Years ago I was dumb enough to fall for this girl who told me all kinds of stories. She came so close to messing up my life permanently.
In 1982, when Israel moved into Lebanon, a friend of mine went on at some length how this meant WWIII. The missiles would have to fly. The Soviet Union could not possibly take it lying down. It was the end of human civilization.
He spoke credibly, convincingly, and with all the appearance of expert knowledge.
I didn’t sleep that night…
In the morning, I slapped myself. He was just an idiot, posing as knowledgeable, but really had no more idea of what would happen than anyone else.
One of the last times I ever let a liar get to me.
In my job as a (remote) telemarketer, I’ve come across a few liars, but none so blatant as RON! Ron just can’t help himself…not only is his daughter a graduate doctor, she’s FOUND A CURE FOR A PARTICULAR CHILDHOOD CANCER!!! It’s called ‘Stress Cancer’ apparently, and develops when children grow up in a single parent family. I dunno what the cure is, but the diagnosis always got me chuckling! 
Then Ron reckons he’s a super-athlete, and his avatar at work is of a pumped cyclist doing the yards. Alas, the avatar he chose to represent himself is actually a young bloke…Ron is 66 yrs old, and as flabby as your average 66 yr old.
The latest was his posting of his ‘newborn’ grandchild. The kid was super cute!! The kid was also at least 3 months old!!! When challenged on the age, he said that all the kids in his family have looked older than their ages, and that they’ve all SMILED at a week! 
How do I deal with him? I don’t believe ANYTHING he says now! If he tells me the sky is blue, I go onto the Bureau of Meteorology website and click on his location to confirm!
And yeah, he even lies about the fucking weather! Onya Ron!
I know how you feel. I just feel like saying “Look, I know you are lying, so this discussion has ended. Bye!” instead of listening to this BS. I had a supervisor in one of my first jobs who would tell these BS stories about him claiming to own a side contracting business, and he would describe in detail some complex job. Even if it was true, I could careless about it. When I tried to change the subject he would say “Hold on a second, let me finish what I’m telling you”. I wanted to tell him, what’s the point, it wasn’t real and I don’t care. But I waited a couple of minutes and then got away from him. He didn’t seem crazy at the interview. 
Why did he claim he owned a side contracting business, who knows, perhaps he knows someone who does that kind of work and wishes he did too.
Sometimes the information is so incredible the number don’t compute. This couple moved way far out away from everyone and claimed it took only 45 minutes to drive to her office. I mapped their home and office in Google Maps and the distance was 83 miles. There is no way someone is going to be able to travel (in rush hour traffic too!) 83 miles in 45 minutes, unless they can fly.
I use to think of lying as something people would grow out of, but it’s amazing to see mature adults telling lies like this. I guess over the years they have gotten so comfortable with their lies they don’t even think altering their story telling. Like instead of saying “I then told the guy…”, say “I wished I had told the guy…” which would still make it an interesting story, but it would be the truth, because it’s about their thoughts and not a fabrication of events.
I’m really surprised to learn that the DSM doesn’t recognize pathological liars. It is so obviously a personality disorder of some sort.
I’ve been lucky (or naive) and haven’t known too many such liars. But I did know one in high school whose dumbest lie has always stuck with me: one day he told me, with a completely straight face, that he had something like 10 different pairs of eyeglasses (all identical, of course) because his eye prescription changed around constantly, so he needed to switch glasses all the time.
I’d been realizing he had … problems … but that was the story that made me realize was a chronic liar he was. I mean really, even if such a story were believable, who on earth would care?Was he trying to come across as “special” because his eyes were different from everyone else’s? I guess.
The thing is, if you ask follow-up questions in hopes to shut the person up, they just add more lies to cover for what they told you or questions you ask.
Thanks for providing that, I was wondering the same thing if being a pathological liar was an actual diagnosis for a condition for treatment. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ad for a psychotherapist that said it dealt with issuing of lying. Maybe lying is covered as part of another type of DSM entirely?
