Liars Anonymous Community Group
A support group to provide those with a compulsive addiction to lie a place to share hope, strength and courage with others like them; solve our common problem and help others with a compulsion to lie. We aren't alone!
My wife caught me lying about something stupid today. (I bought a pack of cigarettes, she found it, I made up a ridiculous lie about how it got in my bag.) I stuck to my story at first: "I know it seems crazy but blah blah blah." After it became clear she wasn't buying a word of it, I reluctantly admitted I was lying.
She's super hurt and angry right now. She's one of the most honest people I know so lies feel like serious betrayal to her. In my family, honesty was incredibly rare. My mother and grandmother were drug addicts and alcoholics who spent 90% of their energy lying and covering up their lies. So I grew up not valuing honesty as much as I would have liked to. As a kid, I quickly picked up the habit to cover up my own failures and to try to make people think better of me. As an married man, I started lying to cover up my drinking problem and financial trouble.
I'm extremely good at telling lies. I can come up with elaborate and believable stories without missing a beat and tell them just as though I believed they were true. I'm pretty sure I could beat a polygraph test. Lies have saved my butt many times. And I hate that.
3 1/2 years ago when I quit drinking, I decided it would be an honest abe from then on. My resolution didn't last long though. It seems so much easier to lie than to argue with my wife about forgetting to pay a bill, or what movie I watched when she was out, or what I had for dinner. But when I get caught telling one of these "little" lies, my relationship takes a big hit. I wish I always had the courage to just tell the truth, consequence be damned.
I need to remind myself that no matter how many times I tell the truth, telling one little lie brings into question every truth I've told. I need to learn to value honesty more than I do. I need to love my wife by telling her the truth.
What keeps you honest?
She's super hurt and angry right now. She's one of the most honest people I know so lies feel like serious betrayal to her. In my family, honesty was incredibly rare. My mother and grandmother were drug addicts and alcoholics who spent 90% of their energy lying and covering up their lies. So I grew up not valuing honesty as much as I would have liked to. As a kid, I quickly picked up the habit to cover up my own failures and to try to make people think better of me. As an married man, I started lying to cover up my drinking problem and financial trouble.
I'm extremely good at telling lies. I can come up with elaborate and believable stories without missing a beat and tell them just as though I believed they were true. I'm pretty sure I could beat a polygraph test. Lies have saved my butt many times. And I hate that.
3 1/2 years ago when I quit drinking, I decided it would be an honest abe from then on. My resolution didn't last long though. It seems so much easier to lie than to argue with my wife about forgetting to pay a bill, or what movie I watched when she was out, or what I had for dinner. But when I get caught telling one of these "little" lies, my relationship takes a big hit. I wish I always had the courage to just tell the truth, consequence be damned.
I need to remind myself that no matter how many times I tell the truth, telling one little lie brings into question every truth I've told. I need to learn to value honesty more than I do. I need to love my wife by telling her the truth.
What keeps you honest?
Like you, I grew up in a household where honesty wasn't valued. The messed up thing is that it was SAID it was valued, and when I was a kid and got caught lying, I was punished severely. But that just taught me to be a better liar. I won't get into the dynamics of my grandmother and mother... that's an entirely different thread in an entirely different forum. But let's just say that those were my "honesty" role models. Not making any excuses for my behaviour, because I made the choice to lie to my wife impulsively, compulsively and purposefully time and time again.
What keeps me honest now is knowing how it feels inside when my brain formulates the lie. I can cut the lie off so I can tell the truth.
What keeps me honest is my wife, who values truth and honesty, who calls me out on my BS when I downplay a situation, or exaggerate one... both of those things she considers lies as well.
What keeps me honest are my kids... My parents were my honesty role models. And look what happened. I don't want my kids like me. Not too long ago, when I lived in my filth of deceit, when I'd catch one of my kids in a lie, I would get mad, of course. And tell them about the virtues of honesty. What a hypocrite I was. Just like my parents. I don't want to be that role model for my kids.
What keeps me honest is the notion that every lie comes pre-packaged with a consequence. Whether your secret stays safe with you forever or not, your lie hurts someone, or prevents someone from something.
I'm so full of platitudes, aren't I? I'm so full of sh1t still. I'm John, and I'm a horrible liar.
Good luck to you. Keep on this board. There are a lot of great folks here, past and present with a lot of good insight into their own struggles.
That's a really good point. Knowing that I just lied about something is bad enough, even if I get away with it.
Lying makes me feel small and weak. Telling the truth is empowering.
My problem is that I'm lacking in the empathy department, so "knowing that I lied" wasn't really motivation for me because "catching shit" was worse than "knowing that I lied."
So, along with all the honesty, I'm working on the empathy. I've been called psychopath, sociopath, narcissistic... all those things. And the trait common with all those things is the lack of empathy. While I don't want to believe that I'm any of those things, the lack of empathy resonates with me. So, thinking about how my lies affect others is something that I'm working on.
That link you sent out in a separate post was really good.
JP... same goes for me w.r.t. kids vs adults. I was told that I compartmentalize, which goes some way to explain why I felt as though it was NOT okay to lie, but I did it, and hardly felt bad about it. I mean, come on... no one here actually believes that lying is okay, even when we were doing it, right? That's why we're here now.
I feel good now, in a sense, that I feel guilt and remorse over the things that I've done, whereas an older version of me probably didn't, and wouldn't today. The guilt and remorse feel terrible, but the fact I can feel them is a good thing.
I used to use alcohol to numb away bad feelings. Now I realize I've been using lies for the exact same purpose. The problem with trying to avoid certain negative emotions is that I lose the ability to experience any emotions at all.
Yesterday I was telling a close friend about how I had been lying to my wife and was working on getting honest and I almost started to tear up. Not because I was ashamed, but because it felt so good to be real with someone and experience genuine connection.
I think it was my body's way of "fighting". Like, John, what the hell? We're supposed to be lying here. What are yo doing? Stop telling the truth. That was a little cartoon dramatic, but you get what I mean.
My body still does that to this day when telling the truth, and that has caused some friction between my wife and me on such occasions because she can obviously see me acting and looking nervous so she thinks I'm lying.
Can't explain that phenomenon, and since my wife can no longer believe anything I say, she doesn't believe anything I say.
I know my truth, so that will have to do till my body figures out how to react normally.