Lies and Those Who Live By Them

I have trust issues. I won’t try to pretend that I don’t.

I’ve known three pathological liars in my life; probably more, but these I was close to. One was a high school friend, another was a relative, and the third was a boss I had for a period of time.

It usually takes a while to figure them out, but once you do it’s impossible from that time forward to believe a word they say. It’s a sickness for sure. But since I don’t play the blame game I believe that they are responsible for what they do. They can seek help. If they don’t know they lie, then it’s really serious.

The high school friend and I would often experience things that most teenagers do. I was often surprised to find that what I witnessed happening on our escapades was much more boring (but real) than what happened according to her. Things that we did were embellished beyond recognition. And if that weren’t enough, there were additions that never happened.

Sometimes I thought I had Alzheimer’s (not exactly that because I’m not sure it was a diagnosis in the late 70s, but maybe I just lost my memory). It wasn’t too long before I got tired of it and moved on with my life and left the lies behind.

About the relative, I better not go into too much detail about him. I realize that posting on the Internet is offering my words to millions if they were to find them. And since others in the family wish to keep what he does secret, it’s best for me to not post it on my blog. It’s their sickness, not mine. I have discussed it plenty and still do — I just don’t want to open a can of worms with the family.

And for the third of the liars I’ve known well: this one really takes the cake. It took me a while to figure out her lies. But from the moment I got it, things were never the same. She would show up late for work and say she had car trouble. Twice the same exact thing happened to her vehicle when she was in Texas and could not get home as planned to return to work.

She would lie about one employee to another in order to turn us against one another. Instead of working as a team, we were always at odds with one another.

One of the biggest lies and something that we laugh about to this day was when she said the reason the police from a neighboring jurisdiction came to see her at work was because she’d turned in a supposed drug house, meth lab or something, and they needed her to sign some paperwork.

The truth of the matter was, she had hot check charges and they were there about that. Once she was no longer with the company we continued to get numerous calls from those who held bad checks and were trying to locate her for payment.

Often I’d hear her phone conversation where she’d ask people on the other end of the phone if they could loan her money to pay the electric bill (or some other bill) as it had been shut off. She’d then fly out of the office telling us that her child was sick. This happened numerous times as well.

I learned long ago never to lie about something and use an illness or a child in the lie. Once, at another job, I needed a day off. I said I had a stomach virus. I was really rarely sick. So I had that Friday off. The problem was the very next Friday I had a stomach virus. It was so weird, that I will never use a lie to get a sick day at work. I may say I don’t feel well … but I’ll never give a specific diagnosis. I do believe in mental health days, especially for those who are rarely sick.

If you’re one of those people who lie and think you’re getting away with it, think again. We know your lies. It never takes that long to figure them out. Children may not get it while they’re young, but the day they do, your lies won’t work with them anymore.

And besides that, when you lie continually nobody believes a darn thing you say anymore even when you do tell the truth.

If you see yourself in the people I have just written about, please get help. Your lies damage all of your relationships, especially those closest to you. If you have children, you are teaching them not to trust. I can tell you from experience that having trust issues as an adult is a very difficult thing.

Honesty

“I hope I shall follow firmness of virtue enough to maintain that I consider the most enviable of all titles — the character of an honest man.”
—George Washington

Being honest is not always easy, but it is much simpler than trying to keep up with lies. When we tell the truth we don’t have to remember what we said.

Once we have lied to someone we cannot expect that person to believe us in the future. Maybe we told a “little white lie,” but it still puts the mistrust in between us and the person we said it to. Usually when a person has been lied to it matters not how great the lie, what matters is there is now distrust and it’s nearly impossible to overcome.

One of the most difficult things to deal with is when we are lied to and the one who told the lie continually tells us they didn’t lie; that we just misunderstood. This is even harder to get past when they tell us numerous lies and say they weren’t dishonest. We cannot believe anything they say.

Those who have a difficult time trusting will find it next to impossible to believe someone once they’ve caught them in a lie. And this is a hard spot to be in for those who have trust issues because they probably think people lie even when they don’t.

Sometimes it may seem easier to lie, and maybe in the moment it is, but in the long run lying is just not the answer because we tend to start believing even our own lies.

We must be honest in small ways if we hope to be honest with the really important stuff. This does not mean that we have to tell someone they do indeed look fat in a certain outfit if asked, we can instead find something complimentary to say about some other aspect of how they look. We can use some common sense about answering questions of that nature. But when it comes to lying because we find the truth uncomfortable, the truth’s still going to be there, why add a lie to it and make it worse?

Telling the truth keeps you from having to add more lies to cover lies.

