EverydaySpy Podcast - Narcissism’s Deadly PSYCHOLOGICAL Patterns EXPOSED

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

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This is where it becomes really important to track consistency and effort. When someone is inconsistent in their behavior, meaning they're nice to you, and then they get less nice, and then maybe even over time, they get straight up mean or abusive, right? Or even worse, they were nice to you all the time at the beginning, and now you're at a place where they're nice on Monday, mean on Tuesday. Nice on Tuesday morning, mean on Monday night. Nice when you're in public mean when you're in private. That's massive inconsistency. Huge. That should be a red flag. And here's what's so hard, Lisa. I think to most people, that is a red flag. I think most people sit there and they know that something is not right. They may not assume that the person is narcissists.

They may not assume that the person is abusive. They may give that person every benefit of the doubt. But they know something isn't right. Oftentimes, this is why women blame themselves. Why they say, I must be doing something wrong. I must be making him upset. If I just change this or if I just do this or if I just don't talk about this or if I just don't talk to that person, right, I'll make everything better.

Or they'll explain away that their partner or the other person in relationship is going through something. Oh, it's just a hard time at work. Oh, it's just a stressful period with their parents or oh, you know, whatever. They're just not dealing well with the recent news. Who knows what?

They'll explain away what they already know are signs of inconsistency. A trained person, and anybody hearing this conversation, needs to understand that when you see the inconsistency, you've got to call it what it is. It's inconsistent behavior. Not your problem, a change in the behavior pattern of the person that you're with.

If that's coming from you, that's one thing. But don't leap to the conclusion that their inconsistency is because of you. Focus on the fact that it's an inconsistency first. because then when you look at the effort next, that effort is going to give everything. Does more effort go into them being nice? Does more effort go into them being mean? Does more effort go into them trying to ignore you?

Where does their effort go? There's a great saying at CIA that we all care about the things where we put are time, money, and energy, our efforts. So if you see somebody putting a lot of effort into being nice, chances are that's what they're trying to be. They really may be stressed out. see them really trying hard to be nice. But if all their effort goes into ignoring you and being mean, that's what they care about, right? The being nice thing is just convenient and easy in the moment. So if you were with somebody, let's say I gave you two hours with them and you started to notice that,

let's say, their body language and their verbal communication weren't in line. How would you start to decipher whether they're just awkward or they've got anxiety or they're trying to lie to you and they're just bad at covering it up. There's multiple layers to this, because in some ways, two hours takes away my benefit of time. Remember, I need time, consistency, and effort? Yeah, exactly.

That's why I did it. So if you take away my time, then the only two things I have now are consistency and effort. So what that means is I need to step out of the role of being passive and into the role of being aggressive or assertive. Instead of letting them talk, I need to ask questions. I need to direct questions.

I need to probe. I need to control the situation. Oftentimes, one of the fastest ways to crack a con is to take control when they're used to having control. Right. So let's just take a real quick example. Con man is trying to lure an older woman into trusting him with her money. More than likely that con man is going to show his confidence by controlling the scenario. We're going to go to this restaurant.

You're going to love it. I can't wait to show you this wine and you're going to love the escargo. That's not him being nice. That's him creating a box where he can control the experience inside that box. If that woman wants to test to see

if that's genuine or if that's con man behavior, all she has to do is be like, I'm not really feeling like that tonight. What I'm feeling like is tacos. How does he respond to that? If what you see is him be like, no, no, no, I really put this together for you.

Like, I really want you to experience. it's important to me. That's a man panicking. When a guy's like, tacos, that's interesting. Like, really? I'm open to tacos, but I don't know any good taco joints. That's him giving you control. Con men do not give up their control. Trained fabricators and manipulators will fight to keep control. It's natural to them because they don't know how to handle themselves outside of control, right? They have to give up control and that makes them uncomfortable, where somebody who's genuinely interested in you will let you take control because what's their number one priority giving you an experience that builds your confidence and trust in them genuinely not in a

fabricated fashion this may seem like a silly question but I really do mean it genuinely people who have OCD are control freaks so what's the difference between someone that's just got OCD and gets nervous about change or someone that's genuinely trying to control you you That's where you have to trust body language and verbal cues. When you're talking to somebody with OCD and you try to take them outside of what they're comfortable in, you physically see their physiology change. You can see them start to shake.

