I had a distant relative who was born and lived abroad but would come to my country every year for a stay of 6-8 weeks. She was the biggest liar I have ever known. The lies she would tell were so patently just that and they were often so far fetched and convoluted that I could barely keep my face straight.
I did confront her on more than one occasion but the first time I did was because she was maligning my deceased grandmother’s character. My grandmother died from liver cancer but according to the distant relative she died from cirrhosis of the liver from a life of heavy drinking. I pulled her up at that point but she even had the gall to argue with me citing “the fact” that she herself had witnessed my grandmother’s heavy drinking for herself. At that point I told her to remove herself from my presence if she didn’t want a smack in the mouth. My grandmother enjoyed the occasional drink and now and again she’d get to the tipsy state, especially if she was in the company of her sisters, but this happened maybe a half dozen times a year at best.
Another time the distant relative claimed that an official at the airport recognised her as she came through security and called her over for a chat. I was already pulling a “yeah right” face at this point before realising that this was the first time she’d flown into this particular airport so I pointed out that little fact to her.
She took a moment, and her face on being caught out was a picture, before claiming the guy had transferred from the other airport. I couldn’t help but say something like “so an airport official, who deals with literally thousands of people a year, not only recognises you from making two flights a year into this country he also knows you so well that he calls you over by your first name to have a chat with you?” She just replied “yes”.
What she didn’t know she would make up. And even when she did know something she’d add to it anyway.
She’s dead now but by all accounts her son has inherited her traits of lying and exaggerating.
Yeppers. This is about it. They never admit anything, no matter how much proof you present them with, and you only wind up more irritated and aggravated. And they don’t care, and will never care because they live in their own little world of delusion and they are happy there. They have no real incentive to change. Even if they get caught up in the legal system due to their lies, it is always someone else’s fault or they minimize their own part in it.
I think people like this have a true mental disorder that just can’t be treated.
I do, in my professional capacity. I start with phrases like “your subjective complaints are not consistent with objective findings” and often move to such words as “you’re telling me falsehoods even when the truth would serve you just as well if not better”, to “you lie like a rug”.
Yes, and I’ve learned one big tell is when someone claims to be bound by an unusual requirement to inherit (if they’re not part of a wealthy/storied family but I’ve never been close to anyone who’s part of such a family).
‘I can’t get married before I’m 25 or I’ll lose the castle I’m due to inherit.’ Sure, Gretchen.
‘I can’t have kids before graduating college or I won’t collect a million dollar inheritance from my grandfather.’ Sure, Kristen.
Confronting the liar never fixes them, it’s never worth it. They may even try to take you down w/ them.
At least a couple of them, probably more. One was a guy in the Navy, who told the most outlandish stories as a sort of one-up-manship sort of thing. I told him I’d seen Carlos Montoya in a concert and he told me that he had met him and played his guitar. :rolleyes:
Another guy told me that he had worked with a crew on the “road to Nome”. He got really angry when I confronted him with the fact that there is no such road and never has been. I really thought he was going to take a swing at me.
Also, sadly, my daughter. She has always lived in her own reality, and a lie was almost always the first thing out of her mouth from an early age, regardless of whether or not it served any purpose. She still does it, especially when confronted, so I’m never sure if what I’m hearing is the truth or just her version of the truth. She’s very adept at embellishing the lies to adapt to any challenges to her credibility and will become very angered if you persist. It’s destroyed several relationships in her life. In fact one guy she ended up in court with told the judge that he considered her to be “a pathological liar”.
I love her, but it makes me alternately crazy and sad.
FIL will lie about anything - big or small. He was a bigamist, and would just as soon lie about what he had for breakfast.
No point in confronting him. He would maintain the truth of whatever he chose to say. Only thing we found that worked was to do our best to avoid putting ourselves in situations where his lies would bother us, and to never put ourselves in a position where we depended on him. It still is frustrating at times to learn how readily people seem to accept - or excuse - his blatant lies.
Chefguy, that is sad. Does your daughter have any diagnosed mental illnesses? Can you pinpoint a moment in her childhood (like traumatic bullying) that would cause her to go down such a path?
IME confronting them doesn’t do any good - they generally either repeat the lie, louder, or make up a new lie.
Dashiell Hammett had a character in The Thin Man who would sort of get away with lying because people got tired of disbelieving her. People who lie a lot depend on sticking to their story stubbornly until you stop trying.
There really is no point confronting them, but it’s hard not to try.
The responses I get are “But I don’t remember things that way, so therefore you can’t blame me” or “I don’t remember saying that so there’s no point saying I did”.
Even with witness/video evidence, they will never admit they are lying. There’s always some excuse.
This. Pathological liars are usually quite good at it, and unless you want to get down into the mud and wrestle with a pig, you are better off taking adaher’s approach. Avoid them, don’t believe them, don’t act on what they say etc.
When I was a teenager, I worked for quite some time with a woman who told the best stories. I later also worked at another job with another woman who had grown up in the same small town as her (and they actually lived together briefly - long story, and it didn’t end well). It turned out that pretty much everything woman #1 said was a big lie.
Here are a few things I remember:
She was in a band that went to California and cut a record. (The band did exist, but she wasn’t in it.)
She lost a 2-carat engagement ring while canoeing on a lake near her hometown. (Didn’t happen either, and there’s no lake near that hometown.)
