Are You in a Relationship with a Chronic Liar?

What can you do when you are in a relationship with a chronic liar?

Michelle seeks out her brother for advice because she caught Tom, her fiancé, lying, yet again. Her brother, Andrew, affirms to her, “He would never tell the truth. You could not beat it out of him nor threaten his life, or that of a loved one.” But Michelle is in love with Tom, wants to marry him, and spend the rest of her life with him, she says, “But I believe in him.”

Michelle and Tom have been together for three years, just celebrated their first year of engagement, and she catches his lying about his whereabouts, and private communications with ex-girlfriends again.

This has happened before, and they had an important talk not long after their engagement. Michelle tried to understand that Tom might feel awkward about continuing to communicate with exes and other women, so in his mind, it was easier to lie about it than to tell the truth, even though he had nothing to hide.

They agreed that he would tell the truth because it was important for Michelle to marry a trustworthy, honest, and open man. Her brother Andrew’s advice to her was to leave him, because he is a pathological liar, and will never be truthful or honest, “Men, like that, can never change.”

To be fair, there are many types of chronic lying, and pathological liars have clear intentions to defraud, deceive, or gain in some way from their often wildly exaggerated lies. Compulsive liars, on the other hand, are motivated by fear of what other people might think. They tell fictional stories to avoid making other people feel uncomfortable or awkward or to avoid being uncomfortable or awkward themselves. Lying is one thing, intention is also important.

In the therapeutic environment, the best way to help someone is to fully understand them, to feel what they feel, share in their suffering, have an idea of their life, and how they became the person they are today. That is longtail understanding, a long-haul approach to understanding why someone might have a tendency to lie instead of feeling open and honest enough, to tell the truth consistently.

Your first reaction to being lied to is understandably rooted in anger and likely followed by a sense of betrayal. You feel like you have been victimized by a perpetrator. While this may be true if you have been lied to by a psychopath or pathological liar, this may not actually be the case, even though you feel that way, and have every right to feel as if you have been stabbed in the back.

As soon as you are starting to notice this as being a pattern of behavior, you would be well advised to start keeping notes of all the incidents of inconsistencies, times you felt your intuition telling you that something wasn’t right, or when you caught him or her in a lie. This will be helpful to keep your own sanity intact and will come in handy later if you feel as though confrontation might be necessary.

In most cases, lies are told to spare your feelings. This is an important distinction when evaluating the motivations of the liar because it makes a difference whether someone is lying because they want to exploit or harm you or they are lying because they care about you and are trying to protect you. Right?

Chronic liars may lie more often than not, they cannot help it, but they are not being malicious about it. They are commonly also diagnosed with personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder or narcissism.

Mediation is used in the process of confrontation, though I am not convinced that intervention is not the best method due to its being shocking, assaultive, and combative, which victimizes the person who is lying. How many victims do we need, here?

If you are feeling like an intervention is your only hope for sanity or wellness, it may be healthier just to end the relationship as soon as you are able to do so with as little drama and trauma as possible. Because holding on to the hope that your liar will start telling the truth out of his or her love for you, is not the most likely outcome.

Perfect liar's response, "I'm not lying. And if I was lying, you would never be able to tell because I am the best liar in the world."
Perfect liar’s response, “I’m not lying. And if I was lying, you would never be able to tell because I am the best liar in the world.”

If you are feeling victimized by your partner’s lying, it is far more likely that your feelings will be hurt even more, and the relationship will end. Your feelings will be hurt, your heart will be broken, you will feel incredibly betrayed, angry, sad, and depressed.

It is extremely rare that a liar is willing and able to do the deep work of resolving all the life issues, drama, trauma, and learned responses that have resulted in his or her compulsion to not tell the truth, but it is possible.

If you decide to take the chance of working with your partner on their compulsion to lie, it will require a commitment to a lengthy and probably painful process for you and your partner to get to the place of your partner’s epiphany and resulting breakthrough. It will require a great deal of compassion and understanding on your part while you endure the roller coaster ride through recovery.

You must decide if you are ready for this kind of torrential commitment, and ask yourself, will your sacrifice be worth it? Whether it works or not?

If this process and the person you deeply care for is too toxic for you? You may have to let go and walk away. You have already given and endured more than would be expected from anyone.

You deserve to love and be loved, to experience reciprocal truth, openness, honesty, and happiness.

Any advice?

Deception by Omission

Everyone lies, it’s a basic mechanism we use to get through life with some sense of decorum. Then there are those who are involved in deception with malicious intent or ill-gotten gains. The craftiest of these swindlers engage in deception by omission, then deny any wrongdoing because they didn’t actually engage in lying, they just failed to include some of the pertinent details.

It’s no accident that these details went undisclosed, it was meant to purposefully deceive you, and to prevent you from having access to the truth, then deny all responsibility of deceit by claiming that no deceit has taken place because no one lied. You just did not have all the information. No crime. No foul.

In terms of trust and betrayal, you cannot trust someone who engages in deception by omission. It is a cunning misdirection and intentional withholding is no accident.

Even with the best of intentions, we leave out certain details out of fear. The fear of being caught, punished, made to feel guilty, or because we let someone down and cause someone’s feelings to be hurt. Even so, if you’re leaving out details that would have otherwise been more honest, you are lying.

