Liars: Erasing Your Own Soul
Dr. Roger Ray June 30, 2024
A teenaged girl in a church I served in Kentucky many years ago, quickly moved from being a quiet, low performing student, into a raging, anti-social, drug dealer wannabe. Her parents were good friends and I tried to be as helpful as possible, but it became clear that when she was forced to come to counseling appointments with me, that she would just tell me whatever she thought I wanted to hear. She ran away from home one night and her father and I set up in a large apartment complex parking lot where we thought she was buying drugs to see if we could find her.
We spotted her and my friend and I gave chase. Being the faster runner, I caught up to her just as she was entering an apartment with me close behind and it was a nightmare scenario, with dozens of people lying about on mattresses, hypodermics littering the filthy floor and a lot of very high and confused looking addicts staring up at a tall young man in a black suit. Before they could discern that I was a preacher rather than a detective, I took my young parishioner by the arm and led her out of the apartment.
We felt that there was no other option to save her life but to have her admitted to a mental hospital where I had a connection with an amazing psychiatrist who seemed to me to have almost magical powers in psychology. The psychiatrist and I held sessions with her jointly. Dr. O’Connor saw through her constant lying immediately and he said something to her that has stuck with me for 40 years.
He said to her, “Every time you tell a lie, you fade a little bit. If you keep lying all of the time you will eventually become invisible, you will have erased yourself from the world of anyone you ever cared about.” This realization seemed to impress her for a little while but, folks, these stories don’t all have happy endings.
After a brief hospitalization she returned home and quickly ran away for good. The last I heard about her she was working in a cheap strip club to get her drugs. Her grief stricken mother drank herself to death and her father spent a couple of years, unemployed and just staring into the distance. He did, eventually get his act together well enough to go back to work and I was honored to go back to Louisville to officiate his marriage to a wonderful women, who helped to pull him out of the black hole of despair where he had been living. But his daughter succeeded in basically erasing her existence and I have little hope that she is alive today.
Honesty used to be treasured as a virtue. Lying, on the other hand, was associated with criminals, con men, addicts, and philanderers. Now, lying by politicians, the news media – especially the ones that tend more towards entertainment than information, businesses, and even individuals, has become so common that I am no longer certain that honesty is regarded seriously as a virtue. With your permission, I would like to try to rescue truth telling from the trash heap of our current society.
Forgive me for getting into the weeds a little bit but let me distinguish between compulsive liars and pathological liars:
A compulsive liar will exaggerate or fabricate statements out of a felt need to lie, they lie even when telling the truth would be easier and would hurt them less.
They lie because, like other compulsive behaviors, like avoiding stepping on cracks or locking and unlocking a door three times satisfies some felt need in them that serves no real purpose. If you have a kid with ADHD, you probably noticed them being horribly unreliable in the stories that they tell you. They are not con artists, they are not manipulating; they are just lying because they feel a need to lie.
A pathological liar is a different color of horse altogether. Pathological liars lie to get what they want, to control the behavior of other people, they are manipulative narcissists and their pathology makes them indifferent to what their lies do to other people. Pathological liars are often really good at lying; they are persuasive, and in the case of malignant narcissists, once they have told the lie four or five times, they come to believe it themselves, often to such a degree that they can’t even remember what was true in the first place, the lie has overshadowed any rational memory.
Addicts are almost always pathological liars because they have to lie to cover for their illegal drug use, drunk driving, and the theft, irresponsible use of family money, and bad credit that it takes to stay in steady supply of their drug of choice. In AA and AlAnon, the family members of addicts are encouraged to not believe the lies because being gullible only encourages more lying. But, as I said, pathological liars are usually pretty good at it.
When I have had an addict in counseling, I quickly get to a point where I could spend all of my time trying to get enough information to figure out if they are lying right now or if this happens to be one of the times when they are telling the truth. So, you tend to assume that they are always lying . . . this goes back to what Dr. O’Connor said about becoming increasingly invisible.
