Now, she had come to think of herself as mostly a burden and as someone who could only count on others to be there for her as long as she provided a benefit to them. Vivid examples stood out about not having been picked up after soccer practice, and otherwise being forgotten about or neglected by caregivers in many situations. Instead my truth becomes a self-presentation I can adapt to what I think others want from me.Īnother person was helped to discover that at the root of her lies was a profound fear of being abandoned if she were to be herself. Being myself becomes a dangerous proposition, a luxury which I cannot afford. Who I am, in this scenario, becomes who I need to be in order to be liked or accepted by others. The truth became associated with danger and became hijacked by the more primordial need for safety. One person, for example, was in a physically abusive relationship where he learned that he needed to say or do things more out of a concern for maintaining the other person’s happiness, than out of a need to express his true thoughts and feelings. In my own work with compulsive liars I have generally found that the lying is a reaction to trauma. Pathological Lying as Reaction to Trauma: It is a mechanism for maintaining psychological safety and reducing interpersonal anxiety. The compulsivity of pathological liars means that these are not people who choose to lie. We can call these people pathological or compulsive liars, although in many cases, pathological lying is really more of a symptom than a definition of who I am. Pathological Lying:Īlthough we all need some modicum of fantasy and untruth in order to make our lives and our view of ourselves more tolerable, for a certain group of people, lying becomes the central mechanism by which they interact with others. In psychosis, on the other hand, our lies become fully-fledged fantasies without any basis in external facts. We need reality to BE a certain way in order to feel okay with ourselves and comfortable in the world. In neurosis, for example, the truth gets distorted (minimized or magnified) in the service of maintaining a certain level of psychological safety. When we tell a lie, we make reality conform to our ideas rather than adjust our ideas to fit reality. Various forms of lying, on the other hand, have been the hallmark of what we consider to be pathology or maladjustment. The real self (an acceptance of one’s real feelings and motivations) and the reality principle (a sober assessment of the world as it really is) has always been considered the hallmark of health or good adjustment. The line between telling the truth and telling a lie has always been the central theme of psychotherapy.
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