Why Chronic Lying Isn't Just a Character Flaw
The connection between lying and abuse
“The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.”
— Stephen King
Pathological lying is a different animal from occasional or situational lying. It is a persistent pattern of behavior that, over time, can significantly damage the liar, their relationships, and the recipients and objects of their lies.
Situational lying, on the other hand, refers to the occasional lies often driven by insecurity, social status, humor, and possibly substance abuse. Sometimes children, in their phases of maturation, can engage in patterns of lying for those reasons, but eventually grow out of it, or continue to use lying as a coping mechanism for those reasons.
As Stephen King also said in his book, Needful Things:
There were people who lied for gain, people who lied from pain, people who lied simply because the concept of telling the truth was utterly alien to them.
In some cases, especially where it involves pathological lying, it can be a symptom associated with several conditions, including personality disorders like antisocial, narcissistic, and borderline personality disorders, as well as factitious disorder.
Those disorders also have significant crossover to abusive behaviors. In those cases, lying is a habituated pattern and is often used as a means to control, cope, manipulate, or cover-up.
Habituated lying often becomes gaslighting
What do I mean when I refer to “habituated lying”? It just means lying that is so regular, reflexive, and practiced that it is a habit to the liar. It is instinctive in how they respond to certain situations.
For those of us who prioritize the truth as a value, the truth is usually the first gauge in deciding how to respond in a situation. For those who are habitual liars, it is not. The first gauge is how they can achieve their objective—whether that is maintain power and control over someone, avoid shame, obtain a desired result (money, fame, the target to do a certain thing, etc.), or even to maintain their sense of ego or value.
Lying, therefore, becomes a tool, and like all practiced tools in the hands of a skilled craftsman, they get better and better at it.
Sophisticated lying is where the liar can not only tell a lie, but convince the target to believe the lie and the entire surrounding circumstances and world that the liar creates with their lies. That is gaslighting.
The target then, over time, questions their own experience, what they’ve seen with their eyes, what they’ve heard with their ears, even what they think they feel. The liar slowly shapes their world with confrontations, fabrications, lies that are only a little bit off from the truth.
Lying as control
A core objective of abuse is to have power and control over the target. Sometimes that is accomplished with physical intimidation. Sometimes with emotional manipulation. Sometimes with verbal abuse. And sometimes, that is accomplished with lying.
For example, to draw a target into a relationship, abusers often engage in a practice called “future faking” where they tell you all the things you will do together, all the future parts of your relationship. The trick is that they have no actual intention of engaging in those actions. Their objective is to draw you in and hook you, not to actually make promises that they intend to fulfill.
They may also lie about their life, their experiences, who they know, etc. in order to make themselves appear more desirable, but all of this is to attempt to influence or control your behavior as their target.
Abusers usually attempt to isolate their victims. When people think of isolation, they often think of physical isolation, like being in jail or being kidnapped. But isolation from an abuser often comes in the form of emotional manipulation and lying.
Lies might be about what people think about the victim or her behavior. They might be about people who would otherwise be part of the victim’s support system. The goal is to separate the victim and other sources of support or truth other than the abuser. So if the abuser is effective, the victim starts to perceive the abuser as his or her source of truth, support, and alliance, and others as less or untrustworthy / unsupportive.
Lying as coping
The most innocuous use of lying, if you can call it that, by a pathological liar, is as a coping mechanism. Truly, in many ways, all of their lying is a means of coping with their inability to handle the world, their self, their behavior, and their relationships as they truly exist. They have to lie in order to shape things for how they need them to appear or function in order for their self to survive.
But even among their more sophisticated and manipulative lying, there is still the immature coping lying.
“Did you take out the trash?”
“Yeah, I did it last night.”
“But I just saw three bags still in the garage?”
“Well, they weren’t out there when I took the trash out so you must have set them out there today.”
What started out as coping lying (they didn’t actually take out the trash and either did not have relationship skills to navigate any expected conflict or could not tolerate the shame from not fulfilling a responsibility), turned into gaslighting in order to perpetuate their own narrative and continue to try to cope with their world.
Lying as manipulation
“You are so obsessed with the mail.”
We lived at the end of a gravel lane about a third of a mile long. The mailbox was at the end, along a country road with the mailboxes of the four other houses on the lane. On some days, the afternoon walk to the mailbox was an enjoyable stroll over the rolling hills that led away from our house, offering a chance to chat with the neighbors or get some light exercixe with the kids.
Other times, pulling into the lane from errands provided a quick opportunity to grab up the mail on the way home.
I started hearing comments about my “obsession” with the mail many years before my marriage ended. It made me question myself, it made me defensive. I wondered if I was indeed abnormal or strange.
In isolation, it sounds like a minor thing. But when it combines with similar comments about other behaviors, it starts to shift your perception about what is healthy and normal. It manipulates your view of yourself and your relationship because you want to be seen as good and normal of loved and of course not “obsessed” with something by your spouse. Then it changes your behavior.
There were pieces of mail at times that I believe he didn’t want me to see. Early on, there were bank statements from an account I didn’t know he had. Later, he was smart enough to have those e-delivered from the new secret account he opened.
Whether the lying is to get you to do or not do something, or to alter your perception of yourself, it is a manipulation tactic.
The prime example of this is President Trump. His entire scheme with the presidency is: how do I avoid jail, how do I enrich myself, how do I set myself up to keep enriching myself, all the while convincing people that I am doing something for them? His entire scheme is a lie and a front and so by necessity, it involves lie upon lie.