A constant liar is someone that you either consciously or unconsciously just stop listening to. It simply isn’t worth the energy to try to figure out what is a lie and what may actually be true.
For example, the hosts of Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, eventually decided that they would no longer allow Trump administration spokesperson, KellyAnn Conway, on their show because you couldn’t believe anything she said and fact checking her would have taken up the entire show. She continued to be interviewed on Fox and other entirely unreliable news sources but she just contributed to the increasing disappearance of her credibility and anyone who risked being associated with her.
We saw this in the recent “hush money” trial of Donald Trump in which a key witness, Michael Cohen, a former Trump attorney, had lied so often to cover up for Trump’s crimes and illicit affairs that the Trump defense team kept insisting that you can’t believe anything Cohen said. And to a certain extent, this was true. Cohen had erased himself to the point that he lost his law license and spent time in prison but in this trial, he wanted to tell the truth, but his reputation was so damaged that prosecutors had to find other witnesses to corroborate everything he said, lest it be dismissed out of hand by an appropriately skeptical jury.
Michael was a true pathological liar. Most of what was discussed in this trial were lies he had told for Donald Trump, but he had told very many other lies to feather his own nest as well. He was an accomplished and seasoned liar.
Now he would like to redeem himself and reclaim his credibility. He wants us to believe him when he apologizes for his past and insists that he can become a new person, its just that the only thing that restores the trust of family members or the public is a long period of telling the truth. Narcissistic pathological liars usually want a brand new soul instantaneously. The hard truth is that rebuilding a reputation is one of the hardest things to do.
If you have ever been married to or in love with an addict or an alcoholic, you know what it is like to desperately want to believe the lies. You want to believe that this is the last time and that it will never happen again. There will never be another drunken disappearance for three or four days, there will never be another affair, there will never be another argument that becomes violent.
I suspect that every therapist in the world has had to often remind one client after another of this basic fact, that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. When I was first divorced in my mid 30’s, I dated a beautiful woman who was a part of my running and biking group. We had common interests and many common views and beliefs, and, I can say, that she was the most generous, loving, kind, and fun person in the world . . . . one day, and the next day, for no discernable reason, would be the meanest, most critical, hateful and resentful person you have ever met. Several months into the relationship, it was no longer a good day followed by a bad day but rather the moods would shift from one to the other, sometimes in minutes.
We saw a couple of counselors together. We tried everything to try to smooth out the good and bad times, but nothing worked. I loved the angelic side of her, and I was terrified of the demonic side. And if a minister can’t believe that a person is capable of changing, then why be a minister at all?
But a psychologist friend saw that I was tearing myself apart trying to make that relationship work and she sat me down and said it over and over: The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior - The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior -
I desperately did not want it to be true, but it obviously was.
That doesn’t mean that a person cannot change, but when the issue is a profound character flaw, you have to want the change more than anything in the world but, in her case, she just needed a new victim. And, even all of these years later, I sincerely believe that she really wanted to change and to have a stable, long term, relationship . . . she just didn’t want it enough to actually try to control her behavior.
That’s largely why I eventually stopped working with alcoholics and addicts. I always seemed to find myself in the position of wanting their sobriety more than they wanted to be sober and it always, somehow, became my responsibility to make sure that they stayed sober, which, of course, is something that never works.
That’s why AA and NA meetings always start by going around the room and allowing everyone to introduce themselves by their first name followed by the stark, honest, and difficult statement, “I’m an alcoholic,” or “I’m an addict.”
Some people just can’t bring themselves to say. Most of the people there have to say it five or six times a week for a couple of years before they start to believe it.
One of the most strangely ironic cases of lying in our public conversation recently was the conviction of Hunter Biden in federal court. While he was actively smoking crack, he got the wild idea that he wanted to buy a handgun. The form he had to fill out to buy that gun asked the question, “are you currently addicted to drugs,” and like every other addict you have ever met, he easily and impulsively lied, insisting that he was not.
