

On April 10, 1955, Easter Sunday, Ruth took a cab to the Findlater’s residence, looking for Blakely.
She saw Blakely’s car driving up as she arrived and she paid the cab off and walked to the Magdala
Pub, an establishment a few blocks away in London. She found Blakely’s car outside and waited for
Blakely to come out. Blakely and a friend exited the Magdala at around 9:30. Ruth was standing in
news seller’s next door when he walked passed her. She called out to him twice but he ignored her.

As Blakeley attempted to enter his car, Ruth removed a .38 caliber revolver from her purse and fired
at him. Blakely began to run, as the first shot had missed, but then Ruth pursued Blakely and fired a
second shot. This shot landed and Blakely collapsed into the pavement. Ruth stood over him and fired
three additional shots into him, one of which was less than an inch from his back. She asked Blakely’s
friend if he would call the police and when they arrived, she told them that she was guilty. She would
later admit to the murder.

During the trial, Ruth stated that she had intended to kill Blakely when she shot him. She had gone to
the bar with the revolver with the intention of killing him. The jury found her guilty of the murder of
David Blakely, which carried a mandatory death sentence. Ruth’s family attempted to get a reprieve,
and a new attorney urged Ruth to reveal where she had gotten the gun. She revealed that it was
Desmond who had given her the gun as well as shooting practice. Desmond had allegedly harbored a
rivalry with and dislike for Blakely. This did not change Ruth’s fate. On July 13, Ruth Ellis was hung
for the murder of David Blakely, one of only eight women to have been executed in the preceding
thirty years though sixty had been convicted of murder.

After the murder, Desmond Cussen moved to Australia and changed his name. Whether or not Ruth
Ellis committed the crime of murder is not an issue. The question is the extent to which Ruth’s
motivation to kill was of her own making or if it had been implanted in her by a skillful manipulator.
If one examines the facts, Ruth Ellis had a history of failed, abusive relationships of which the
relationship with Blakely was the latest. She was seeing Blakely while living with Cussen and she
knew that he was seeing other women.

When Ruth was asked why she shot Blakely she reported that her actions were due to extreme
provocation, but it seems strange that she would be provoked to want to harm Blakely at this stage
when their relationship had been strained throughout its two years and she was the one living with
someone else. The truth seems to be that it was Desmond Cussen who wanted him dead and Ruth was
just the easy tool he used to get what he wanted. The key here is that Ruth, too, wanted Blakely dead,
but was this motivation purposive or did it come from somewhere else?

This is the power of dark psychology manipulation and this is why it is important for men and women
to learn about it to arm themselves. Ruth Ellis murdered David Blakely and even she seemed to
believe that her desire to kill originated with her. Many commentators on the case argued that
history’s approach to Ruth’s story has been colored by a desire to absolve her of guilt. That is not the
intention here. Ruth was guilty. She was guilty of premeditated murder and she was guilty of being
easy prey for someone else to manipulate.

What is it that makes someone easy prey? It is easy to look at the life of someone like Ruth Ellis and
say that she was emotionally vulnerable because of her fractured home, her poverty, her insecure
social and economic situation, her multiple pregnancies and miscarriages creating a perhaps
whirlwind emotional and psychological state. There are many reasons why Ruth was vulnerable to
manipulation, but perhaps the primary reason was that she was not prepared. Just as Voltaire’s
Candide argued that French children of the 18th century ought to be better prepared for the world as
part of a humanistic approach to education, so too ought Ruth Ellis to have been prepared for the
lion’s den that she was thrown into as a nightclub hostess in London.

Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of Ruth’s story was that her sentence could have been
commuted and it was not. It is believed that about ninety percent of death sentences dealt with women
during this period were forgiven, while Ruth’s was allowed to remain. Was this another part of what
made Ruth such easy prey? She was a beautiful bleach blonde nightclub hostess at a time when
women were supposed to be something else. She even showed up to court in her normal hairstyle and
a fur coat even though she was urged not to. Perhaps it was Desmond Cussen’s desire to deal death to
Ruth and Blakely both.

The thing is, you never really know the motivations of a narcissist or dark manipulator because they
are wise enough to keep these to themselves. They know how to use words to gain your trust and to
make an emotional connection with you. Making an emotional bond, a bond that may even have the
appearance of empathy on their part renders you easy prey to them because it allows their motivations
and their emotional state to become your own, flying in the face of Adlerian ideas of individual
psychological action.

If a practitioner of dark psychology is good at what they do then they should be able to turn you into a
mirror of their own emotions and desires. You are a tool that they are able to wield because they have
insinuated themselves into your psyche with a device that is not too different from hypnotism. The
tricks of this trade rely on basic human tendencies toward suggestion and emotional imprinting.
Again, as much as is said of “human nature,” these sorts of features of us appear to be animal nature
as this sort of imprinting can be seen in animals as primitive as geese as the studies of Konrad Lorenz
demonstrate.

History will never really know who Desmond Cussen was and what his motivations were. Cussen is
not reported to have been angry at Ruth that she was not only seeing Blakely, but that she still cared
enough about him to become pregnant by him and to stalk him, but he must have been. Ruth was just
insensitive to what his real emotions and motivations were because he was such a skillful
manipulator. Indeed, Desmond perhaps was so skilled that even today people doubt whether he
should be associated with Ruth’s action or if she should be treated as if she acted with her own
volition.

The Aspects of Dark Psychology and Mind Control

One of the issues with Alfred Adler’s individual psychology concept is that if human beings were not
motivated by deep, primal drives then they probably would not be so susceptible to mind control. It is
not difficult to see why Freudian psychoanalytical theory did not fully account for the observations of
human behavior that researchers like Adler made, but it is also a pitfall to suppose that humans are
motivated only by purposeful desires.

It is important to get back here to the idea of some human behavior being purposeful while others
being in the realm of what is called a singularity. Singularity is a term that is occasionally used in the
field of artificial intelligence, but it has relevance in dark psychology, as well. In AI theory,
singularity represents the hypothetical point at which artificially intelligent technology powered by
quantum computing will exceed the collective intelligence of all human beings, representing a point of
universal machine omniscience. This type of singularity represents the idea of AI having a sort of
collective, intelligent identity and motivations that are particularly human.

Singularity in dark psychology suggests tapping into a collective narcissistic energy that perhaps
represents a “dark” or primitive side of human nature. The implication here is that human beings are
possessed by qualities and motivations that are not only not purposive, but which represent a
collective desire to behave maliciously together. This is an interesting concept because if a group of
human beings has been manipulated into behaving collectively badly by a manipulative person then
there is some purposive action here. The individual actor is the one who is behaving purposefully
while others are behaving at his or her direction.

What this sort of theory does is explain how human beings can behave in both an individualized and
singularity-type fashion. This allows those studying dark psychology to accept Adler’s idea about
purposive motivations while also recognizing that people can be controlled by tapping into a capacity
for non-purposive, group actions. This almost opens the door for Freudian psychoanalytical thinking
to be melded with individual psychology theory. Though Adler might have distanced himself from
Freudian ideas of animal motivations in human beings, the inadequacy of his theories in accounting
for examples of group narcissism, hysteria, and the like in human beings forces a rapprochement with
Freudian theory.

Therefore, the skillful manipulator can be said to act on individual, purposive, narcissistic motivation
while those that are preyed upon perhaps are acting in a non-purposive fashion. What this means for
the people who are potential targets is that it becomes important to recognize the tools that the
manipulator can use to turn you into putty for their mind control tactics. The goal of this book is to
help you to recognize the tricks that manipulators utilize to tap into your primal human motivations.
Narcissists and other practitioners of dark psychology can use the following to gain a hold over you:

Manipulation
Persuasion
Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP)
Hypnosis
Brainwashing
Mind control

These are only a few tricks that they can use to cement their control, and they represent the basic
strategies in their arsenal of attack. As interconnectivity and globalization have made men and women
around the world more connected than ever before, the tools that manipulators have at their disposal
to harm and to destroy are greater than ever before. Indeed, incidents of internet abuse have become
come commonplace and widespread that they represent almost a collective exhibition in the dark
psychological arts. A young person is bullied online, but rather than advocate for goodwill or, at the
very least, abstain from participating, other people exposed to the bullying choose to join in. Why?

If you understand what dark psychology is then these sorts of behaviors will not baffle you. Some
describe dark psychology as the use of manipulation or other tools to do harm to others, but this
definition does not fully describe the behavioral aspects of human beings that allow these acts to
occur. Dark psychology can perhaps better be described as the psychological tendency for human
beings to prey on other people out of a desire to do harm or for reasons that lack purpose. The
startling observation that Voltaire, the Marquis de Sade, and other philosophers made is that human
beings often due to malicious things to others not because they hope to achieve some gain, but for no
reason to all. Understanding this may be hard, but it is important to recognize this reality to be
prepared for learning the dark psychological arts and to be armed to fight.
Chapter 2: A Brief History of Dark Psychology

Human legend is rife with tales of demons and monsters who behave in ways so extreme that the mere
tells of them sent shivers down the sides of the adults who listened to these tales as recited by bards
and musicians of the past. The existence of monsters warns us that the world is not perhaps as safe as
it may seem from inside our window. Monsters live among us and they render our lives as something
that must be guarded against, as something that needs to be protected.

Perhaps as you sleep in your bed a monster crawls out of the closet or creeps in through a window
that you forgot to shut. Perhaps you thought you were alone but you hear footsteps creaking up the
stairs and a low voice rumbling as it approaches your door. You see a shaggy, hoof-like foot poke out
from under the bed or a claw. You hear a deep sinister laugh as you run for your life. You run into the
bathroom and you shut the door. It is not exactly a great escape route as your bathroom lacks a
window, but you did not know where else to go. Perhaps the monster is on the stairs. You do not
know where it is. But then you pull the chain of the overhead bathroom light and you see that the
monster is you.

Monsters live among us and they are referred to scientifically as H. sapiens. Acts of genocide,
pillage, and destruction were not conducted by aliens from another planet. They were humans who
committed these atrocities and they still live among us today. In applied psychology, there is a term,
the so-called dark triad. This term, which we will explore later, refers to the three personality traits
of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. These traits are considered particularly dangerous
so it is important to separate these folks out from the general population, or is it?

The argument can be made that human beings have been accommodating the monstrous parts of their
personality since time immemorial. Today we think of common practices of the distant past like
human sacrifice, orgiastic religious practices, and ritualized murder (as in the Roman Colosseum) as
barbarous acts of the past indicating a time better forgotten, but it has been posited that these acts
represented societal outlets for the dark singularity that lies beneath the pretty surface of the human
exterior.

Societies were organized differently then. It will be left to you to decide if times are better now or if
they were worse. As garish as the aforementioned practices of the past may have been, their
institutionalized status within their societies represented a recognition that human beings had a dark
side to their character, and it was better to give this dark side an outlet than to let it simmer and
explode in unexpected ways. For what do the gang stalking, cybercrime, serial murder, and
narcissistic or antisocial acts of today represent but human beings giving in to sides of themselves that
previously gave expression in other ways?

The point here is not to posit that human beings should give in to their so-called dark singularity
tendencies but to suggest that the modern art of dark psychology represents a range of behaviors that
were expressed in unique ways in the society of old. Although the discussion of the history of
societies giving in to the dark sides of their character may seem peripheral to the discussion of dark
psychology few things can be more central. An important step in preparing yourself for defense comes
in recognizing that the practitioner of these dark arts can be anyone that you meet. It may be someone
that you already know.