Lying Hurts

“A liar will not be believed, even when he speaks the truth.”
—Aesop

Lying has its consequences in the fact that eventually nobody believes one who lies. We may believe that little white lies are not big deal, but when someone tells us lies it eats into our trust for them.

If we’ve had someone in our life who lied to us continually such as a parent or a partner, this will effect future relationships and cause us to have trust issues. We will have problems believing people who may have never told us a lie, but we have been damaged by another because of their dishonesty.

This will hurt us in the long run if we do not deal with it and stop assuming that all people lie like those who may have hurt us in the past with their mistruths. Usually the pathological liar types will show themselves early on in relationships with us. Others may be a bit more sly and not let others see who they are right away.

Lies perpetrate more lies so it’s easy for someone to spin themselves into the web of deceit quickly. We can trust others until we are given real reasons not to trust, rather than live under the false assumption that they are just like the last one who lied to us.

Learn to trust each person as an individual, not based upon what others did to you.

Trusting

“We’re never so vulnerable than when we trust someone — but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy.”
—Walter Anderson

Some of us have trust issues. They may go all the way back to childhood when we had parents who lied to us, who never did what they said, and we never knew what to expect from them. They may still be acting out these same behaviors with us as we have grown into adulthood.

And now that we are all grown up, we deal with even more situations that require trust. Sometimes, for me anyway, it seems that the situations where trust, or rather distrust, becomes an issue happens in phases; as in, over and over in a period of time where it makes me question even the most trustworthy of people. I begin to doubt every word that is spoken by people who interact in my life because others have lied and broken my trust.

But to not trust means we cannot have real relationships. And those of us who work on recovery issues of all sorts want real relationships. We want trust and truth. We desire the best life and love has to offer. We cannot give up on people and live a full life.

It’s difficult though to continue to open ourselves up to knowing that we will be hurt again. We will go through the pain of someone walking out on our relationship. We will experience the loss of trust again in our lives and we will hurt from it as long as we continue to have relationships that mean something.

Being vulnerable means we have lives full of intense emotions, both joy and pain. We must learn to handle the disappointments when others are not true to us, when they lie or walk away for no reason, so that we may experience love when it does come. And it will. Sometimes when we least expect it and from places we never dreamed it would appear. But we won’t have love or joy if we are not willing to take the risk of trust.

Trust that God will give you what you need when someone is not true to you.

Integrity

“Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people.”
—Spencer Johnson

When we seek to improve our self-esteem and grow in self-love we must be true to ourselves. We must love ourselves fully, without judgment. Honesty with ourselves is where we start the process.

We do not lie to ourselves about who we are. If we do things that we know are wrong we don’t justify that, we stop doing it. We don’t pretend to be someone or something that we are not if we choose to love who we are.

Trust is an important part of any relationship. To have trust, all parties involved must be honest and true to their word. Integrity means we are who we say we are. We do what we say and say what we mean and life goes a lot more smoothly than when we don’t tell the truth.

If someone says they are going to do something time after time, and they never do it, eventually we know that the words are hollow. They probably intend to do what they say, or perhaps they just say what they think others want to hear. Most of the time what anybody wants to know is the truth in a situation even when the truth hurts. Whether or not others are honest does not justify us to be dishonest. It’s still our integrity that we are responsible for.

We cannot be honest with anyone else if we cannot be honest with our self. It is not possible to be dishonest in one part of our lives and not have that carry over into other areas. Honesty and dishonesty are either part of us or they are not.

Our integrity is vital to both our self-image and what others in our lives see. We ought to be honest about the smallest things in order to be honest about the big stuff as well.
Honesty starts with me or I cannot be truthful to anybody else.

Being Honest With Self

“Self-honesty is a prerequisite for self-discipline.”
—Ellen Kaye-Cheveldayoff

There’s a line in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous which states that there are those “who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves” and because of this inability to be rigorously honest they cannot achieve sobriety.

And so it is with life, really. We can walk through life, go through the motions, be reasonably successful, or not so successful, or even make it big in whatever we attempt. But in order to have emotional and spiritual success where we are capable of self-love and healthy relationships, we need to be honest not only with others, but also with ourselves.

When we are wrong we admit it, but we don’t take blame when we have not done harm to anyone or been out of line. That would be dishonest. It means we are truthful to others and we don’t deceive ourselves either.

Many times people think of “cash register” honesty when asked if they tell the truth. And while giving back the extra change from an attendant if given too much, or telling them when we are undercharged is a form of honesty, it still doesn’t mean we are honest in other ways. Another way we look at how honest we are is if we tell the truth when asked a question.

