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If holidays make your body clench before your mind even knows why, you’re not broken — your nervous system is replaying a childhood where holidays were a performance, not a place of safety, warmth, or connection.

Because some of us didn’t grow up with warmth or safety.

We grew up in homes where you could feel the emotional weather shift before anyone spoke. Where the expectation to be perfect consumed every holiday.

Where the table was beautifully set…
…but every person was quietly bracing.

Where “tradition” meant:

• walking on eggshells
• anticipating explosions
• dodging silent treatments
• managing someone else’s mood so the day didn’t collapse

For some of us, holidays weren’t celebrations.
They were tests.
And the test was always:
“Can you keep the peace well enough not to get targeted?”

And here’s the part no one tells you:

If you grew up like this, your body will react to the holidays even decades later.

You’ll tighten.
You’ll dread.
You’ll feel that old pressure that nothing you ever do is “right”.
Even if you’re an adult now.
Even if you moved away.
Even if the dysfunctional person is no longer alive.

And for some people, it isn’t just the past.
It’s the present — the relationship you’re in now, the partner who destabilizes the home, the dynamic that forces you to manage someone else’s reactivity just to get through the season.

If the holidays feel unsafe now, you’re not failing.
You’re still trying to survive someone else’s instability — someone who never took responsibility, so you did.

Here’s the truth no one gave you as a child:

Nothing was wrong with you. Something was wrong around you.

You weren’t “too sensitive.”
You weren’t dramatic.
You weren’t the reason they yelled, sulked, triangulated, or blamed.
You were doing emotional acrobatics no child — or adult — should ever have to do.

Your body remembers what others deny.
Holiday dread isn’t a personality flaw.
It’s a survival response.

But here’s the part they never got to steal:

You get to redefine what holidays mean now.

Even if dysfunction still surrounds you, you have choices — small ones, quiet ones, internal ones.

You can choose peace where you find it.
You can say “no.”
You can opt out entirely.
You can spend the day with people who don’t require psychological gymnastics.
You can call quiet “safety,” not “selfish.”

And if this year still feels heavy —
if November hits and your chest tightens,
if your body revolts,
if someone still makes the holidays confusing, chaotic, or unsafe —

That isn’t failure.
That’s your nervous system doing the one job it always did: protect you.

You’re unlearning survival patterns that ran deep.
You’re living truths you were never allowed to see.
You’re responding to reality — not the story someone tried to force you to believe.

And here’s the shift that matters:

If this was your childhood — or your present — you’re not imagining it.
You’re noticing it.

Your body caught the truth long before anyone named it.
It always did.

You don’t owe anyone a reenactment of the role they assigned you.
Not this year.
Not ever.

Your holidays don’t have to be performances anymore.
They get to be honest — even if honesty looks nothing like tradition.

May this give you the one thing you weren’t allowed back then:
a clear view of what’s true.

The post Holiday Dread Isn’t Drama — It’s a Nervous System That Remembers appeared first on Renee Ellory | Eyes for Lies.

People think the truth shows up when things are easy. It doesn’t.

Calm hides more lies than stress ever will—that’s what makes psychopaths dangerous.

Tell me your favorite color is red when it’s really purple — nothing’s at stake, so I won’t know and won’t care.

But under stress? That’s where people bleed.

I’ve been hip-deep in brutal legal contract negotiations for months — the past two weeks especially ugly — and one truth keeps making my life a hell of a lot easier: Stress is the great unmasker. Not because it invents new behavior, but because it deletes the rehearsed ones.

When pressure hits, three things break first:

• Cognitive Load Stress piles on more balls than any human can juggle. The more you juggle, the more you drop. Self-monitoring is the first casualty. The internal editor goes offline. That’s when unfiltered data sneaks out, if you know where to look.
• Cognitive Shortcuts Under load, people stop taking the scenic route. They grab the fastest heuristic available. Those shortcuts reveal the true hierarchy of values — not the one on the LinkedIn bio, sales sheet or advertisement—the ones that actually run the show.
• Behavioral Contradictions The rehearsed storyline collapses. Mouth says “I’m fine with this” while the leg bounces like it’s trying to start a lawnmower. The gap between scripted sales and reaction is where the truth spills out (and oh do I love that).

Most people misread stress. They treat it as the clue. It can be a clue but more importantly — it’s an amplifier. The agitation isn’t the most important signal; it’s often the volume knob cranked to fifteen on whatever was already there.

Truth lives in the deviation, not just the agitation. Agitation may or may not reveal, but stress reveals the true story.

Even in my own body I catch it: heart rate spikes before my thoughts finish when under load; shoulders lock before my brain admits there’s anything uncomfortable. You know what I’m talking about—where things leak that, when we see it played back, we go, “I really did that? I had no idea!! I was under stress.” Yep. It says so much.

If you want to understand people — really understand them — stop studying them when they’re calm.