Ritualized Behaviors in Human Society

Bullfighting is a traditional art on the Iberian Peninsula, but it is a practice that has attracted much
criticism in recent decades because of the perception of the brutality that the ritualized killing of the
bull represents. Although detractors of the sport have not succeeded in having it eliminated in the
Spanish-speaking places where it is still practiced today, there has been an active debate about
whether the sport deserves the censure it receives.

Although there is no question that there is an element of cruelty in the manner in which the bulls are
gawked at by an audience as they are killed, the argument has been made that bullfighting is tame
compared to what the Romans used to do. We have all seen films in which gladiators are pit against
each other or Christians are fed to lions, tigers, or other beasts. What the Romans wanted to witness
was a gory spectacle that allowed them to participate, albeit briefly, in the violence that is
commonplace for most life on Earth.

Today, the idea that civilization as advanced as the Romans could have engaged in practice as
seemingly brutal and backward as gladiator fights to the death still continues to shock. The Romans
considered most of the other groups that they encountered on their frontiers hopelessly barbaric, but
today it is they that come across as the barbarians. But, in truth, we live in dogmatic times and the
dogma of today does not allow for the equivocal approach to life that characterized the worlds of the
Greeks and Romans.

It has been proposed that what strict adherence to dogma does is force people to become hypocrites.
Naturally, some would argue that if one is natively a good person then there is no need for them to
behave in a hypocritical fashion. This is the sort of idea that naturally adheres to the belief that there
are good people and there are bad people and the bad people deserve to be punished. But what if
most people are bad, or, at the very least, what if good people do bad things some of the time? This is
the idea that writers like Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade were driving at, and it seems the ancients
may have understood this.

It has been argued that when people are not allowed a natural outlet for their animal emotions then
they are liable to act out in ways especially dangerous and destructive. It is easy for societies to label
people like this as “bad” because there is a tendency towards a hypocritical approach to human
behavior that allows life to be neatly constructed into black and white, good and evil. In the old days,
the local judge may have hanged a man for being an adulterer while the judge himself had two women
that he was seeing secretly. Who is the bad person here? The adulterer who was hanged or the judge?

We generally believe that we know right from wrong and can easily tell good from evil when met
with it, but as human behavior becomes increasingly better documented it seems that evil is ever-
present in ways that were never spoken of before. The advent of the internet and IoT devices has led
to the proliferation of acts that would be labeled as evil even by men and women living two thousand
years ago. Teenagers goading other teenagers into suicide for fun. Bullying on the internet that leads to
acts of violence. Cybercrime. These are all aspects of life that appear to be surfacing as new things in
our connected, globalized society. Are they new or do they represent, perhaps, an expression of latent
tendencies that were handled differently in the past?

The King Must Die by Mary Renault is a book that is read in many schools through most students
likely do not understand some of the deep themes of the book, at least as they relate to the study of
dark psychology. This startling work by Mary Renault attempts to construct the myth of Theseus and
the Minotaur as a historical event that the mythmakers made into a compelling story for children (and
adults). You see, the Minoans had bullfights of a sort too, or at least a type of bull dance and the idea
of ritualized killing that seems so garish today served a function in these ancient times that nothing
does today.

The idea here is not to plant into your head the idea that dark psychology is normal, but to suggest that
people may be somewhat different than what you thought they were. The person who you fear may
manipulate you and wreak havoc in your life may not be too different from yourself. Indeed, perhaps
you have manipulated someone or spread a rumor that was so damaging that it eventually resulted in
irreparable harm.

In The King Must Die, Mary Renault subtly weaves several stories of ritualized death in her construct
of lives lived so long ago. Renault was able to do this as, although she may not have been an
anthropologist, her work represented a sensitivity to subjects of non-Christian, non-Western European
societies that was highly unusual for the time. Renault appreciated the role that these behaviors had in
these societies because she approached the study of pre-modern or non-Western cultures outside the
standpoint of religious doctrine.

Those who study dark psychology recognize the potential for evil that exists within all human beings.
Societies of the past may have found ways for human beings to release their destructive, possibly
even narcissistic energy while minimizing the harm that was done to individuals and to society as a
whole. In The King Must Die, the sacrifice of the “king horse” supplants the ritualized sacrifice of the
king himself, which was part of the traditional practices of the people of Troezen, the town where
Theseus is raised in the book. The sacrifice of the king horse is undertaken for the sake of his people,
much like the sacrifice of the king before had been taken as an act to benefit the common people. This
idea of the ultimate sacrifice in the form of a ritualized death as a type of munificent act or even an
atonement for the actions or motivations of others takes an early form in this idea, which would be
repeated in later religions.

There is a need for the deeds, thoughts, or internal motivations of a large group of people to be atoned
for based on the recognition that these deeds, thoughts, and motivations are malevolent and would
derail society if they were allowed to continue without some form of regulation. Therefore, the
manner in which societies of the past allowed their citizenry an outlet for their dark energies can be
construed as not indicating objective evil on the part of the people in these societies but was part of a
wider plan to keep these sorts of dark energies contained.

It has not been until recently that psychologists and others have begun to recognize that humans are
motivated to behave in a wantonly evil way. It is often said in conversation that a particular act is
“evil” or a particular person is “evil” based on a perception that an individual has committed a
harmful act for a selfish or indefensible reason, but malevolence can also take the form of committing
acts that are objectively bad for no reason at all. This is what often baffles the victim of dark
psychological tactics: that another would wantonly harm or destroy with no “motive” or goal. It is
this bafflement, this inability to understand the basics of human behavior, which allows the target of
these tactics to be easy prey.

An exploration of the history of dark psychological study will perhaps prepare your mind for the
harsh realities that your psyche will face in the world today. For it is your psyche that will be the
target of the manipulator and the narcissist, and it is your psyche that it is the weapon of mind control.
This is what the practitioner of dark psychological tactics does: they turn your own mind against you,
disallowing you from realizing that your own thoughts, your own emotions, your own motivations
originate from the manipulator and these are the tools that will destroy you.

History of the Study of Dark Psychology

The two social scientific trends which have shaped modern-day dark psychology are arguably
abnormal psychology and individual psychology. Abnormal psychology is the branch of
psychological study concerned with patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior that are associated
with mental illness. These thoughts, emotions, and behavior may precede a mental illness and are
generally regarded as abnormal. As psychology (and especially psychiatry) does attempt to erect a
fairly rigid dichotomy of normal and abnormal behavior, abnormal psychology would fall under the
scepter of abnormal or atypical types of behavior in opposition to behaviors that are regarded as
falling in the normal range.

Individual psychology is the school of psychological thought developed in the early 19th century that
is focused on human behavior is motivated by purposive action as opposed to underlying motivations
of libido and sex that characterize Freudian psychoanalysis. Although we have discussed in some
detail already the extent to which human actions are not intentionally motivated and therefore may be
construed as non-purposive, individual psychology does allow for unconscious or subconscious
motivations, it just tends to regard them as non-Freudian, benign, and perhaps not always really
unconscious.

For instance, Alfred Adler focused a lot of his writings on inferiority complexes as a motivator for
action. He believed that individuals who behaved in angry or otherwise non-benign ways were
generally motivated by a sense of inferiority, which caused them to “act out” in a sense. Now an
inferiority complex as a motivator may lie below the surface in some people, although others may be
entirely conscious that they have an aspect of themselves that they are not entirely satisfied with and
which they are attempting to compensate.

When constructing dark psychology as an extension of individual psychological concepts as opposed

to Freudian psychoanalytical concepts, it is perhaps simplistic to say that human beings generally
behave with conscious, intentional motivations in contrast to being subconsciously motivated by
sexual desires, like the well-studied Oedipus complex (the desire for a man to murder his father and
to sleep with mother). In order to fully understand the historical development of dark psychology as
an area of study, it is important to recognize that individual psychology theory does allow for the type
of not-completely conscious motivations that are necessary to understand why human beings appear to
behave in such a wantonly cruel way. Even so, dark psychology theory supposes that human beings
are capable of dark singularity, engaging in actions that are harmful and which have no purpose
whatsoever.

As a field of study, the study and treatment of abnormal behaviors have been around since at least the
Ancient Egyptians. We have more records from the Greek period, in part because we are closer in
time to the Ancient Greek period than we are to the Egyptians, and this group seemed to approach the
idea of pathology (including mental pathology) with an avidity that is rather fascinating. The study of
what we call today abnormal psychology was present in the 18th century and earlier in the form of the
asylums and sanatoriums that treated men and women with abnormal conditions of the mind, but the
field as we recognize it today really dates from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Indeed, before the 19th century, the usual treatments for abnormal disorders of the mind were
exorcism, trepanation, and being burned at the stake as a witch. Trepanation refers to boring a hole in
the skull in order to release malign spirits from their hold on the mind, and it is believed by some to
be the oldest surgical procedure of which we have archaeological evidence. Trepanation was still
practiced in the 19th century, and there are even advocates for the practice today, although their
entreaties generally fall on deaf ears.

Exorcism really gets at how abnormal behaviors and thoughts were perceived prior to the modern
era. Indeed, up until the 1960s, many behaviors that we consider to fall within the range of normal
today were considered to be mental illnesses. Exorcism, although perhaps less violent than
trepanation, embodied the perception that the individual possessed of the strange thoughts and
behaviors was inhabited by an evil spirit or demon. All this really did was transfer the malevolent
motivation from the individual to something else, whether that something else was an agent of evil
(like a demon or spirit) or the agent of evil (i.e. Satan).

One school of thought sees Satan as the embodiment of the capacity for human beings to behave in a
way that is “strange” or, more specifically, malicious or cruel. It is difficult to say whether their ideas
of demons, ghouls, spirits, or of Satan himself represent a true belief that human beings were made to
commit acts because of possession or if they might be better characterized as stories designed to
frighten children or teach them important life lessons about good and evil. Certainly, exorcisms still
take place today, and there are people who do truly believe that acts of the evil stem from possession.

If it is your belief that the evil that humans commit stems from a source outside of the human being
(such as possession by a demon or the Devil) then dark psychological theory as it stands today may
be somewhat at odds with what you believe. A crucial concept in dark psychology is this idea that
human beings are capable of behaving in a remarkably cruel and violent manner without purpose,
merely as an extension of something dark that dwells within us. Whether you choose to attribute this
type of behavior to Satan as a part of your religious beliefs is up to you.

Of course, the abnormal psychologists of the 19th century and later did not fully accept this idea of an
external source for the conditions that they were seeing, and so treatments like trepanation or
exorcism would have been baffling or at the very least pointless to them. As we touched on earlier,
this was a period in which scientists began to move away from the doctrinaire ideas that
characterized their professions, doctrines which often had more to do with religion than with the
factual compendia of the professions itself. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with
religious doctrine, but a physician who is unfamiliar with human anatomy because he is not allowed
to dissect q cadaver is likely practicing a doctrine that is not beneficial to himself (or herself) or to
you.