There was a BUNCH of other stuff, too. She was very gregarious and friendly, and woman #2 said she was universally disliked in their small town; she was the type that kids would invite to parties just because they knew she had older siblings who would buy booze for her, and then as soon as she set the booze down, they would kick her out. :rolleyes:
Later, when I was in college, I worked at a restaurant with two people who just had too many interesting stories, and like Chimera was saying, you’ve done those things and you’re working here? The more memorable one was a man in his 30s who was the type where you could tell who had turned 20, because people that age or over could tell he was a phony. Those under 20 thought he was da bomb, and that seemed to be the average age of girls he dated, because older women wanted nothing to do with him for obvious reasons.
The restaurant guy in his 30s also claimed to be in a band; my sister had a lot of friends who were musicians in that college town, and my roommate from the previous year (who had also worked at that restaurant but not with him) was in the scene as well, and neither had ever heard of him.
It turned out he did have a band, of sorts, and they got booked at a bar on a night when nobody else was playing, probably just so they’d have a band there. The roommate I had at the time went with some other co-workers, just to be polite, and she said they were awful.
You gotta wonder about a guy in his 30s who starts a band, KWIM? I’m not talking about someone who had been performing all along and had actual musical talent, either. It’s sort of like what some people are saying about the owner of the Ghostship in San Francisco: A middle-aged person who calls themselves an “artist” is actually a cult leader wannabe.
She had mental issues and as George Bailey said about Clarence,
“…just a kid inside… never grew up…”
I’m sort of amazed she could handle even the easiest of college courses… or birth control. She had been adopted by an ultra religious family that had twisted her head like a screw with evil BS, expectations, and racism against anything outside of her own family horror-show.
She failed out of college, and was disowned by her family. married a guy ( she had long since alienated all of us), never even visited her family in Deal again, and dropped off of the grid.
I learned later that she only lived 5 more years.
There was another at a bank I worked at once.
She was the bank owner’s niece and she liked to think up lies and insist they were true no matter what.
If it became obvious from all sides that she was wrong (ex. “lighting does not cause forest fires.” We wrote away to The US Forrest Service, got a report on the subject, read it to her & presented it to her.) she would hold her head in her hands and she’d shake her head violently like she was having a fit or a stroke.
Not that I’m aware of. She’s always been very popular and attractive, so I don’t think bullying was a cause. Perhaps insecurity from having to move so often (military) caused her to embellish her life to others, but the automatic lie is a mystery.
When I was in the Reserves I had the additional duty in my unit as personnel officer. After I booted out a couple of officers (one for being drunk and taking a swing at a base cop, and the other for failure to report) I was told this story:
The unit had a member who would disappear for drill after drill. He had verbally told the commander he was doing secret missions behind the Iron Curtain or some other outlandish story and for some reason had to be paid with reserve funds to keep it a ‘secret’. How any grown man who had reached the rank of Lt Col and was commander of a unit could believe this bullshit, I don’t know. Anyway, this guy would appear at drills now and then with stories of midnight flights over snowy fields. and being pulled out of the ocean by submarines, etc.blah blah blah.
Anyway, a previous personnel officer to me apparently had better connections than the lying miscreant and started pulling the threads. For one thing, he apparently knew how special missions were funded, and I suppose got an investigator involved. Long story short, the guy was a compulsive liar. He could have got treatment for that, except he’d committed pay fraud so out he went.
Now that I look back on it I’m surprised the commander didn’t get fired for stupidity.
A woman I knew was married to a compulsive liar who was in prison for murder (but he didn’t do it). It seems he would pick up hookers, have sex and beat them, and then rob them. When he was confronted with a pimp in a bar, they went outside, and he came back in later covered in blood. The pimp’s body was found outside, but he claimed “some other guy came by and stabbed the pimp to death.”
She met him in prison, married him, and spent her life savings on his appeal. She finally got him paroled. He went back to his old tricks (ha!ha!) and got arrested again. She said he didn’t not have sex with those women, but what’s wrong with beating and robbing prostitutes? She spent more money trying to keep him out of prison, but that’s where he ended up.
Basically liars are non-empathetic, manipulative, criminal type people. They DON’T CARE if they get caught. And don’t care what other people think.
I have confronted many liars and they could care less. One of them told me he thought the consequences would not be as bad as they were (for lying) so he miscalculated. To him it is not getting caught, but what the price will be via consequences if he is caught - which matters.
Terms for this are sociopath and anti-social personality disorder (conduct disorder if it is someone 18 or younger).
I can think of two from my local pub, both called Bob.
BA Bob had one consistent lie - that he was a retired British Airways 747 pilot. But stories of his life prior to that varied every time he told it. One time he’d flown Sabre jets in the Korean war. (Was the RAF even active in Korea?) Another time he was a Royal Marine commando, yet another time he was SAS. His real background was as a baggage handler at Heathrow. He was a friendly old guy so everyone cut him slack.
The other was Boring Bob who nobody really liked. He was like the character Topper in the Dilbert comics. If you said “my cat is black” he’d say “my cat is blacker”. If I said “I got pulled over for doing 82 MPH on the M3 and got a ticket” he’d say “I got pulled over for doing 472 MPH and got a warning”. He got on everyone’s nerves and even a very sweet old lady once told him to “Fuck off”.