But the honesty necessary to grow and to have self-love is that in which we have pure motives and where we are sincere. It means that we don’t lie to ourselves or rationalize poor behavior.

Self-honesty means we examine our strengths and weaknesses so that we can do the work on those parts of us that may need to be changed. We don’t convince ourselves that we are just this way, or blame it on someone or something in our past; we admit to ourselves that we have something that needs some work.

It’s easy to deceive ourselves. Some will say they are not an alcoholic because they only drink beer as if there’s no alcohol in that. There are those of us who claim not to be prejudiced against a race other than our own, but our thinking and behavior says otherwise. We may try to lie to ourselves that we didn’t eat all day when dieting because all we ate was a bag of cookies, no real meal.

Deception of self can take on many forms. But until we can be honest with ourselves we cannot be truly honest with others. And until we are capable of self-honesty we won’t be able to grow much or have sustained self-love.

Honesty with self is necessary in all aspects of growth and love.

Character Shows Itself

“Every man has three characters: that which he shows, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.”
—Alphonse Karr

No matter how much we might try to convince others of how good of a person we are, it’s our actions that speak most loudly. If we do what we say we will do we become trusted by others. If we fail to do what we say often enough we show that we have no character and nobody believes us.

There are times when we have legitimate reasons for not doing a thing, but when it’s a habit to not do what we say we will do, that’s when it becomes a problem because nobody believes us.

Are we kind to those who are unkind to us? Do we talk badly about others when they aren’t around just to put them down and build ourselves up? There’s a difference in venting and getting our feelings out and just downright gossip.

The words we speak about others and the things we do in our lives are huge character giveaways. It really doesn’t do any good to gossip about what we see as defects of character in others. Those are their issues. Our issues are to be true to our word and to be positive in our actions.

Character requires that we keep our word; that we say what we mean, and mean what we say. Those with great character are honest and trustworthy. When someone asks for their help, they know that they can count on that person to do what they promise.

Those who don’t have much character may think they are fooling others, and they may for a while, but it doesn’t take long for a person’s true character to show.

Examining our character from time to time is a good idea to keep us on track.

Truth Is There When We Are Aware

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
—Oprah Winfrey

As we go through our journey of life we meet many people in various ways. We meet at work, church, recovery meetings, social settings, etc. And most of the time we try to get to know some people better than others.

If we are fully aware during out interactions with people and truly listen to and watch them, they will reveal to us a lot about themselves. If someone says, “I don’t drink very often if at all,” but every time we talk to them they are on the way to or from the liquor store, or talk about what they drank or what they are about to drink, then their actions speak for them.

Anytime someone says one thing and does another it sends up a red flag warning us that something is not right about the situation. The person may not even be aware of what they are saying and doing, in other words, they may be lying to themselves too.

Usually people tell us and show us who they are. Not so much in what they say directly, but what they say when they don’t think about trying to impress us or when they let their guard down and the truth comes out. We need not learn a lesson about someone over and over again, once we find out the truth about them, we can let go of thinking that they will change. They won’t. Their truth is their truth and people rarely change without lots of effort.

So if the person’s faults are shining through and they don’t show any effort to change, chances are they are stuck with that behavior. And if their actions are things that we cannot deal with on a regular basis, it’s time to let go and move on gracefully from that person, before investing any more into the relationship.

If words and actions do not match, beware.

Lies Perpetrate More Lies

“Every act of dishonesty has at least two victims: the one we think of as the victim and the perpetrator as well. Each little dishonesty makes another little rotten spot somewhere in the perpetrator’s psyche.”
—Lesley Conger

Every one of us has told a lie at one time or another. Sometimes people lie to keep from hurting someone or to keep something hidden. Sometimes lies are to cover up something and then there are the malicious lies that could never be justified no matter what.

Once a lie is told more untruths must be spoken in order to keep the lie secret. It makes life more complicated than it already is. If we simply tell the truth when faced with a choice we will find that things will work out OK. We will have more peace and we will be free from the added stress that will burden us to keep the lie hidden.

Think of a lie you once told. It could be a life lie, as in living the life of addiction and always trying to hide it. Or maybe you took something that was not yours and live with the knowledge that you were dishonest. Perhaps you had an extramarital affair. Or it could have just been a lie about nothing important, but having told the lie you had to keep lying to cover it up.

Now think about all of the energy you had to use to keep that lie from being discovered. It takes a lot of energy to lie. It might be difficult to be honest in the moment, but the moment will be over soon. A lie and all of the lies that go with it could last a lifetime. And in the process of telling all of those lies you not only hurt yourself you hurt those you lied to.

It’s easier to just tell the truth; it takes a lot less energy in the long run.