Abnormal psychologists began to wonder why human beings were motivated to behave in abnormal
ways, and the Devil or demons were not wholly acceptable answers to them. Most of these
researchers in abnormal psychology were psychiatrists and psychoanalysts (as they would be called
today) who were undertaking detailed studies on these subjects based on a new, freer understanding
of medical matters. Although the term dark psychology did not appear until later in the 20th century,
even in the 19th-century studies of narcissists, sociopaths, and others that we would describe today as
having personality disorders were being undertaken.

Abnormal psychology of the time would have followed the pattern of what we now know as Freudian
psychoanalysis, with the writings of Alfred Adler representing one of the first major departures from
Freudian theory. Although Adler is a relatively obscure figure today, his writings from the years
1912-1914 formed the basis of much of the ideas that permeate the field of psychology today. His
writings were translated into English in 1925, and his beliefs about personality and where it stems
from predominate in modern psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.

Adler focused on compensation, resignation, and over-compensation as the three external factors
shaping personality development. His theories paralleled those of another important psychologist,
Abraham Maslow, who recognized the influence Alder had on his own work. Although Adler himself
did not write on “dark psychology,” his theories helped form the development of this subject as a
departure from preexisting psychoanalytical theories.

Dark psychology study may be recent but it represents a range of behaviors that have been present
with human beings from the very beginnings. Indeed, the dark psychology field gives the impression
of a realm of study in transition, as the term and the concepts associated with it become more readily
known to the public. This has made dark psychology into a subject that exists somewhat below the
radar of many who might be the target of actors using its tools to damaging effect. Dark psychology is
an unusual field in that it encompasses both those practitioners who teach its art as a series of tools
that manipulators and narcissists can use and those minds who attempt to arm the potential victims in
defense.

Famous Manipulators throughout History

History is rife with the examples of men and women who used what we now know today as dark
psychology to exert great influence over others and to harm them. In reality, these arts are so
widespread and so old that perhaps the most adept practitioners must always remain nameless. While
the narcissist may attempt to advertise the great damage they have done to others as a way of flaunting
their own greatness, an individual acting with dark singularity, or a person who is skilled enough at
dark psychology to know when to be silent about their tactics, these individuals will generally not be
known to the public.

But it does help to understand how dark psychological tools can take their effect by examining those
who have used them and those who have fallen victim. Names of these practitioners are numerous and
easy to cite although one can fall into the pitfall of reducing complex individuals into one-trick ponies
with the label “narcissist” or “sociopath.” For instance, surely Grigorii Rasputin was a manipulator
and practitioner of the dark psychological art par excellence, but he was also a “mystic,” “holy man,”
“lover,” and perhaps one of the most interesting people to ever have lived in the city of St.
Petersburg, Russia.

Of course, Rasputin is an interesting case study because he was not personally responsible for the
sort of newsworthy death tolls that a Ted Bundy or a Jim Jones is. Some are inclined to draw
publicity to dark psychology by pointing out men like these as examples of the art because it helps
draw interest in the subject. Most people are interested in learning how society produces men like
Ted Bundy and Jim Jones. Ted Bundy himself famously said that men like him were all around as
brothers, husbands, sons, and the like. This is the sort of statement that is designed to send chills
down the spine of Americans who have come to see the world outside their window as fraught with
every sort of danger.

In truth, the world is fraught with danger, but it is just this sort of paranoia that the manipulator wants
to imprint in your mind. As we stated in our exploration of the psychological underpinnings of dark
psychology, the practitioner of this art may have a purposeful desire to ruin you or they may be acting
from a deep well of destructive tendencies. Whatever their motivation is, instilling a paranoia so
deeply in the victim that the victim sees every encounter as a dangerous or threatening one and every
person as an enemy is one of the most effective tools in the manipulator’s toolkit.

This tactic works so well because every encounter is a potentially threatening one and every person
one meets may be an enemy waiting to strike, but this is a paranoid idea that not only does not
originate with the target but is detrimental to the target. Being prepared to defend oneself from dark
psychological tactics does not mean behaving as if you have post-traumatic stress disorder or another
debilitating condition of anxiety. If you behave this way, then the predator has won. They have turned
you into prey who’s every thought and action stem from fear. They can sense this fear on you and they
love it.

Grigorii Rasputin was believed to have the ability to hypnotize and the ability to heal. He was able to
heal the Tsarevich Alexey of his hemophilia merely by laying his hands on the boy. Although some
historians have disputed that Rasputin actually possessed this ability, others have argued that he might
very well have possessed the capability to hypnotize and that he might have placed the prince into a
sort of trancelike state that caused relaxation and essentially represented mind control. Because of his
ability to heal the hereditary affliction of the heir to the throne, Rasputin was able to gain an influence
over the Russian Government during the darkest periods of Russian imperial involvement in World
War I. As the Tsarina may have regarded herself as responsible for her son’s hemophilia as she had
passed the gene to him through her Hanoverian ancestors, she would have been especially vulnerable
to the manipulation and mind control tactics used by the former monk.

As will be explored further in the next chapter, individuals who are in a weak state are at risk of
attack from a narcissist or manipulator who is able to accurately size a man or woman up. Although
we may not think of narcissist, psychopaths, or manipulators as emotionally intelligent people, these
sorts of individuals do possess emotional awareness, which permits them to be attuned to the
subjective emotional states of others. What these individuals lack is emotional self-regulation and
empathy. It is this lack of empathy that prevents the narcissist, Machiavellian person, or psychopathic
person from identifying with you in a meaningful way. This emotional barrier allows them to see you
as prey for their attack.

It is critical to understand that prey in the dark psychological game is just that prey. Just as a lion,
gorilla, or other wild animal prey on individual members that are young, weak, wounded, or
otherwise at a disadvantage, so too does the manipulator learn to detect these aspects of other people
and to use them in their determination of who would make good prey and who would not. In the end,
the relationship here is clearly one of predator and prey. Although one may be inclined to regard
others that one meets as individuals who harbor a benign interest in you (or disinterest), the predator
sizes you up during these encounters to determine what measure of prey you make and how best to
strike.

There is a question about whether Rasputin truly was a manipulator or if he has been unfairly
maligned by history. It was believed by figures close to the Russian Government that Rasputin had
inappropriately close access to the Romanovs and was privy to information that someone in his
situation – that is, a civilian with no government role – should not be privy to. Rasputin ended his
days by assassination at the hands of Prince Felix Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, a
cousin of Tsar Nicholas II. Though Rasputin was likely a hypnotist, narcissist, and generally unsavory
person, history may never know whether he ever influenced others to behave in a sinister way or
himself tapped into the well of dark singularity.
There are others for whom this assessment is less confused. Jim Jones, who inspired his cult
followers into an act of mass suicide, is considered to be a powerful manipulator and narcissist who
perhaps represents the type of narcissism that is regarded as Machiavellianism. The Machiavellian
type believes that he or she is above the ordinary cut of human beings and therefore the rules do not
apply to them as they would apply to someone else. This is the Napoleonic type who is often
possessed of great intelligence and ability and therefore believes that they have been entrusted by fate
with the power of reshaping the world or life in some way.

These individuals are particularly dangerous because their ability, intellectual powers, or charisma
can cause them to have followers who behave as they bid without really understanding that these
leaders are actually narcissistic or antisocial people who are inspired on a certain level by
motivations that are clear only to them. This is one of the conundrums of dark psychology, an area that
perhaps those studying it in the future well shed more light on. An individual who is inspired to
manipulate others or coerce them into harmful acts is behaving with volition, not with the destructive
energy that dark singularity represents. But the people who follow them often are motivated by the
dark energy that they have tapped into, so the evil actor becomes possessed of a different type of evil
than his or her agents. Which type of evil is worse?

Examples of dark psychology abound and listing them all would be outside the scope of this book. A
dramatic example out of Hollywood reveals that dark psychological practices are common albeit
well hidden. A group in California called NXIXM in which the leader coerced and manipulated
women to compensate him financially, have sex with him, and even brand themselves has been
referred to as mind control. As this book will explore later, sometimes willful deeds can be labeled
as mind control after the fact by individuals motivated to distance themselves from controversial acts.
What is clear is that there were elements of narcissism and Machiavellianism involved. These two
members of the dark triad are important in the study of dark psychology, and an important aspect of
this field is helping men and women to identify people like this.
Chapter 3: Basics of Manipulation

When some people imagine dark psychology and its practitioners, images of men like Ted Bundy or
Jeffrey Dahmer come to mind, but the alarming idea of this dark art is that the capacity to engage in it
lies in all of us. The adherents of dark psychology might be your coworkers, your significant others,
your family members, or even your friends. And this fact does not refer to individual narcissists
behaving with a desire to do harm. An essential idea in dark psychology is that people on a group
level can be motivated to behave with destructive energy for no reason at all.
We have seen this aspect of dark psychology from a historical perspective. We have seen how human
societies of the past tapped into the dark tendencies of human beings, and how more modern societies
brushed these tendencies under the rug or turned them into skeletons in the closet liable to pop out
when least wanted or expected. Indeed, in the first chapter, we argued that this hypocritical approach
to dark psychology is probably one of the major reasons why men and women tend to fall prey to its
tactics. When we say that human beings are good and only evil men like Ted Bundy do bad things,
then that opens you up to being prey for an ex-lover who wants to manipulate you into ending your
life, or co-workers who turn the entire office against you merely because they can.

In order to guard against manipulation, you need to understand that anyone can be a manipulator. As
loaded and maligned as the term manipulation may be, it can be considered the most basic form of
dark psychology. Some books about manipulation begin by attempting to sanitize the word, convincing
the reader that manipulation is just “persuasion” as everyone engages in it. Although it may be true
that everyone engages in manipulation it is not necessarily true that manipulation is generally
something basic or harmless that everyone does. As you will see, or may already know, the
manipulator is capable of doing great harm.

The first step in preparing for learning about manipulation is understanding that this term can
encompass a range of actions. Indeed, the distinction between manipulation and persuasion is at least
partly an issue of semantics. Persuasion will be discussed further in the succeeding chapter but it is
generally regarded as the capability to influence others. Manipulation refers to the tactic of
influencing the behaviors and thoughts of others. The distinction between persuasion and manipulation
is therefore really a construct that generally sees persuasion as benign and generally beneficial, and
manipulation as underhanded and potentially dangerous.

In this book, persuasion will be taken to mean the ability to influence others while manipulation will
refer to the influencing of the thoughts and behaviors of others along a spectrum that includes benign
and not-so-benign actions and motivations. Persuasion will, therefore, be approached as a type of
manipulation, one in which the influencing of another’s thoughts and deeds is often benign or
beneficial to the other person, but does not necessarily have to be.

Psychological Manipulation
The term psychological manipulation is sometimes used to refer to the act of influencing another
person’s thoughts and behaviors through psychological tactics that some might regard as dark. In
reality, most manipulation involves a psychological tactic of some kind, even if that tactic is merely
positive or negative reinforcement. Even a reinforcement scheme involves accessing the neural
patterning of the other individual as it essentially consists of imprinting a behavior through a system
of reward and punishments. This system of reward and punishment establishes a connection in the
individual’s brain between a certain act and the positive or negative result that followed.

If we accept that all (or most) manipulation is psychological as it involves accessing the ability of
human beings to recognize stimuli from outside of themselves and create an association between
things, we are left with the situation of attempting to distinguish the bad kinds of manipulation from
the perhaps not so bad ones. A classification system that is often made is to divide manipulation into
ethical manipulation and unethical manipulation. This division recognizes the realities of
manipulation: that although we often associate manipulation with sinister design, there are people
who manipulate with the goal of benefiting others rather than from some dark motivation lying deep,
down inside.