For those with malicious intent, they lie by omission to manipulate, defraud, do harm, protect themselves, avoid accountability, or to appeal to your more sensitive capabilities causing you to let down your guard. No matter what they call it, or how they try to justify it, they are being dishonest and lying to you by omission.

Practicing deception of any kind, either by outright lying or practicing deception by omission, actually does more harm to the deceiver than you might expect. If you are otherwise a good person attempting to live a good life, the act of deceiving others in any fashion will cost you in your overall health score.

Unless you are a psychopath or pathological liar, these little indiscretions cause stress in the body which builds in magnitude and severely compromises your immune system. It takes a great deal of energy to manage deception and lies. This is a waste of energy which would be better used to sustain life, not to cause its deterioration.

Lying also creates an underlying frequency of paranoia for those who are trying to cover their tracks, often wondering if their true colors will ever be been shown or will they one day be held responsible for their deception.

The act of deceiving others lowers your emotional frequency and keeps your mind in the lower vibrational environments which breed fewer positive thoughts and responses overall. This will tend to attract less positive life circumstances to appear more frequently in your life.

Deception by omission promotes a lack of trust in your inner circle. Even of those who aren’t actually a party to your deception by omission. They will always wonder when and if you might be practicing deception by omission on them, even if you never do.

Once a betrayal of trust has taken place, there is little that can be done to repair the damage, except to be totally honest and trustworthy for long enough a period of time that the offending party can start to trust you once again. The amount of time necessary to regain someone’s trust depends on the person who has been deceived.

What Can You Do if You Catch Your Partner Lying?

Everyone lies. We do it for all kinds of reasons; to make life easier on us, on those we care about, on the behalf of someone else, to be polite, and to outright deceive and defraud on purpose. But what can you do if you catch your partner lying?

You love and trust your partner. Without trust, where is the love? When you catch your partner lying, you feel as though you’ve been stabbed in the back, punched in the gut, or so disrespected or disregarded that you don’t know if you can think straight. What can you do?

Nobody will deny you your right to feel bad about being lied to, that’s a given. We’ve all been in the same boat, for who of us has made it through life without being lied to of deceived. Sometimes people can be harmfully deceitful without saying a word, as is the case of lying by omission.

Yes, even not saying anything is in order to cover something up or avoid being truthfully honest (lying by omission) is a venial sin. It doesn’t mean you have to be rudely open and honest, just to tell the truth, and if you love someone, be honest lovingly. Tell the truth in a way that respects your partner. Be gentle and speak your truth with grace and love, even if it is difficult. Nobody expects you to be perfect.

If you’ve caught your partner lying, don’t sweep it under the carpet or try to gloss it over. Dishonesty in a relationship will cause your trust to rust, and leads to the erosion of your love, especially if you’re harboring the truth about your knowledge of the deceit or dishonesty and not saying anything about it (lying by omission). Even you are a guilty enabler by engaging in the dishonesty.

Get it out in the open. Relationships go through periods of varying levels of comfort and discomfort, it’s the nature of two people sharing one life. It is all part of the growth process. If there is no conflict, there can be no growth, which leaves you with stagnation. Where is the life in that? You might be able to get by, but you can forget thriving in a relationship which is a cesspool.

Grab your grown-up skivvies and get ready for some gentle conversation about your awareness that something’s not adding up. As in all difficult conversations, create a safe space to frame the conversation and avoid being accusatory. This is about creating an environment where its safe to be honest. Avoid jumping-in, interrupting, or otherwise preventing your partner from fully sharing. Take notes on paper, if you have to, but let them speak their truth in peace.

Let them say whatever it is, without interruption, or else he or she will get defensive, and the flow of open communication will stop if your partner feels like he or she needs to take the defensive position.

Once you’ve actively heard what your partner needs to say, and you’ve affirmed that you’ve understood the key points by paraphrasing them back to him or her, now your partner owes you the same respect to hear what you have to say about it.

Check with your heart and center yourself. Take a cleansing breath, then speak your heart in love. Again, be honest, but try to avoid being harsh. If your feelings have been hurt, say so, but try to use words that are not abrupt or frightening. Remember you are expressing how you feel, so start your sentences with “I,” or, “I feel like,” and avoid starting any statement with, “You.”
Trust your intuition. When you feel like something just isn’t right. In most cases, something isn’t right. If your partner gives a perfectly good explanation, and it doesn’t feel right, you probably know by experience that something has most always been amiss when you’ve had feelings, like that, in the past.

Deciding whether you can live with this or not is only something you must decide for yourself. Everybody’s different, and we all can tolerate different degrees of what our partners are allowed to do or not do within the confines of our relationships.

Even though magazines and tabloids will gibe you a list of do’s and don’ts in black and white, there really is no strict guideline for what is and is not acceptable in a successful relationship. Each couple must figure out for themselves what works for them.

Forgiveness in a loving relationship goes a long way. For the repeat offender, you might think about negotiating new paradigms for the expansion of your relationship, or if you are unable to come to a workable compromise, it might be time to look for a better match for your true love to emerge.

It’s your love life. It’s up to you.

Love, love, love. Love like it’s all that matters because it is. And if you dare, think about loving unconditionally.

I love you no matter what.