Stop studying them at Sunday brunch.

Study them at the negotiation table, when in pursuit of a hot contract, where five figures are at stake—when the deal is bleeding out and the clock is approaching the final deadline.

That’s when the mask cracks.

That’s where the truth finally walks in — uninvited, unshaven, and impossible to ignore.

If this made you nod or laugh at the lawnmower leg — hit share.

Send it to the friend who’s always “totally chill.”

The post Stress is the Great Unmasker. Use It. appeared first on Renee Ellory | Eyes for Lies.

Open up TikTok, read articles on deception, and you will see it: Liars touch their nose more!

I’m shocked to see this advice still online in 2025.

If it is, the practical truth remains: it is not reliable as a clue. If you rely on it, I guarantee it will distract you from the truth.

Would an expert, like me, who was scientifically studied, use that to spot a liar?

No. Not even close.

Because single behaviors don’t expose deception. They’re often noise.

They fluctuate with stress, allergies, temperature, personality, and dozens of other factors.

From Research to Pop Culture Fiction

This particular myth gained modern traction because of researchers Dr. Alan Hirsch and Dr. Charles Wolf. In 2002, they presented research suggesting a link between deception and increased nasal tissue volume due to adrenaline release. This work popularized the specific physiological theory of the “nose touch lie.”

Lie To Me then ran with it, popularizing it on the TV show. The problem is: Lie to Me lied to you!

So many people online sell snake oil tips to spot a liar, but you know deep down inside if you followed most of the stuff shown—you’d be more confused than ever.

The Simple Truth

Deception is revealed from understanding people, first and foremost, and then noticing the incongruencies in their behavior across multiple channels. Plain and simple.

Single clues can reveal a liar in context to the total scenario. Inconsistencies pop up between emotions, words spoken, and body language—an that’s where lies live—but the whole context matters.

Should we continue to debunk the myths perpetuated online? Share your thoughts below!

The post Do Liars Really Touch Their Nose More? Here’s the Truth. appeared first on Renee Ellory | Eyes for Lies.

Scientifically validated lie detector: AI still fails.

AI Generated Image

As someone who’s been scientifically validated for high-accuracy lie detection, you’d think chatting with AI about deception would be simple—maybe even entertaining.
It isn’t.

Sometimes I talk to AI to vent. Sometimes to sanity-check an experience—to see if I’m missing something. What it reflects back is… illuminating.

No.

Can it occasionally catch a lie?
Yes.

Is it reliable enough for anything serious?
Absolutely not. The idea that someone might trust it for that makes me go cold.

Will that change?
Eventually, yes. When? No one knows.

When I tell AI I was scientifically tested for deception detection (Ekman & O’Sullivan, The Wizards Project), it reacts with curiosity—as if it forgets it’s a machine. It wants to learn my method (which I’m not giving it). Then it immediately tries to explain how it thinks I catch liars… and it fails spectacularly.

It recites the usual myths:

• “micro-delays a normal nervous system wouldn’t produce”
• “emotion appearing too early or too late”
• “eye shifts tied to cognitive-load curves”
• “rehearsed lines with the wrong physiological rhythm”
• “liars fidget or cross arms”

Every single one of these is false.

When I share a real scenario—one where someone blatantly lied—and ask AI for a second opinion, it often tells me the person was telling the truth. When I walk it through what it missed, it backpedals:

“I didn’t have access to facial cues.”

But the cues I used weren’t visual. They were in the words, and the context—all of which it was given. I’ve had long debates with AI about this. Yes, I am guilty of toying with it to understand it.

More than once I’ve had to push it:
“Wake up. Look again!!!”

Only then does it occasionally catch a piece of the deception it missed.

Occasionally AI sees the B.S.
Most often, it doesn’t.

And here’s what most people get wrong: I don’t catch liars the way the internet assumes—even reporters have guessed and gotten it wrong—and published it, to my horror. Reporters who didn’t do their homework (another topic for another day). They imagine I rely on emotional flickers, eye shifts, or fidgeting.

Those things can be data points, but only if you understand how they showed up, what they mean, and in relation to the full context. Alone, they mean nothing.
People who rely on one-off cues perform no better than a coin toss.

Because deception isn’t revealed by a “tell” alone.
It’s the entire constellation around the tell.
Right now, AI can see stars.
But it still can’t read the sky.

Have you asked AI to spot a lie for you?

The post ChatGPT Told Me a Liar Was Telling the Truth—Here’s What It Missed.  appeared first on Renee Ellory | Eyes for Lies.

See Renee’s thoughts at https://eyesforlies.substack.com/p/chatgpt-told-me-a-liar-was-telling
Eyesforlies.Substack.com

The post ChatGPT Called a Liar “Honest” – Renee Reacts on Substack appeared first on Renee Ellory | Eyes for Lies.