Most people reading this will have some idea of what ethics refer to. Ethics is the study of beliefs
about right and wrong, and people have been studying and writing about ethics since at least classical
times. Ethics presents an important distinction in manipulation because it targets what the motivation
for the manipulation is. If the manipulation is undertaken for the purposes of doing something positive
with both the resulting act and the reason for the motivation falling within acceptable standards of
good behavior in the society than that would be considered ethical manipulation. If the motivation is
to do harm to others, or if the act results in harm even if there was no particular motivation for it
(malign or otherwise) then this would be considered unethical manipulation.

Unethical manipulation is a weapon in the arsenal of the practitioner of the dark psychological art. It
is a weapon that is really a toolbox replete with its own weapons. As the reader will understand at
this point, an evil deed does not have to be undertaken with a necessarily evil intention. And by this
we do not mean the intention that is clear to all the individuals involved, we just mean any intention,
even unconscious ones. As we have seen, human beings have the capacity to behave in a cruel,
violent, or destructive way without any motivation, and this represents the ability of human beings to
tap into a well of sinister energy.
If you are reading this because you are interested in guarding against manipulation then it is unethical
manipulation that you need to be protected against. Manipulation has been defined and it is important
to recognize that this term represents a range of behaviors that are used to control the actions or
beliefs of others. It is important to highlight this aspect of beliefs because although the actions that are
influenced may be the most visible example of the effects of the manipulation, the manipulator often
targets the thoughts of the person they seek to manipulate because these are the actors that lead to
actions.

Understanding manipulation in this way allows the reader to appreciate that even persuasion can be
dangerous as this tactic to is the result can result in beliefs being influenced. But persuasion is only
one trick in the arsenal of manipulation. Below we list some of the behaviors that a manipulator can
engage in that fall under the rubric of manipulation:

Punishment
Reinforcement
One-trial behavior
Rationalization
Seduction
Bandwagon effect

Some people have relatively amorphous ideas about manipulation. They see it as a trick or tactic that some people use to coerce others
into giving them what they want. But manipulation is not so shapeless. Manipulation should be thought of as a set of tactics rather than
just one and these all can be used to influence others in a dramatic way. Punishment represents a simple type of manipulation. Although
punishment overlaps with negative reinforcement, the latter is a tactic that is generally used to action to a reward while punishment does
not have to necessarily have a goal of reinforcing a behavior.

For example, a manipulator may “punish” you to make you emotionally weak, demoralized, or because it pleasures them to do so. This
may be difficult for some to relate to or to understand, but a manipulator or a narcissist does not have to necessarily have a goal in doling
out punishment to their victim. Their goal may be to weaken you to such a state that you become easier prey for their abuse, or they may
behave in this manner towards you just because they can. Although one may think of punishment in the context of manipulation as having
a particular goal, punishment may be part of a larger spectrum of manipulative behaviors that together serve the goal of leaving you
weakened and dependent.

Reinforcement is another important type of manipulation. Reinforcement links behavior to a result, so if you do something that the
manipulator likes they may reward you or they may instead punish you. he first type, positive reinforcement, is designed to reinforce or
encourage the behavior by linking it to something positive in your mind. This positive result or reward can be anything: food, money, sex,
attention. The manipulator would have read you accurately enough to determine what you value so that they can use it in their
manipulation scheme. Indeed, manipulators rely on information that you give them (even unconscious information) so one of the most
valuable tools of defense is keeping those things about yourself that others do not need to know to yourself.

Negative reinforcement also links behavior to a result, but in this case, the result is a negative one. A manipulator can use any punishment
to discourage a behavior in you. In some countries, it is common for managers of factories to punish their employees for complaining
about work conditions by cutting employee hours, paying employees late, or stalking them. In this example, the purpose of the
manipulative negative reinforcement is to discourage complaints, limit independent thought and action, and instill fear.

Whether the reinforcement is positive or negative, the goal is the same: to place you more deeply under the control of the manipulator.
Manipulators (at least the unethical ones) are behaving in a predatory manner so any leeway you give them merely encourages them to
continue with their predatory tactics. For instance, if the manipulator sees that their tactics are working, they will be inclined to continue
with this treatment. This could be either because they have a sinister goal with you that they wish to follow to its completion, or because
they are narcissistic or psychopathic and have a desire to inflict pain or emotional disorder upon you.

Why People Manipulate Others

This leads naturally to a critical aspect of manipulation that it is important to address. The subject of why people manipulate others has
been touched on, but there is a particular aspect of this topic in the context of dark psychology. As we have seen, manipulation does not
necessarily have to be unethical. Manipulators can engage in their acts for ethical reasons, generally with the desire to influence others in
what they perceive as a positive way. The question of whether influencing others to do what you want them to do is ever positive is
outside the scope of this work. It will be up to you to decide whether someone else’s desires, even if they are well-intentioned, trump
your own desire or requirement for the agency.

But this idea that the manipulator wants you to do what they want you to do is a common theme in manipulation. Even someone
manipulating for ethical reasons wants you to behave in a way consistent with their own beliefs. In dark psychology, the idea of
motivation is important because it reflects the psychological concepts of purposive versus pathological actions. The question with
manipulation is really whether the manipulator is behaving out of narcissism, out of a desire to control you (even in a way they believe is
positive), or out of deeper, pathological reasons.

Even leaving aside cases where the manipulator desires to influence you because they perceive some eventual benefit to themselves, the
goal of the manipulation still remains control. Both you and the manipulator have the ability to engage in actions that have a purpose and
which represent free will. The manipulator desires to use their free will to cause you to act in a way that they choose. Even if their
motivations appear benign or positive, the goal is still to control because they see their own desires as being paramount to your own.

Therefore, what the manipulator really desires are control. Even when you engage in a positive or negative reinforcement scheme with
your dog, the goal is still to control the actions of the dog. You do not want the dog to jump in the bed so you punish him. You are pleased
when the dog fetches the object that you’ve thrown so you reward him. You are controlling the actions of your dog using manipulation
and so too does the manipulator seek to control others using the tools at their disposal.

Typical Characteristics of a Manipulator

The characteristics of a manipulator behaving unethically will overlap with characteristics associated with the dark triad personality traits.
The dark triad of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy represent personality types that fall on a dangerous spectrum. These
are individuals that engage in the wanton harm and destruction of people regardless of the consequences. These individuals would be
diagnosed with personality disorders like a narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, or borderline personality
disorder by a psychiatrist.

Some characteristics of manipulators include:

A disregard for the feelings, desires, or concerns of other people

Regard their own desires or emotions as paramount to those of other people
Unconcerned about harming others, including people they may be in a close relationship with
Strong emotions of love or hate
Difficulty regulating their emotions
Skillful at insinuating themselves with others because of high emotional awareness skills
Skillful at keeping secrets or hiding their intentions or motivations
Shallow or superficial
Highly perceptive
Easily angered with a tendency to act based solely on their emotions
Unconcerned with the safety or lives of others
A manipulator may possess some of these traits or all of them. A manipulator may also be skillful at producing a weapon of attack based
on what is needed at that time. Remember that a manipulator, like a narcissist, makes a mental note of who you are so that they know
how to control you. These individuals are highly perceptive, which will become obvious if you pay attention to the things that they say.
They may repeat things that you never told you, which may cause you to believe that they have stalked you or researched you in some
way.

The characteristics of a manipulator appear to comprise a list of bad or negative qualities, but it is important to recall that manipulators
can possess high levels of emotional intelligence, in addition to being intelligent in general. Because of the large skill set that manipulators
possess, they can even resort to brainwashing to obtain what they desire. Brainwashing can involve removing thoughts, behaviors, or
motivations from your mind and replacing them with others.

Brainwashing can be the result of hypnosis, but often it is the result of effective use of manipulation. Because human beings are naturally
so suggestible, a manipulator can effectively brainwash you by suggesting an idea to you through repetition, reinforcement, or some of the
other tools of manipulation that were mentioned previously. This is considered Brainwashing because the manipulator was able to take an
idea or a desire of their own and introduce it into your mind. The power of suggestion should never be underestimated as it can be the
most potent tool leading to Brainwashing and you may be entirely unconscious that it is being used against you.
Chapter 4: Basics of Persuasion

Persuasion is the ability to influence others and it can be thought of as overlapping with manipulation
or as a more benign type of manipulation. Persuasion is generally thought of in terms of guiding
someone in a particular direction or convincing them to have a belief or engage in an act that is
beneficial to themselves. In short, persuasion is perceived more positively than is manipulation
although there is a thin line between the two.

Consider the salesman who knocks on the door. They appear pleasant, have an attractive personality,
sensitive, and they seem generally interested in doing you some good. The good that they hope to do is
to convince you to replace your roof on your house even though your roof is only five years old. They
notice that you have some streaks on your roof and they indicate to you that these reflect that you have
water damage. Water is collecting under the shingles and the last thing you want to do is wait until a
thunderstorm hits and your house becomes flooded. Perhaps an agent can stop by with samples and
you can pick out your new roof.
This person wants to help you, right? Well, perhaps not. This person is attempting to influence you
into purchasing a new roof that you probably do not need. The streaks they saw in the roof were due
to the shadows from the tall trees you have on the lawn with their wide branches. Your roof is
relatively new so at most you may need an inspection but most likely not a replacement. What the
salesperson has done is to influence your ideas by suggesting to you an idea of their own. Your roof is
damaged and you need another one as soon as possible. They have attempted to persuade you.

Although the goal here is relatively benign – convincing someone to purchase a new roof –
persuasion can run the gamut to ideas and behaviors that are relatively benign and those that are less
so. You can persuade someone to go to one restaurant rather than another for dinner tonight or you can
persuade your grandmother to change her will, naming you as the sole beneficiary. Persuasion is
regarded as a step down from manipulation, perhaps a step in the right direction, but the effects of the
conditioning that it involves can be very dramatic.

How to Influence People

Men and women adept at the art of persuasion know how to influence you. Indeed, the best persuaders and manipulators are “people
persons” who know how to get on well with others because of their social skills. What this really means is that they possess high
emotional intelligence, or at the very least are highly self-aware and good at being cued into the emotional states of others. As the reader
has seen, emotional intelligence requires also having empathy and using that to guide one’s actions so an emotionally sensitive or aware
person is not necessarily emotionally intelligent though they can be.

Because persuaders and manipulators are closely attuned to emotional states, they are excellent at reading people. They will pay
attention to the impact that their words have on you. If they say something that causes you to have a furrowed brow, they will make a
mental note of that, or if they say something that makes you laugh, they will note that too. And because they are highly attuned to the
emotional and internal states of others, they are able to make these assessments instantly and even subconsciously. Even the behavior
changes that result from their awareness of you may be not entirely conscious.

Therefore, we can define a set of skills that are useful in persuasion. Recall that persuasion is the ability to influence others. In particular,
the thoughts and actions of others are those that are generally desired to be influenced. Here are some features that a person skilled in
influencing others will possess:

Emotional awareness
Excellent memory
Excellent understanding of human nature and normal human behavior
Agreeable personality
Intelligent
Great attention to detail
 Ability to mask one’s own feelings and motivations
Ability to identify with others and to get others to identify with you

These sorts of characteristics are important in persuasion because the idea in this tactic is for the persuader to cause the thoughts of the
target to align with their own. What this means is that the best persuasion happens when the persuader makes a connection with the
target that allows the target to be more vulnerable to suggestion or influencing. It is natural for human beings to want to identify with
others so if the persuader can establish an area of commonality then they are more likely to be able to influence the other person.