You can see them get really uncomfortable. You can almost see a fear response because this is too far outside of what they're comfortable with. That's OCD behavior. You might also see them make a shift where they want every detail about where they're going, right? because if they're going to go to a taco joint, they want to know what's the name, what are the reviews, when was the last time somebody got food poisoning, let me ask a friend, like, who do you

know that's been there? Those are OCD behaviors. When you see somebody who doubles down on on keeping things their way, that is the sign of a dangerous control freak. That's not somebody who's OCD. OCD is still, they are malleable, right, but with a lot of effort. Whereas a person who just fully resists, that is a sign of somebody who's trying to maintain control. When it comes to relationships especially, if you run into somebody who's fighting for control, you don't want that person. It doesn't matter how polite they seem, doesn't matter how much other people like them, that is not what you want for the rest of your life. If they can't let you take control of tonight's movie, if they can't let you take control of the restaurant, if they can't let you take control of

what day you get together, if they can't let you take control of when you have sex, If they can't let you take control of those things, especially, I'm not saying do it every time. I'm saying just periodically test the relationship to see if control is really something that's shared, right? If they're not willing to do that now, do you really wanna have kids, you really wanna marry bank accounts,

you really wanna have life insurance policies? Like it's a huge sign that you can't trust the person. If they are too immature, to share control, you still don't want them, let them go gain some maturity or keep your distance, right? keep yourself safe. But you've got to look for the red flags and understand that they are red flags when you see them. That was so well said. Okay, I've got another interesting question for you. So if I was to hook you up to a polygraph machine and I want you to imagine, pretend that you have

cheated on your wife and now I've got you hooked up to a polygraph and I ask you questions, how would you pass the polygraph? The polygraph is. is one of the least understood tools by the American public. I don't know if you knew this, polygraph is not accessible, it's not acceptable evidence in a court case. Polygraphs don't actually tell you if someone's being truthful or dishonest.

They're called a lie detector test, but they don't actually detect lies. What they detect is something called sensitivity. So the idea is that a human polygrapher will be able to interpret the data from a polygraph and make a conclusion about whether or not you are sensitive to a certain topic, meaning you're sensitive to a topic about drugs,

or you're sensitive to a topic about murder, or you're sensitive to a topic about abuse. And then that sensitivity is supposed to be what a trained interrogator can dig into, right? That's why polygraphs are not admissible in court because they're not actually detecting truthfulness. They're detecting sensitivity. So when you think about that,

you realize that passing and failing don't really exist. You can't pass or fail a lie detector. All you're doing in polygraph is you're creating a baseline of what you are and are not sensitive to. So using that understanding, anybody who wants to beat a polygraph essentially can. You beat the polygraph by making the polygraph results null and void. Essentially what that means is you show sensitivity to everything. Oh, I thought you were going to go the opposite. Don't show sensitivity to anything.

It's very, so remember we talked about liars? You can tell when someone's lying because they put a lot of effort into something. The amount of effort that goes into acting calm is much less effort than the effort that goes into actually being nervous. So when somebody is on a lie detector trying to act calm, there will be a physiological tell that gives them away. I don't know if you've, have you ever done a polygraph? No, I'm fascinated. We should get you organized. Oh my God, I would love to.

They're so uncomfortable. So just some of the elements, they measure your heart rate, they measure your body temperature, they measure your sphincter control, they measure your muscle movements, and then they also measure like your eyebrows or your facial movements. So all of those, to control all of those things simultaneously take so much effort that your heart rate would increase and your body temperature would increase, right? Whereas if you sat down in a polygraph and all you did was just think about all the most uncomfortable things in the world, think about it. about ants crawling up your shorts, think about cold weather, think about whatever else. And all of those different body parts are gonna start to react in inconsistent ways.

You're gonna move in your seat because you don't wanna, like you can feel the ants crawling on you, that's gonna throw off your sphincter control. You're gonna feel your muscles tensing. Sometimes it's your calf, sometimes it's your shoulder, sometimes it's your forearms. That's gonna throw off the muscle the tension. Heart rate's gonna increase, decrease, increase again, decrease again.

Blood pressure is gonna increase, decrease, decreasing. That's gonna make the polygrapher look at the polygraph results and say, I can't interpret any sensitivity. It has it's totally independent of the questions. I ask about drugs. They're weird. I ask about abuse. They're weird. I ask about what's your real name? What's your real birthday? And the physiology is different. So, I mean, what the bad part of a polygrapher or the bad part of a polygraph is anybody can beat it by simply making the results null. And that's what polygrapers have to deal with. And that's why FBI, CIA, DEA, we all hate the polygraph because It's just, it's an impossible tool when you, when they use it against you, you're like, dude, I had bad Indian food last night. I swear I'm not a spy.