Lying as cover-up
Abusers usually have a lot of behavior to cover up. First and foremost, while their abuse may be out in the open to you, they are certainly lying to others about it, either in words or in how they treat you differently when others are around. They may also be lying to / gaslighting their victims about even the obvious abusive behaviors in order to provide a sheen or cover for their abuse.
Because the core of an abusive mindset is entitlement, abusers are often engaged in other behaviors that they need to cover up from their target and others such as affairs or financial shenanigans. Depending on their level of self awareness, they also likely need to lie to cover up their own core desires for fame, recognition, and control of those around them.
How to handle a pathological liar
For as many different kinds of relationships and kinds of liars there are, there are just as many ways to navigate handling them. But there are some themes and steps you can take when you realize you’re in a confusing relationship that may involve abuse and pathological lying.
Open your eyes to the lies
The first step in dealing with a pathological liar is recognizing the behavior, seeing that a pattern of lies exists. As long as the target perceives the abuser as their main source of the truth, or even as a reliable source of truth at all, it will be difficult to come out from under the lies and abuse.
I remember the moment when my therapist said: “Consider everything he says a lie and be surprised if something turns out to be true.”
In my next post, I’ll share more of what came before and after that pivotal moment. It is enough here to say that it was a line of demarcation that allowed me to begin to recognize lies for what they were. That then enabled me to start to reconstruct my own identity and start the healing process for the ongoing confusion and trauma I had been in for twenty-five years.
Find your foundation
Once you recognize that you’re being lied to on a regular basis, you have to start to grasp what is actually true. If the lies are about who you are, your identity, you have to discover the truth about who you are. That may be a long and ongoing process to rediscover or even in some cases, re-create a whole identity.
One day I sat down with a notebook and drew a line down the center. In the left column, I wrote the things he had told me about myself or insinuated about me or my behavior or life. In the right column, corresponding to each item, I wrote down what I believed to be true.
That can be a difficult process early on in healing and you / the victim, may need someone like a close friend or therapist to help them identify what is actually true.
If there are lies about events or other facts, doing the same for those, especially ones that can be documented, is also helpful.
These two columns can form the basis of shifting the reliance upon the abuser’s (mis)perception and (mis)characterization of reality to beginning to trust you / the survivor’s own perceptions, instincts, and identity.
Evaluate the relationship
In college, I had an acquaintance, a sorority sister for a time, who I realized was lying about the dumbest things. She was lying about bigger things too, but once several of us started discussing it, we realized she was lying even about things that were easy to verify.
After some discussion, several of us decided to sit down with her and attempt to confront her. We knew this wasn’t healthy behavior, wasn’t good for her, and also wasn’t a good look for our organization to have someone who was so blatantly lying all the time. But we were so inexperienced with this type of behavior.
I can’t remember everything that happened, but I know it didn’t go over well and I distanced myself from her at that point. She and I were not close, I felt like I had engaged in a healthy way to the extent that our relationship called for, and I was no longer going to have a relationship with her other than to nod in passing.
Contrast that with realizing that I was married to someone that was lying just as much, but about things that were part of the core of our life together, our relationship, his job, our kids. I couldn’t unwind myself from that relationship as easily or unemotionally.
“I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
In cases where you are entangled with the liar, often your abuser, you realize you need to take more serious steps to deal with the lying.
Document the lies
One of those steps is to document the lies. Because pathological liars are so good at lying, to the point that it is often gaslighting and making you question your reality, documenting the lies is important not only for any future ramifications like legal proceedings such as divorce or defamation, but in maintaining your own foundation and emotional stability.
There are several ways to document lies that carry weight in legal proceedings and in reminding you of the truth later on:
Audio recording conversations you are a part of (check the laws of your state — some states allow only one party to the conversation — you! — to consent to recording, and you can then use your phone or a hidden recording device to record the conversation; other states, known as “two-party states” require the consent of everyone involved in the conversation).
Taking notes or journaling a summary soon after conversations occur.
Describing conversations to people in your support system soon after they occur.
Sending the abuser written documentation like an email, letter, or text, after the conversation in which you summarize the topic, what was said or done, action steps, etc. This is often not a safe option in an abusive sitution like it would be even in a toxic workplace to document an important conversation, but there are ways to document even important abusive or deceptive parts of a conversation through written means to the liar.
Offer accountability, disconnect emotionally, and/or walk away
At some point in a relationship with a lying abuser, you have to take the next step. For many in abusive relationships, at first, they want to try to salvage the relationship. That is a natural response and part of how they often stayed so long believing the lies and not seeing the abuse. At multiple points over the years in my own marriage, I attempted to offer accountability and stay, only to have nothing really change and the pattern began again.
Once the lies are recognized and the realization comes that these are habituated behaviors that take years or decades to change if the abuser is even willing to change, the victim has to decide what is next. Even if the abuser says they want to change and changes for a short period of time, I have yet to see lasting change happen.
As we establish our foundation and rebuild our identity, it becomes easier to disconnect emotionally from someone who is willing to harm us over and over. We are reconnecting emotionally with ourselves, reclaiming our own identity, and reestablishing the source of truth as our own perceptions and experiences, shifting all of these away from the liar abuser.
“Sometimes you just have to be done, not mad, not upset. Just done.” – Unknown
Ultimately, walking away from someone with these patterns is the healthiest choice. It is difficult to breathe if you are swimming in sewage.
Especially in a marriage situation, we often have to maintain some sort of relationship and communication with someone who has a habituated pattern of lying, but we can now do that knowingly and thoughtfully, taking that pattern into account.
Soon, it starts to feel more and more like freedom.
Warmly,