Establishing this rapport or connection can occur in the form of making the other person laugh or smile, helping or being perceived to help
the person in some way, being sensitive to the emotional state or concerns of the other person and demonstrating this awareness, and
presenting an image of agreeableness or benignity. The idea here is that the person to be influenced should see you as someone who is
akin to himself or herself. If they see you as someone divergent, then they are less likely to be influenced by you because they are not
perceiving you as someone that they can or desire to make a connection with.

Once you have established a connection with others, you can now engage in the act of beginning to persuade. This persuasion will
involve introducing an idea with the goal of the other person having the same idea. If you are a salesperson, the idea is that the potential
customer should get a new roof so your goal is to convince the person that they should do that. You have conditioned them by
establishing an emotional connection with them through your words and demeanor, which now leaves them open to be more suggestible
to you. You appear to have done them a favor by pointing out a problem with their roof and you appear genuinely interested in helping
them.

How You Can Condition Others (And Be Conditioned Too)

If you follow the skills laid out in influencing others, then you will be involved in the process of
conditioning them to be open to influence by you. Conditioning refers to preparing someone for
another process or act, in this case, the process of persuading them or manipulating them into doing
what you want. Although conditioning can happen in various ways, it basically requires that some sort
of connection has to be made between the two parties to leave the second party open to being
modified by the other person.

Conditioning is a psychological process that occurs in animals. An animal can be conditioned to be

sensitive to pain or insensitive to it. An animal can be conditioned to crave fights and violence or
they can be a pacifist. Conditioning happens all the time and it takes place all around us. We are
conditioned to have certain beliefs about life by the programs that we see on television and by the
books that we read in school when we are growing up. Conditioning is the process by which humans
learn what is normally thought and behavior, and conditioning continues to occur even after we
become adults.
In persuasion, the target can be conditioned to have certain beliefs. What this means in this context is
that the individual has become open to an idea somehow. Conditioning can occur in manipulation as
well, but we often think of this type of conditioning as more traumatic. In manipulation, a person can
be conditioned through mental or physical abuse, or through the well-thought-out use of words or
actions.

Just as others can be conditioned, you too can be conditioned by others seeking to influence you.
Learning to be wary of the intentions of others is a good first defense, even if it comes with its
drawbacks. Not every person seeking to influence you is doing it because they want to manipulate you
or persuade you to do something that benefits them. Sometimes it is good advice to be careful with
new people as you do not know what their intentions are. Over time as you get to know someone
better, you can be more open with your emotions and the real you, knowing that these are the tools that
a narcissist can use against you.
Chapter 5: Neuro-linguistic Programming

Neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP, is a powerful tool of mind control. NLP tactics are used by
anchormen and others on the television and cable news, by politicians, coaches, and other public
speakers, and by individuals acting with the goal of controlling you. Indeed, most of the targets of
NLP do not realize that they are under the influence of mind control, which is one of the things that
makes this tactic so powerful. NLP uses various tools to induce a trance or trance-like state in people
leaving them vulnerable to suggestion. The instruments used in NLP are a type of hypnosis, and many
of these techniques have been used by manipulators and others involved in mind control for years.

NLP: What Is It?

Neuro-linguistic programming is a method of mind control that was developed in the 1970s. As you
will discover when we delve into history shortly, this was a period where many people were
experimenting with different ideas in psychology and the behavioral sciences. There was an openness
to approaches like those of NLP because they seemed to use skills and knowledge that had been
compiled both as a result of men that had used mind control and hypnosis in the past, and the new
types of knowledge about human beings that the hard sciences and social sciences were revealing.

When we discussed the history of dark psychology, we spoke for a minute about men like Rasputin
who seemed to use arts so dark and mysterious that it is difficult for others to understand just how
they managed to do what they did. Looking at pictures of Rasputin, the one thing that appears most
striking about home is his eyes. He seems to stare out of the picture, almost as if he shares the room
with you. Rasputin’s techniques of manipulation and control were little understood at the time, but it
seems that we can today see in some of his tactics elements of what we would call NLP mind control.

Eye contact is a tool that practitioners of NLP mind control use to induce rapport in their target.
Although NLP guides focus more on the tricks and less on psychology, this type of tactic taps into a
desire for human beings to establish a psychological and emotional connection with others. Very
powerful eye contact combined with certain words, gestures, or other cues can open the other person
up for mind control or even put them into a trance. NLP techniques are used by many people today to
obtain their ends, even if that goal is to sell you something for a slim margin of profit on their part.

History of NLP
Neuro-linguistic programming was developed in the 1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder,
two men from California with backgrounds in linguistics and psychology. The aspect of NLP that
stands out the most is that incorporates knowledge from different disciplines and combines these with
a deep understanding of human behavior and human motivations. The traditions of most relevance to
NLP are those of Milton Erickson, Fritz Perls, and Virginia Satir.

Milton Erickson is a name that has been very influential in psychology and hypnosis. Indeed, his
techniques have been alleged to be used by various politicians and well-known public speakers like
Tony Robbins. Ericksonian techniques are still used in psychotherapy today, but they have also been
co-opted by hypnotists and practitioners of NLP because they make the other person more suggestible
and more able to be conditioned and controlled. Ericksonian techniques are designed to access the
unconscious mind, something which NLP has accomplished in very dramatic ways. NLP grew in
popularity in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Techniques of NLP

The NLP tricks are subtle, so subtle that most people unfamiliar with NLP would likely allow them to
fall under the radar. It has been argued that neuro-linguistic programming techniques have been used
by the likes of the former president of the United States, Barack Obama, whose speeches are cited as
examples of permissive language hypnosis, an NLP technique. As stated previously, NLP techniques
are derived from an understanding of how the brain works, what motivates human behavior, how
human beings form a rapport with one another, and how human beings interact and behave normally.

We mentioned in other parts of this book that a manipulator or narcissist pays attention to the cues that
indicate your emotional state or your interests and motivations. A practitioner of NLP is also paying
close attention to you, looking for ways to establish the bond of rapport, looking for clues to how you
think, and looking for opportunities to induce a trance. Below is a list of some of the things that a
person using NLP techniques is looking out for:

Using eye movements to determine how your brain processes information

Using eye movements to determine how your brain stores information
Making an assessment of what sense of perception is dominant in your brain
Making an assessment of which side of your brain is predominant
Making the determination of when you are lying

Neuro-linguistic programming represents a side of dark psychology that is relatively close to the
surface in terms of public knowledge, as many people use it, but it remains yet a powerful tool of
mind control. We will see later how those motivated to protect themselves can break from their
programming.
Chapter 6: How to Analyze People

There are a number of skills that are important in analyzing people. The first and perhaps most
important skill is having an understanding of human nature and normal human behavior. If you do not
have a sense of how humans behave under normal circumstances or what motivates most people then
you are unlikely to correctly interpret the actions and intentions of others. Just as a judge relies on
their sense of how people typically behave and what motivates them in their judgments, so too must
you develop an understanding of the normal spectrum of human behavior in order to properly analyze
someone.

Of course, human beings can behave in highly original ways, which makes the process of analyzing
them difficult at times. Although human beings frequently behave in typically human ways – like being
jealous at the success of others, or envious of a colleague who just married a beautiful wife –
sometimes people can surprise you. Indeed, some people never feel jealous or envious others. Most
poor people do not steal even though they may need this or that because it just is not part of their
character to do so. Indeed, frequently the greatest, most flamboyant thief is the person who already
has all that they need.

That being said, in order to analyze people, you are going to have to start with knowing how humans
are generally. This includes understanding the spectrum of human emotion, the behaviors linked to
these emotions, and the things that motivate people to do this or that. Everyone wears a mask, which
means that sometimes the intentions of others are not always clear. But even with this mask, people
can reveal to you their emotional state, the things that make them happy, the things that make them sad.

We all wear a mask, but perhaps only FBI agents are so skilled that they never give you some sort of
clue. A spontaneous laugh, a twinkle in the eye, a giddy tapping of the foot: these are unconscious
signs that men and women give of how they feel. Analyzing men and women appropriately will
require taking a basic understanding of human behavior and using it to interpret the things that people
say and do.

Non-verbal Communication
Non-verbal communication refers to the little clues that others give us that convey important
information to us outside of language. Human beings are social animals, which means that we evolved
in settings where we were generally in close proximity to one another rather than alone. For this
reason, we developed the ability to perceive and to interpret the signals that others send us that
indicate their emotional state, thoughts, and motivations.

It is easy to pay attention to words when we are attempting to analyze others, but because language is
not always an accurate indication of how people feel it is important to also pay attention to the non-
verbal cues that others send. These cues can include facial expression, body distance, the position of
hands, quick movements of the hands or the feet, and the like. These non-verbal cues are not specific
to human beings. Non-human primates are excellent examples of how animal societies can be built
without speech. From bearing of teeth to the position of the tail, apes have a language comprised
entirely of non-verbal cues.

Differentiating Fake from Real Emotion

Analyzing others accurately will require developing the ability to distinguish true sentiment from a
false one. Human beings know that others are observing and interpreting them, at least the intelligent
ones do, so they have become adept at hiding how they feel. A common example of this is someone
who smiles even though they are not happy, but this hiding of emotion can mean appearing to be angry
when one is really hurt or vulnerable. Human beings wear masks to protect themselves, as you must if
you plan on defending yourself from practitioners of dark psychology. But protecting yourself also
means analyzing people appropriately, and this means determining which emotions are real and which
are not.

The practitioner of dark psychological tactics perceives you as prey so they are paying very close
attention to your words, actions, non-verbal cues: essentially anything that indicates what’s going on
inside. You may put up a wall to make your emotions more difficult for the predator to access, but
most likely you will say or do something to reveal the truth. This is just as true of the predator as it is
of you, the prey. They can put on a façade of smiles and pleasantries, but sometimes all it takes is one
fierce look to reveal that their intentions are not so friendly.

We see this all the time in films and television shows. The new neighbor seems nice, but just when
your back is turned the camera shot reveals their subtle change in expression. They are not so
neighborly. Their goal is to steal your husband and wreak havoc in your life (in the case of the
standard Lifetime Original Movie). To protect yourself, you need to use your understanding of human
nature and your ability to analyze to figure out what is really going on. Is there a discrepancy between
the surface emotion and the events taking place? Perhaps the other person is smiling, but you heard
that they lost their house and are short of funds. Would most people be so giddy in this situation?

An important part of distinguishing real from fake emotion is deciding whether the surface or “fake”
emotion makes sense given what you know. Also, there is a useful expression here. “When people
show you who they are, believe them.” Human beings are good at being emotionally aware by dint of
being so communal. A person can hide what they feel, but it may only take a brief glimmer of real
emotion for you to establish the rule of what is real in this person and what is not. When the other
person drops their mask for a second, make a note of what the real person beneath looks like.