You're like, that's why I'm sweating. That's why my heart's racing. But the polygrapher is like, no, we caught you in the act. You're like, no, you didn't catch me in shit. You're going to catch me in shit if you keep me here much longer. That's amazing. Okay, so we actually said something. They're looking at the facial expression.

So explain to me a few things because, I mean, look, you've heard, I think there's so much myth out there as well about, and I've heard you say, if you look up to the left, it means you're lying. If you look up to the right, it means you're telling the truth. Like, there's just a lot of myths out there. But what are like some of the universal, like, okay, these actually are true? It's not in and of itself an example of yes, they are lying. But I'm really trying to think about that woman that's listening right now. And when you trust someone and you give over that trust and then they lie to you, you do blame yourself. And then sometimes you never trust again. So I understand it's never black and white, but what are some of the things that we can maybe look out for,

especially I've got to hate infidelity, but that's the biggest one that really wrecks so many of us, women, where we trust our partner, we believe them, we believe some crazy idea. When we're out of that relationship, we're like, I can't believe I believe that. Right. But when you're in it, as a woman, you do tie your emotion to that person. So are there any things that we can just in general look at that can be signs that they're not telling you the truth? So yes, there are. And here's what I would say.

I want to use kind of a very simple three-part solution that works 90% of the time. Okay. Okay. But not 100% of the time because cultures are different. People are different, right? If you're dating somebody who's on the spectrum, they will be totally different than somebody who's highly emotional. If you're dating a creative person but you're an accountant, you're going to react completely

different to things, right? So that's why there's three steps. There's three steps because you can never trust any one piece of data. The goal is always get yourself to a position where you have more options and can collect more information. If there's a rule of thumb I would have for every woman out there, put yourself in a position where you have more options and collect more information. As long as you have more options and more information, you will always have what we call information superiority over the situation. Right. So whatever choice you make, more options, more information. So you're with somebody.

You want to know if they're lying. You suspect infidelity. The first kind of question I want to teach people to ask is a time-based question. The human brain, it works in a very rational, very logical way whenever time is presented. Because time is one of those things that is universal. It doesn't matter whether or not you're of a tribe that's undiscovered in Africa or whether you're part of Western high society. Everybody knows time is a one-way direction.

And most of us visualize time, physically visualized time as a chronology that goes in the same direction as we read. So you see time going from left to right. Chinese see time going from top to bottom. Japanese is from right to left, right? There you go. So you've got all these people who are going to see time through the lens of a chronology that is the direction that they read. Have you ever watched somebody read a book? Yes.

You can literally see their eyes move. You can do the same thing when you ask someone a time-based question. So I'll just give you a real quick example. Lisa, when was the last time you had a really good steak? Stop right there. Everybody who's watching just saw all I needed to see. Your eyes moved to the left. Yeah, they did.

Your eyes moved to the left because you were referencing the chronology from today. When was the last time I had a good steak? So if you're asking somebody a time-based question and you see their eyes move to the left, up, down is indifferent. But if you see their eyes move to the left, you know they're referencing their chronology in their brain because that's how they read for Western society. So whatever you were about to say,

you were genuinely trying to find the right time. If I were to say, what was the last time you had a good stake in your eyes were just stay still or even get bigger? Now I know you're fighting your instinct. Fighting your instinct takes effort. Effort is one of the three things that you look for when you know that someone's lying to you or when you suspect someone's lying to you.

Right? So the first kind of question is a time-based question. You think someone's having an affair? Where were you last night? Um, I would at work. So if they just stay right in your eye, that can be a sign. That can be a sign. Or if they look to the right, because when they look to the right, looking right gets your creative brain. Your creative brain means you're coming up with a story. Right? So where was I last night? Hmm. Well, I was obviously working out at the gym. Right? I'm trying to. to find a story. I'm trying to be creative. I'm not trying to reference my true chronology. Even worse, you see someone, I'm trying to reference, oh, that's what I was doing. What I mean is, anybody who's still listening to this conversation can literally rewind just a few seconds and watch how fast you looked to the left. It happens that fast, which is why I don't tell people that it's a one-stop shop. The second kind of question to ask is a feelings question, an emotional question.

Because when you ask somebody feeling questions, you see all sorts of micro expressions in their face because they react to a feeling. Right? So I was telling you a story earlier. Just neutralize your face. If you want you, you can close your eyes. Right?

Which one? Keep them open. All right. What was it like the first time you met Tom? That's it. That's everything we need right there. Whatever you're about to say, it's going to be true. That's all we need. Why?

Because everybody watching just saw your eyes move to the left. left and as soon as your eyes move to the left you landed on a memory and as soon as you landed on the memory all of your smile muscles starting to kick in you're so wide so fresh sun