So, for 11, count em, 11 days, Hunter Biden owned a gun. The gun was never loaded, never fired, and his girlfriend finally just snatched it and threw it in a garbage dumpster. Now, folks, there are over 400 million guns in the United States.
There are between 40 and 50 million alcoholics and drug addicts in the United States. Now, how many of those 50 million addicts own at least one of this country’s share of 400 million guns?
I have spent almost all of my life in Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and now Florida. I’m going to go out on a limb and say just about all of the addicts own one or more guns and nearly all of them have owned them for more than 11 days. Hunter Biden may be one of the least guilty gun owning addicts and yet he was put on trial and found guilty on these federal changes that have never been brought against any addict gun owner who had not committed a crime with a gun.
In my opinion, the person who decided to just ask addicts if they were using drugs is the person who should be on trial. If we don’t want addicts to be able to buy a gun, then the purchaser should have to pee in a cup before making the purchase. The sad truth is that the gun industry doesn’t want to wait for test results, and they don’t even want to screen out potential buyers, they want to sell as many guns as possible, no matter who is buying them and no matter what they are going to use it for.
If you want to know if someone is an addict, don’t ask them! You can ask their spouse, their kids, their employer, and probably their neighbors, but the one person you are not going to get an honest answer from is the addict. The hypocrisy in this case has been maddening but the day of the trial, when the verdict was read, the talking heads went straight to the point that this proves that the judicial system has not been weaponized by Democrats against Republicans.
So we just sacrifice Hunter Biden on the altar of appeasing hypocrites who will not be appeased by anything? No, the obvious truth is that Trump has been shown every kind of favoritism imaginable, all of the way from the little Federal Court just south of me in Florida where the judge has made sure that Trump will not go on trial for stealing classified documents before the November election, all of the way up to the Supreme Court which is sitting on a decision about whether a president is immune from any criminal prosecution so that he won’t go on trial for the insurrection before the November election.
Trump has been out of office for over 3 years and the judicial system is still just his fat little lap dog while the rest of the world suffers from abusive prosecution for petty crimes.
The judicial system is rigged, its just that it is ludicrously rigged in favor of our criminal in chief, the former and possibly future president of the United States.
What I don’t understand is why lying has not made him invisible. It seems to work on almost everyone else, but somehow, this cult leader can spew the most obvious lies all day long and his loyal following will deny what they have seen with their own eyes, heard with their own ears, and insist that this tyrant has never lied. I have no explanation with which to assuage the cognitive dissonance I know that we are all feeling.
But I am sure of this, Hunter Biden’s guilty verdict for a crime that would never had been charged against anyone whose last name wasn’t “Biden,” is evidence that somewhere in the distant back of Republicans’ brains is an awareness that lying is wrong and honesty is a virtue we should all cherish and strive to make our own.
Trump’s daily spewing of propaganda, disinformation, lies, and self-serving exaggerations have somehow not made him disappear but association with him seems to make everyone else disappear.
Eight of his staff and administration members have served time in prison and three more have been criminally charged. And even though Trump still manages to ride a wave of incomprehensible popularity, who would ever hire one of his sons or daughters for a responsible position in any kind of business? Who would want to be friends with Kellyanne Conway or any of the people who have repeated his lies, lied for him, and pretended that he was not guilty of multiple disgusting crimes?
Trump has not become invisible, but I would contend that the Republican Party has lost all credibility because of their ongoing association with him and loyalty to his anti-democratic, fascist propaganda. What would it take for the Republican Party to become a trustworthy and reliable political influence again? . . . beyond several funerals?
People can change. Parties can change. But the recovery of honor, trust, reliability is a long road and I contend that it is paved with honesty . . . rejecting half-truths, gross exaggerations, and absurd conspiracy theories and deceptive propaganda, a whole lot of people are going to have to say a whole lot of true things to become visible again in a world where character really does matter.
As you would learn in Al Anon, I beg you to stop believing the lies. I implore you to make lying wrong again.