Tips to Identify A Liar

Anyone who has spent time around a pathological liar knows that there are little tricks that can be
used to tell when they are fibbing. Pathological liars are often highly sociable people who love to talk
and always have something to say. It is this always having something to say that gets them into trouble.
If you are suspicious that the person you are speaking to is a pathological liar, pay attention to the
factual aspects of the things they say. This will become natural in time as you become aware the
person is lying. You will simply make a mental note about facts like a specific monetary amount of
something, a date, or the name of a restaurant because you know these things may potentially be false.

Paying close attention to the details is the first step in identifying a liar, and the second is knowing
when to face the liar with the facts. It may not be a good idea to confront them pointedly as you may
decide it is better that they did not know that you are onto them. If they said they went to a particular
restaurant, ask them what they had to eat. Baked chicken and mixed vegetable stir fry. Later or the next
day asks them how was the steak. If they say it was wonderful when you have caught them. They did
not go to the restaurant at all. A pathological liar tells so many lies that they cannot keep track of
them.
Chapter 7: How to Read Body Language

Reading body language is essential in the study of dark psychology as the cues that men and women
send with their body can be indicative of an internal state that would otherwise be unknown to the
person interacting with them. For example, we have discussed that human beings wear a mask, and
sometimes it is the clues that people send with their body language that reveals what lies beneath that
mask. It is important to be perceptive of these cues as they can alert you to such things as interest or
danger, or the narcissist can use their own understanding of your subconscious cues against you.

An exhaustive list of all the body language cues that men and women send would make up a book onto
itself so here we focus on the areas that readers can focus on as being particularly useful or important.
First, the areas of the body that can send cues will be listed, and this will be followed by significant
examples of body language is indicative of a specific internal state. Folding of the arms most people
realize is generally indicative of irritation or lack of interest, but many cues are more subtle than that.

Here are the parts of the body that are important in conveying information in the form of body
language:

Eyes
Lips (smile or frown)
Hands
Arms
Feet
Tongue
Teeth
Hair (especially in relation to hands and fingers)

It should come as no surprise that many of these areas of important body language clues are on the
face. The parts of the face are associated with emotion and intimacy in human beings so these areas
are critical to pay attention to in terms of cues. Many of the most telling body language cues involve
the face. Some of the more important ones are listed subsequently.

Frequent touching by the other person may indicate possession or a desire to manipulate

A person frequently touching you with their hand may be indicative of a desire to manipulate you, or it
may indicate a perception of possession. We often think of touching by someone we are not involved
with as indicating romantic interest, but it really suggests that the other person is acting on a
motivation either to influence you in some way or to possess you. Touching a stranger, or someone
else you are not close with, is very revealing and people who do this want you to be aware of this
clue. But it is important to be suspicious of what their real motives are as this behavior directed
toward a stranger is quite forward.

Physical distance can indicate like or dislike

A body language clue that some overlook is physical distance. Just as some may stand close to you
because they feel comfortable with you or are interested in you, so too might someone mark a distance
between you and them as a sign that they are not overly fond of you or feel uncomfortable. This clue
can also be interpreted as representing vulnerability as someone who dislikes you, but is confident
may not feel the need to mark such a distance.

The bearing of teeth can indicate comfort if it is in the form of a smile, or a desire to attack if it
is in a grimace

This is a body language cue that is very typical of primates. Most people tend to notice teeth bared in
a dramatic way, although this clue can sometimes be subtle. The baring of teeth in primates generally
indicates extreme dislike or a desire to challenge the other person. Although the interpretation of
teeth-baring may seem obvious, someone may want to give you the impression of being challenging
because they are scared, frightened, or feeling particularly vulnerable.

Movement of the hands around the hair and ears can be indicative of romantic interest

Movement of the hands is very telling. Someone may frequently touch their face because they are
lying or something else is making them anxious or edgy, but simply this is nothing more than an
indication of interest. Think the action of repetitively tucking hair behind the ears. This sort of action
can be an unconscious one in a person who is interested in another, or it can be a tool that a narcissist
or manipulator is using to give you the impression that they are interested.

Rapid, repetitive movements can indicate angst, discomfort, or dishonesty

Paying attention to repeated, rapid movements are a tip that can be put to good use in identifying a
liar. Some argue that, in particular, movements of the left hand in touching the face or other things is a
telltale sign of the liar. In reality, these sorts of movement can be regarded as indicative of
discomfort. This discomfort can come from dishonesty, or it can stem from somewhere else, such as
anxiety, agitation, or restrained emotion.
An open body posture can indicate confidence or comfort with the other person. On the other
hand, a hunched or closed posture can indicate a lack of confidence, discomfort, or exhaustion

Body position, especially when sitting, can be very indicative of the mood or demeanor of the other
person. Someone who is sitting with an open body posture, like with their hands on the chair, their
legs wide apart (for a male) or in a posture that simply looks open, can give an impression of
confidence, ease, or comfortability with the other person. On the other hand, a closed or hunched
body position can indicate an overall lack of confidence or exhaustion. Someone looking to
manipulate may regard the person with an open body position as ready to be influenced, but they
might also see someone with a closed body position as being vulnerable. They would likely utilize a
different strategy for the attack in these individuals.
Chapter 8: 10 Tips to Defend Yourself from Manipulation
Understanding how manipulators operate is the first step in defending yourself from manipulation. As
you have seen, the manipulator has many tools in their arsenal, from punishment and group, think to
positive reinforcement. The manipulator may begin with simple persuasion, a style of acting that most
of us are exposed to every day. Although learning about manipulation is the beginning of defense from
it, there are some tips that can help you to synthesize an understanding of manipulation strategies and
how to guard against them.

Tip 1. Do not reveal more to other people than absolutely necessary

Manipulators rely on the information that they have on you to attack you. Some of this is information
they obtain from other people while other information you may give them, albeit inadvertently.
Revealing things to someone who may be a manipulator is tantamount to inviting a vampire into the
house. You have just given them an open door to walk right into your brain. Approach interactions
with others like a witness on the stand or like the US military in the 1990s. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

Tip 2. Spend time getting to know others before you let them in

It is natural for us to seek close relationships with others, and this includes acceptance of our thoughts
and beliefs (and just who we are) by others. But the manipulator uses the normal aspects of human
behavior as a tool to undermine their victims. Although you cannot go through life perceiving
everyone as a dangerous monster out to get you (who wants to go through life like that?) you can learn
to take time in getting to know people before you tell them the names and ages of all your children.

Tip 3. Recognize when someone new seems overly friendly or sends off signs of closeness

A manipulator wants to be your friend. They are not stupid. They know that you are not to give your
bank account number and routing number to someone you do not like. That means they will do
everything they can to get you to like them and to trust them. It may be wise to be on guard for people
who seem to be going out of their way to be your friend, especially if you are the type who is more
reserved. A manipulator can also display other signs of closeness like showing up unexpectedly that
is designed to encourage you to let your guard down.
Tip 4. Be self-aware enough to know when your feelings or actions seem to originate outside of
yourself

Self-awareness involves recognizing your own emotions. What self-aware people often fail to do
however is to recognize where their emotions are coming from. If your emotions originate with your
own internal state, fine. But if your emotions seem to be unrelated to what is going on in your life or
how you were feeling previously, and there is someone knew who seems to be related to all this, then
it is possible that you are being mind controlled. Self-awareness also means knowing when your
emotions stem from someone else.

Tip 5. Learn the tools that manipulators use in their arsenal of attack

Education is crucial to guarding against manipulation (and narcissistic behavior in general). Once you
learn the sorts of things that manipulators tend to do, like establish an emotional connection with you
very quickly or to behave in a false way, then you can be better prepared to protect yourself. As
skilled as they may believe themselves to be, manipulators can behave in a pattern so once you learn
their patterns you are well on your way to keeping manipulators at bay.

Tip 6. If someone wants you to do something wonder what their motives are

You should always wonder what the motives of others are. As humans, we tend to project our own
beliefs our motivations onto other people. This means that if you are a good person then you may
assume that others are motivated by the same desires for good that you are. A person who wants to
influence you for their benefit isn’t going to shout, “Hey, I am trying to manipulate you here!” They
will instead plant an idea in your head and lead you to believe that it originated with you. Be on the
lookout.

Tip 7. Be on the lookout for your own subjective experience of an “emotional whirlwind” or
feeling opposite emotions in close proximity
If you are experiencing a lot of emotional ups and downs and this is not like you then chances are that
someone in your life is causing this. This kind of emotional turbulence can be due to a relationship
that is otherwise healthy, or it might be that a manipulator or narcissist is trying to weaken you by
turning you into a basket case. This is the perfect trick to send you flying into their arms, unaware of
course that they created this wreck just for that purpose. Be conscious of when you are not feeling
right emotionally and who might be the cause.

Tip 8. Be perceptive of when your actions seem not to benefit yourself

One of the sure-fire ways of spotting manipulation is when you notice that you are behaving in a way
that benefits someone else to the detriment of yourself. There is nothing wrong with helping out a
family member or a friend. Indeed, charity is perhaps the most beautiful quality of human beings, but a
manipulator is not someone who wants your charity. They want to use you and potentially destroy you.

Tip 9. Be suspicious when someone seems to be behaving strangely, including when their
emotions seem incongruent to what you know about them

A manipulator will appear to be someone that they are not. The façade that they present to the world
is designed to aid them in accomplishing their goals as seamlessly as possible. When you notice that
someone appears to be someone else than who they are presenting themselves to be then you might
just want to be on your guard with them. Distancing yourself from manipulative people is always a
good idea.

Tip 10. Wear a mask

If a manipulator causes you to change who you are then they have one. Narcissistic people and others
operative with dark psychology want to create a world of paranoia and anger around you. Sometimes
they do this simply because they want to harm you (and for no other reason). Although you should not
fundamentally change who you are because of bad experiences with others, it may be a good idea to
start holding your emotional cards close to your chest from now on.
Chapter 9: 10 Tips to Guard Yourself from Mind Control

There are tips that you can use to guard yourself against mind control (and break free). There are
different strategies of mind control, but neuro-linguistic programming or NLP, mind control is a
popular version that has been used by everyone from self-help gurus and coaches to politicians and
other prominent people in the public eye. These types of mind control have been described
previously, but it involves using language to induce a trance-like state, even vague language. You can
break free from NLP mind control and you can protect yourself. Here are some tips.

Tip 1. Avert your eyes and move them about unpredictably

Eye contact is a very powerful way to make an emotional connection with someone. Even animals
engage in this to some degree. A great way to confuse some controlling you is to move your eyes
around in a way that it is unpredictable. This prevents them from using eye contact as a means of
inducing control and it also will trip them up and make them uncomfortable.

Tip 2. Be suspicious of the use of nonspecific language

It is fascinating to learn the techniques of mind control as some of them are so simple. Vague language
has been shown to be effective at controlling the thoughts and motivations of others. In particular,
public speeches that use vague language can induce a sort of group trance. Any sort of language that is
nonspecific that you hear from a potential manipulator or narcissist should be a red flag.

Tip 3. Pay attention

Someone using mind control techniques will be closely attuned to any lack of attention on your part
and that may be a cue for them to try some mind control. Be aware of the sorts of things that are said
to you when you appear not to be paying attention, or just pay closer attention in the future.