Gosh, it seems like it has to be a condition for treatment. Like that guy I mentioned, who went on and on about a dead girl friend he never had with the wealthy family in Europe who offered to pay for his college there.
Hey, I just found this “The only mention of pathological lying in the DSM is in association with Factitious Disorder”:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-excess/201310/fiddler-the-truth
That begs the question of why do they lie so much?
I can see someone in a bad situation might lie themselves out of it. For example if they were once in jail for theft they might hide that from an employer. But these people who make up these wild stories only to boost themselves and it seems everyday they come up with a new whopper! Whats up with that?
Is it a real mental disease? Could medication cure it?
The one woman I knew who was like this darn well knew she lied and even admitted she didnt know why. She also had been a victim of childhood trauma. Well at least she says she was. Is there a correlation?
I encountered someone who would absorb other people’s stories into his life, and I honestly don’t think he was lying. I really believe that somehow his brain took another person’s anecdote and made it part of his life. These were never things that mattered, more like something his/their kid said or did that was cute.
The reason I don’t think he lies deliberately is because in things that matter, he’ll flat out admit to not remembering something that did happen. I tend to think it’s because he becomes consumed with a work problem or planning out some personal project, and everything else becomes incidental. So he either ignores or discards what he hears, or he lets it into his head and somehow “remembers” what he’s been told as something that happened to him.
Does that make sense? 
I had a schoolfriend who was an appalling liar, in both senses of the phrase. She even used to send emails supposedly from her “friends in Ireland”, (where, according to her mother she’d never been), using her own email address. The “friends” changed ages and shared a curious number of names with characters in books she had recently read.
My favourite lir of hers was when she got stung by a bee, on a school organised weekend fundraiser; she took two days off school, and came back with a bandaged arm. When questioned about the bandages, she claimed her arm had swollen to over twice the normal size (which is why she had been off for several days), and the bandages were to squish it back down to normal.
As soon as she left school and actually did something interesting with her life, she stopped making nonsense up. I think she just felt boring.
A thing which – as per numerous PPs – a surprising number of people do. I’ve encountered a fair few, over most of a biblical span. The one that most comes to mind, is a work colleague from a few decades ago. She was full of tales – very verbosely recounted – of dramatic things done by her / happening to her, both in her (told-of) past, and present. For everything that she “autobiographically” told of, to have actually happened, she would have had to be a couple of hundred years old; and there were a few glaring inconsistencies and plot-holes which could be discerned, in her tales of her past life. And the content was often highly over-the-top – with her supposedly on the receiving end of every imaginable kind of villainy / atrocity.
My “favourite” of her tellings-of, was the one about her father – allegedly a loathsome person, who hated her – having, out of spite, deliberately registered her date of birth wrongly; whereby she was ten years older than her “official” age.
Notwithstanding “all the above”: this lady was, “day to day”, a very kind and agreeable person – she was always ready to help, “above and beyond”, if anyone had a problem; she did her best to take the role of peacemaker, in office-falling-out situations. It was difficult to hate her: the worst thing about her “Baron Munchausen” shtick, apart from its boring-ness, was that it tended to tie one up at length, when one needed to be working. I never understood how – with so many hours of her working day taken up with telling lengthy and unlikely tales – she managed to perform a satisfactory amount of her required job-type duties.
Interesting thread. Seemingly, the majority of the pathological liars in this thread are listed as women. I wonder why that is? As for my own personal experience, I’ve known three; two men and one woman. The best way to deal with them, in my opinion, is to just stay the hell away and not get caught up in their drama. Because that’s always the end result… either (and / or) too much self-importance, leaving no room for anyone or anything else, or too much victimization, which, oddly, is still identical to the former.
If it’s to do with work they’ll give you an answer, and then change that answer later on with some kind of ‘reason’ (administration problems, a supplier, you misheard, you didn’t understand my English, the weather, King Tut etc), making all of your preparation redundant. :rolleyes: