Everything He Says Is A Lie

How lying becomes entrenched in abusers and how it can in us too

“Consider everything he says a lie and be surprised if something turns out to be true.”

I remember the moment when my therapist dropped this weighty boulder of a knowledge nugget on me. I stared at her with my mouth agape. I didn’t believe her at first. I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea that someone I had spent 25 years of my life with would so blatantly and perpetually lie to me.

But soon, the pattern would become undeniable.

I remember listening to a conversation where he fabricated entire conversations, entire events, both with me and with our children.

“Who can do that?” I asked myself, incredulous.

Pathological lying is a dark superpower.

Because most people aren’t expecting someone to lie or completely fabricate events, pathological liars have an advantage most of us simply do not have. We often fail to see it or realize we’re being lied to until we’ve been pulled under in a wave of world building lies. Stephen King’s quote, “The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool” is so accurate.

Read my recent post, “Why Chronic Lying Isn’t Just a Character Flaw” for a deeper discussion of pathological or habituated lying and how an abuser often uses lying to gaslight, control, cope, manipulate, and cover up.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

For those of us who place high value on the truth, this kind of lying flies in the face of what we want to believe about people. It is hard to accept that some people walk around untethered to the truth.

We ask ourselves, can we recognize them?

Recently, I spent several days at a focused writing retreat with about 20 other writers. For some of that time, I was neck deep in the legal filings of O’Connor v. Lampo Group, the lawsuit brought by a former employee of Ramsey Solutions, Dave Ramsey‘s company, who was fired after she notified them that she was pregnant and they otherwise knew she was not married.

I didn’t know that employee personally, but once the case was reported in the news, it struck me that at the same time Ramsey Solutions was firing this woman, ostensibly for “engaging in premarital sex,” they were still covering up for my ex-husband who they knew to have had multiple extramarital affairs and about whom I had told multiple people in leadership at Ramsey that he was abusive to me and our children.

Eventually, I would submit an 11-page affidavit in that case, be subpoenaed, testify in a deposition, and also provide mountains of evidence, including emails, recordings, journal entries, texts, and other documents, most of which are not public. I could make them public, but at present, I have chosen not to do so.

However, the other filings in the case did make public thousands of pages of documents that were and are revealing. Most have names or portions redacted, but at least with respect to those that reference me, my marriage, or our interaction with Ramsey Solutions, I can pretty much fill in 95% of the information. The documents were unsealed in 2022 and were traumatic for me to read, prompting me to call a friend in the middle of the night while experiencing a massive PTSD response.