Tip 4. Stop letting other people touch you

We talked about touching in terms of manipulation, but it applies here as well. In this case, the
touching is not actually to influence you but maybe to put you into a trance. Another touch later can be
enough to bring you out of a trance or to put you back in if you are already out. Breaking free from
mind control can be as simple as not allowing others to touch you.
Tip 5. Be cautious of someone speaking without really saying anything

Part of what makes hypnosis so alarming as that there are tricks that hypnotists use to induce a trance
in the listener. There are certain words or types of words that can induce this state so it is important
to be suspicious of people who are speaking in ways that sound like gibberish to you. The idea here
is not that the words have no meaning at all, but that they seem to be saying something but that the
words have little meaning when taken together. Think typical political speech.

Tip 6. Be suspicious of what others are really saying

Speech is the tool that hypnotists use to control you so you must pay attention to what they are saying
and what the words indicate to break free. Someone trained in NLP may make a statement but thrown
in there may be words that can be taken differently. Those may be suggestions that have been hidden
amongst another language. Be aware of the ways that NLP practitioners suggest things to you.

Tip 7. Leave situations where you feel that you are being guided into a decision

Sometimes the best step to breaking free from mind control is getting away from the situation. NLP
practitioners are skilled enough that they can control you through suggestion and other tactics while
you are entirely clueless of the situation. If you find that you are being guided into action or decision
it may be a good idea to simply leave. This is sort of like closing the door on the Jehovah’s Witness,
but sometimes that is what you have to do.

Tip 8. Let your intuition about people guide you

Sometimes your intuition about people is right, especially when it comes to behaviors that you
observe that appear strange. This is sort of like the scene in The Matrix where Neo sees the same cat
twice and his crew tells him that this is a sign that the agents changed something. If you see something
or hear something that seems or looks strange to you, it probably is.
Tip 9. Be suspicious of language that allows you to engage in a behavior

You may think that a narcissist or manipulator will engage in language that orders you to do this or
that, but this is not how neuro-language programming works. They use calming, permissive language
to induce you to go into a trance. Commands are not effective in the manner that permissive language
is so on the lookout for this.

Tip 10. Do not permit others to copy your body language

Part of what alarms about mind control is that it works because human beings are susceptible to mind
control. Indeed, you cannot even call it being clueless because most people simply do not know what
is going on. Someone copying your body language can be a sign that they are engaged in mind control
so one step towards breaking this pattern is immediately being aware of this and sensing danger.
Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is dark psychology?

Dark psychology refers to the arts of manipulation, persuasion, hypnosis, and mind control
that are practiced and studied by manipulators and others. The term is of recent origin,
reflecting an interest in a spectrum of practices that have been at work for hundreds of years
but which had not been grouped together and studied as a specific field before. Although dark
psychology lies outside the realm of academic psychological study, it is related to the field of
abnormal psychology and is based on aspects of individual psychology theory as promoted by
Alfred Adler in the early 20th century.

Dark psychology is studied both by those who have an interest in practicing it for their benefit
and by men and women interested in teaching others how to defend themselves from the acts
of narcissists, manipulators, and others using these tactics. Dark psychology encompasses a
wide range of behaviors that may be done intentionally to cause harm or which may indicate a
deep motivation to behave in a darkly destructive way. This aspect of dark psychology is
difficult for some men and women to understand or to relate to, but it represents an important
aspect of the field that explains the behavior of some people.

2. Is dark psychology a practice that only narcissists engage in?

An important concept within dark psychology theory is that all human beings are capable of
engaging in acts of evil. Many men and women believe perhaps that they are good and that
they are incapable of behaving in a manner that would be described as evil, but studies of
human behavior by researchers in dark psychology and others have revealed the capacity for
human beings to behave in a wantonly cruel or destructive way. The observation that human
beings are capable of behaving in this fashion is not something that psychologists and
psychiatrists have discovered, but it is an observation that has been made for hundreds of
years (if not longer than that).

Indeed, much of the writing of the French philosophers of the 18th century focused on the
question of the inherent goodness or badness of mankind because of a humanistic desire to
better educate young people for the world. These philosophers reached the conclusion that
Man was capable of behaving with great cruelty frequently in a willful manner. It is important
to observe that many of these people would not be described as narcissists today, requiring
that the reality of human cruelty be approached from a different standpoint. Although
specialists in animal behavior can (and have) argued that animals naturally behave in a selfish
or cruel way (what we might describe as narcissistic behavior today) the range of behaviors
displayed in dark psychology transcend what is seen in other animals, leading to a
phenomenon that some refer to as dark singularity.

3. What is a dark singularity?

It has been observed that human beings are capable of accessing a deep well of malign or
malevolent behaviors and some describe these as representing what is known as a dark
singularity. This is different from the dark triad that some have proposed as the traits in the
dark triad represent behaviors that are conscious and can be explained by traditional
psychological concepts. What dark singularity represents is a deep well of “evil” that human
beings can access on an individual or a group basis. An important aspect of dark singularity is
that it may not be entirely conscious, unlike narcissistic behavior, for example, that is
typically intentional.

It can be challenging for some to recognize what this dark singularity really refers to because
it is not a concept that is typically encountered in academic studies or in conversation. It can
be argued that religion has approached this concept in its construction of acts evil being the
result of possession or temptation by a demon, an evil spirit, or by Satan. Dark singularity,
therefore, represents this type of evil, purposeless motivation but without an external actor
like Satan to blame for the action. The cause would instead be a deep characteristic of human
beings that can be accessed by a manipulator as part of dark psychological practice.

4. Why do manipulators and others engage in dark psychological practices?

The question of what motivates us is important in psychology. Schools of psychology can be

distinguished by the motivators that they focus on as being important in human behavior.
Freudian psychoanalysis focuses on the sexual drive as being essential to human behavior
while individual psychology sees human beings as beings driven by deliberate and
individualistic goals, which is referred to as being purposive.

An important concept in modern approaches to dark psychology is this idea that human beings
may be motivated by both unconscious (or subconscious) motivations and purposive
motivations. Some teachers of dark psychology argue that human beings are motivated
purposefully, but that they are capable of behaving with what is sometimes called a dark
singularity, with this being a type of behavior that is directed towards harming others for
personal gain or for no reason at all.

5. Is there a difference between manipulation and persuasion?

Manipulation is a loaded term. Because of a desire to sanitize the term manipulation for the
purposes of book publishing, research, and other reasons, some have attempted to promote a
definition that includes a range of behaviors that most people would consider not so bad.
Because most people have negative connotations with the word manipulation, some
definitions have expanded the term to include behaviors that would be considered by most to
be persuasion rather than manipulation.
In fact, the distinction between manipulation and persuasion has always been somewhat
blurred. Persuasion falls under the scope of behaviors that would be considered
manipulation, rendering this first term a representative of a type of behaviors that technically
would be considered manipulation. Many men and women engage in persuasion in their
ordinary lives, whether in the work setting or with their family members at home. By
encouraging people to view manipulation more in terms of persuasion, writers on this subject
can convince readers to have a more open approach to the idea of using manipulation in their
daily lives.

The reality is that persuasion is a type of manipulation and can be regarded as the first step to
behaviors associated with narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, the so-called dark
triad. The purpose here is not to scare the reader away from using persuasion in their daily
lives (as many people do), but to help them recognize that human behaviors fall on a spectrum
and that the spectrum that includes persuasion also includes mind control and other less
savory things. By understanding this, the reader recognizes dark psychology not as a
peripheral set of behaviors used by a small group of narcissistic, psychopathic people, but as
a toolkit that all human beings are capable of drawing from. By recognizing this, you are
better able to defend yourself from those who can use something as simple as persuasion to
open the door to something far worse.

6. How do practitioners of the dark psychological art know what I am thinking in order to
manipulate me?

Human beings use both verbal and non-verbal communication to convey information to others.
It is important to pay attention to the things that we say (and how we say them) because of the
cues that they convey to other people, but we also need to think about the non-verbal cues that
we send that may convey to others our emotional state, particularly our fears, anxieties, our
feelings of envy or jealousy. Skillful manipulators know how to tell who is easy prey based
on the cues that they send that convey their emotional state.
But you do not have to reveal information to a skillful manipulator or narcissist using
communication for them to manipulate them. A skilled manipulator understands human beings
very well. They know that human beings want approval, want to belong, and try to make
emotional connections with others. A manipulator will rely on your desire for approval and to
belong to the group to influence your behavior. There are tools in the manipulation toolkit that
allow a manipulator to get you to think like them or to do want they want you to do. They
might be so good at their tactics that you do not realize that a plan then you are motivated to
follow came not from your own mind, but from them.

7. What place does dark psychology have in established schools of psychological thinking?

Dark psychology is not regarded as a formal field within psychology. All this means is that
dark psychology typically is not taught in the academic setting, like theoretical psychology,
abnormal psychology, and psychoanalysis. In truth, dark psychology is a fringe subject, in part
because of the tendency of established schools of thought and of some religions to have a
hypocritical approach to those aspects of human behavior that are obvious to many, but deeply
unsavory.

We can all make the observation that human beings behave in ways that are unfriendly,
antisocial, harmful, or wantonly cruel. Sometimes people engage in these behaviors with no
benefit to themselves. The study of these types of behaviors and the people who engage in
them is undertaken in abnormal psychology and psychiatry, but the approach of dark
psychology to this subject is rather different. Dark psychology uses theories from established
schools of psychological thinking to explain behaviors without the smoke and mirrors or
hypocrisy that is associated with some psychological theories.

8. Does self-awareness mean that I should claim my dark side and embrace dark
psychology?
Self-awareness is a term that is frequently used in the field of emotional intelligence to
describe a type of emotional ability that is regarded as positive and is encouraged. Emotional
intelligence is a type of intelligence that focuses on recognizing one’s own emotions and the
emotions of others and using emotional sensitivity as a guide for behavior. Empathy is also an
important component of emotional intelligence.

Self-awareness is the aspect of EI concerned with being aware of one’s own emotions and
accurately labeling them and understanding them. The argument could be made that as part of
self-awareness men and women should claim the emotions and the related behaviors that
represent how they feel and are motivated to act. In other words, some people’s thinking may
incline them to believe that behaviors falling under the banner of dark psychology are not to
be discouraged because they represent an awareness of our own motivations however dark.

Although the purpose of this particular point is not to argue one way or the other whether
these types of behaviors should be given into, the idea of protecting oneself from dark
psychology presupposes that there is an acceptance that these types of behaviors can be very
damaging to oneself (at the very least). Furthermore, self-awareness alone does not lead to
emotional intelligence. Self-awareness is intended to act in concert with other aspects of EI
like self-regulation and empathy to create someone whose interactions with others follow a
certain pattern.

Someone who behaves solely with self-awareness would be inclined to behave

narcissistically or even psychopathically because the only emotions or motivations that
mattered would be their own. An emotionally intelligent individual is aware of the emotions
and motivations of others as much as their own, and the regard these emotions and
motivations as just as important in guiding behavior as their own. Therefore, though we can
leave aside a recommendation of whether one individual or another should engage in dark
psychological practice, we will state that behaving with self-awareness alone does not
represent true EI and that people who behave this way may be regarded in psychiatry as
possessing a personality disorder.

9. Are dark psychological practices becoming more common now or have they always been
a prominent aspect of human behavior?

A thorough study of human behavior makes it very clear that the sorts of behaviors that we
regard today as falling under dark psychology have been around perhaps as long as there have
been people. These types of behavior consist of the sorts of things that we see from members
of the dark triad of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. These behaviors include
those such as manipulation, mind control, hypnosis in order to do harm, and many more.
Cleary, these behaviors have been around for thousands of years as testamentary evidence
indicates.

The question then becomes whether these behaviors are becoming more common today than
they were previously. There is a reason to believe that these behaviors are becoming more
common today, and the increasing frequency of these types of behaviors can be attributed to
various social, economic, and educational factors. As was mentioned in the answer to a
previous question, mistaken ideas about self-awareness or individuality may be causing
individuals to behave in ways more narcissistic than would have been acceptable previously.
This is not intentional in many cases, but the result of mistaken ideas about individuality and
free will.

Indeed, though individuality is a quality from which the wellspring of a civilization perhaps
springs, it can be argued that human beings (like other animals) are no individualistic by
nature. We have evolved to behave in a group fashion and to be imprinted by thoughts and
behaviors of others like ourselves. What mistaken beliefs about self-awareness and
individuality actually accomplish is to cause individuals to behave narcissistically because
they act based on motivations of self-interest and “self-awareness” rather than behaving with
empathy and having regard for the thoughts and concerns of others.
10. What is the dark triad?

In psychology, the dark triad represents three personality traits that are regarded as having
“dark” or malevolent motivations. The personality traits associated with the dark triad are
narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. This term is used in applied psychology as
well as criminal science, clinical psychology, and management as a way of highlighting
behavior types that may be particularly dangerous or difficult to deal with.

From the standpoint of dark psychology, the dark triad represents personality types that may
be particularly motivated to behave in a harmful or damaging way, but some argue that all
human beings have the capacity to behave with “dark singularity” as it is sometimes called.
What the dark triad does are isolate individuals who are perceived as especially
troublesome, although the truth would be that all men and women have elements of these
individuals in their personality. And for anyone wondering what Machiavellianism means, it
refers to individuals who manipulate and deceive without regard to others, the syndrome
taking its name from the Machiavellian idea that some individuals are permitted to act outside
regards for the law and the rights of others.

11. How do I know if I am being manipulated?

There are many signs that you can use to help you determine if you are being manipulated. If
you find that you are acting in ways that you do not understand, that does not benefit you, or
which seem to stem from someone else then there is a chance that you are being manipulated.
It is common to look to others that we care about for advice. It is also common for us to want
to be agreeable to others, which can cause us to say “yes” when we really should be saying
know. A manipulator understands human nature and they know how to use these aspects of
human nature against their victims.
12. How do I know if I am the victim of mind control?

Mind control is an effective tactic in part because many people do not know they are a victim
of it. New converts to dark psychological practices can sometimes be less adept at the arts of
hypnosis, mesmerism, and mind control than those who are more studied so individuals who
are targets are sometimes aware that they are victims, but in true, deep mind control the
victim is generally unaware of what is happening to them. As was mentioned in the answer to
the question about manipulation, you may discover that you are the victim of mind control if
you become aware that you are acting in a way that seems strange, unlike you, or in which you
do not understand the motivation.

A difficulty here is determining whether you are acting in a way suggestive of dark singularity
that does not stem from someone else or if you truly are acting out of mind control. Remember
that individuals can be manipulated to behave in a destructive or narcissistic way, or they may
behave this way of their own volition. Some people choose to enlist the help of others who
may be able to break them out of the hold of mind control, and this can be a hypnotist or
another person who understands imprinting and mind control.

13. How do I break free of mind control?

Some people are able to break free of NLP mind control on their own. Once an individual
realizes that they are the victim of mind control, they are sometimes able to slowly release the
hold of the manipulator by understanding the ways in which the manipulator is controlling
them. For example, a skillful manipulator may suggest actions or thoughts to you in a way that
causes you to believe that the thoughts originated with yourself. A person engaged in mind
control may go a step further. They may have hypnotized you to cause you to behave in a way
that benefits them or suits them. If this is the case, being aware of the mind control may not be
enough to break free.
In cases like these, individuals may choose to go to another hypnotist, spiritualist, or someone
else engaged in dark psychology. There are risks associated with this course of action. Human
beings have a tendency to act in a group fashion therefore if you reveal to someone that you
have been the victim of a psychological attack there will be an inclination for the person you
have told this to join in on the attack, especially if you are a stranger to them. Caution must,
therefore, be exercised in revealing that you are a victim of mind control and in enlisting
someone to help you. Although it can be difficult to break free of mind control on your own,
some men and women are able to do it by training their mind in various ways. This may
include meditation, chanting, or other spiritual activities that release negative energy or
encourage mental detachment.

14. Are the fantastic monsters of legend invented in the past merely ways of
describing aspects of human behavior that were unsavory?

Some would argue that the monsters, fallen angels, and demons that characterize the mythos of
some peoples and some religions really represent a desire to explain away those aspects of
human behavior that were difficult to explain or just not pretty. The fact of the matter is that
human beings can do bad things to one another (and often do). All one need do is open up a
history book to get a glimpse of that, and history books sometimes do attempt to gloss over
events that do not portray human beings in a positive light.

Human beings have been known to murder wantonly, to commit genocide, to launch witch
trials, to participate in acts of mass hysteria, or to behave in other ways that are harmful to
others and which sometimes have no purpose. Perhaps the writers of religious texts and the
inventors of myths created demons and monsters to mask those humans that have behaved in a
monstrous way. Do human beings wear a mask? Yes, and they wear one because the image
beneath may be too unsightly to look at.

15. Am I at risk of becoming a practitioner of dark psychological practices?

Everyone is at risk of becoming a practitioner of the dark psychological arts whether as a
victim of manipulation or mind control, because they have inadvertently tapped into the well
of dark singularity that all human beings are capable of, or because they choose to engage in a
manner that results in harm to others. In the context of this book, this question is really getting
at whether someone can become a practitioner of these sorts of behaviors because of the
influence of another person and the answer to that question is yes.

A manipulator, narcissist, Machiavellian person, or psychopathic person can lead others to

behave in a way that is destructive through imprinting or mind control, or by other skills like a
suggestion. The distinction between suggestion and mind control is murky as suggestion can
be thought of as a tool that can be used to control another person’s thoughts or actions. If you
fear that you may engage in practices that run contrary to your character and beliefs then there
are steps that you can take to protect yourself from potential mind control or even the most
basic forms of suggestion.

One of these tricks is very simple. Learn to be suspicious. This does not mean that you should
be paranoid, perceiving every person around you as a potential threat with sinister designs
against you, but when you notice yourself having an unusual thought or behaving in a strange
way after an interaction with someone be curious. For example, if someone says something
pointed to you ask yourself why they said that. A manipulator can suggest you into disliking or
attacking another person merely with their words. If a narcissist uses this type of trick to steer
you into a dark psychological act, halt yourself and ask, “why was I about to do that? Where
did that idea come from?”

Of course, the frightening aspect of dark psychology is that men and women are often
incapable of stopping themselves from behaving in a sinister way. As much as it may pain
some people to acknowledge it this is a reality of human beings. As animals, we are capable
of behaving in a narcissistic way, and as human beings, we are capable of being vicious and
cruel for no reason at all. So, yes, you are at risk of behaving in a manner consistent with the
arts of dark psychology, but if there is goodness (what some religions or schools of thought
may call “humanity” or “human nature” in contrast to animal nature), then your defenses are
likely stronger than other people’s.

16. Should I engage in dark psychological practices?

The decision of whether or not to engage in practices that involve the willful harm of others is
not such a straightforward one for many people. As we touched on in the answer to the
previous question, the issue really boils down to the sort of person that you are. It must be
recognized that some people are reading this book because they are interested in pursuing the
path of dark psychology. But others are reading because they have been exposed to narcissists
and other dangerous people and they want to protect themselves.

A person who is interested in protecting themselves from manipulation or mind control should
not engage in these sorts of behaviors themselves because some may consider this as giving
others permission to treat them the same way. Also, if you are worried about narcissistic or
psychopathic acts against you it is probably because you recognize how harmful they can be
and these acts repulse you in some way. In the end, the decision of how to behave is up to you,
but it is important to remember that many religions believe in universal energy that some call
karma and through your actions you can open up the door for negative energy being returned to
you.

17. Does dark psychology represent a range of behaviors that distinguishes human
beings from other animals?

Most animals have a hunting instinct, the innate tendency to detect prey and to attack it with
ferocity. In this regard, human beings are similar to other animals as we also have this
instinct. In fact, human beings are at the top of the food change so our choices of prey are
wide and numerous. But two aspects of human behavior appear that mark out humans as
different from other species in the animal kingdom. Human beings appear to have a strong
instinct to prey upon and even kill members of their own species. And, more importantly,
human beings are known to murder without any goal or motive at all.
The essential idea is necessary to understand the predator is recognizing that they are
motivated by something, usually a drive to obtain food, territory, or for survival. Human
beings have demonstrated time and time again that they engage in acts of violence that are
truly wanton: of which there is no clear benefit to the predator. Human beings are believed to
be the only species in the animal kingdom that kill without reason. The term dark singularity
has been coined to describe this tendency of human beings to be motivated to kill without any
clear goal or reason. This dark singularity represents a sinister well of human motivation that
all human beings can potentially tap into, representing the capacity for all human beings to act
in a wantonly evil way.
Conclusion

Dark psychology is a set of practices designed to manipulate and control others for the benefit of the
manipulator. The tools of this art lie on a spectrum and include beginner drugs like persuasion (the
marijuana joint) of dark psychology all the way up to mind control (the high-grade Colombian
powder of the manipulator). Dark psychology can be studied by those interested in using it to get what
they desire and by those motivated to defend themselves from control.

This field of study may be of recent origin, but it draws from established schools of psychology such
as the individual psychology concept of Alfred Adler. The approach of dark psychology to human
motivation may be more Adlerian in gestalt, but there is some room for the psychoanalytical approach
to human motivation as promoted by Sigmund Freud, with whom Adler spent some formative time.
Dark psychology, therefore, sees human behavior as being purposive, meaning that it has a goal or
purpose, rather than being purely motivated by subconscious forces like libido.

But the dark psychology idea does recognize that human beings are capable of behaving darkly
without purposive force. In this fashion, this field approaches human behavior in a manner that is
more direct and perhaps less hypocritical than is sometimes seen in academic psychology. Dark
psychology recognizes that human beings can behave in a way that is harmful, destructive, antisocial,
or cruel for no reason at all. The tendency for psychology to dance around the observation that human
beings can behave in this way is part of what renders dark psychology an exciting field of study.

Most people study the subject for purposes of defense. Defending oneself from these dark arts
requires an understanding of how manipulators and persuaders work and what motivates them. As
persuasion can have motivations both positive and negative (at least, it is generally regarded as more
positive than manipulation), even those uninterested in adopting dark psychological tactics can benefit
from learning the skills of persuasion.

Neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP, is really a field of equal prominence with dark psychology. It
has been studied for more than 40 years and has been used by news anchors, public speakers,
politicians, and others. This technique of mind control is so powerful that the uninitiated can go from
free will to conditioned in a matter of minutes. Because of this, learning how to defend from NLP (as
well as manipulation) is important in arming men and women for protection from dark psychology. So
armed, you can live free from the world of fear and paranoia that the manipulator seeks to erect
around you.