I don’t want to write a 120 page thesis on the history here, so I’m giving you the (extremely) short version. If a reply requests further info on a specific point, I’m willing to give it. For now:
I have a sister that lies. I don’t mean she claims to bake a better cake than Betty Crocker, I mean she lies. It started way earlier than college, but that’s a good place to start; she claimed she had a B+ average at school for about a semester and a month until they sent her home for failing literally every class due to poor attendance. She moved back in with my parents and got a job. After about a month she stopped going, but lied to my parents about it (she went to a friend’s house instead). A year passed and almost the exact same thing happened… we got her back in school, she stopped going. We got her a job, she stopped going.
The fact that she doesn’t like school is fine, college isn’t for everyone. She doesn’t like the jobs she gets… ok, join the club, work sucks. But she lies about how much she loves everything she’s supposedly involved with until the truth comes out that she bailed within weeks of getting involved.
We’ve tried everything we know to try, including counseling that (surprise!) it turns out she stopped attending after the 5th or 6th meeting. Anybody seen this? Dealt with this? Know how to deal with this? I want to help, but she seems locked into this pattern of self destruction. I try to talk to her about it and she yells at me that everything is fine, then hangs up.
Not sure what I’m asking for here other than a little guidance… so anybody have a little guidance?
Sounds like she just lies to cover up the fact that she isn’t doing the stuff that she is supposed to do. That is a different sort of problem than someone who lies compulsively about everything even if there is no gain it for them.
The answer? Well, I guess my view would be your parents need to stop enabling her. Parents aren’t obligated to let their able-bodied adult offspring live with them for free. At the very least, they should be collecting rent from her and actually follow through with making her leave if she can’t pay it.
There are people out there who would really rather stay at home with their parents than be productive members of society. The only answer is to make it so that the consequences of not being productive are worse than what they’re gaining by avoiding responsibility.
Yeah, I agree I’m abusing the term “compulsive” here, but I didn’t know another way to describe it.
As for the rest of your post, I also failed to elaborate on the most recent happenings. They somewhat passively kicked her out of the house when she got her last job, and after a month or so of being out of the house (and needing money to pay her share of the rent at her new place) she is doing the same thing. She is aware they won’t take her back in, and that she needs income to survive, but screwed it up anyway, and in the same fashion. We have clear evidence that she is not working, but she insists she is and that everything is fine.
It seems to me that this is a beautifully patterned rejection of responsibility regardless of circumstances. We can’t just wait for her to be homeless, but obviously giving her a free ride is the wrong move. I guess what I’m asking is how to motivate her to handle her own life instead of waiting on everybody else to help…
From what I have experienced, she needs a reason to do these things.
Your family is apparently not a sufficient reason. Neither is her success in life.
Unless and until she has a reason to do what she should do, she won’t. Making her do these things won’t change the behavior or the tendency, it’ll just mean she’s more annoyed.
She has to want to change. And what it’ll take to her that light to click on in her brain … beyond me.
It sounds like she feels very inadequate and a failure and that is harder to admit than lying. Also sounds like she’s pretty sure she’s going to fail so she fails on purpose – self-sabotages – in order to take away the suspense (sounds really dumb, but I think it’s fairly common – I know I’ve done this in small ways). I would say counseling, for sure, even though you’ve tried it already. Try again? What about some reassurance that you all will love her no matter what, you want her to take small steps, but also really stop enabling her? What if she did become homeless? Is it cold where she is? Would a few weeks of tough love/homelessness help her in the long run perhaps?
Has she been diagnosed with anything? Depression, bipolar? It might explain why the prospect of being out on the street isn’t enough to get her to stick to a job.
Inadequacy was part of it, but having zero work ethic because everything else had come so easy to that point was also part of it. I struggled for a long time with the fact that ultimately, my brain alone could not carry me through the hardest subjects.
Self-sabotating is right on target. If you’re going to fail, you do it on your terms.
I never did counseling, and it probably would have taken a very long time (I would probably still be working on it) anyway. Besides that, the very idea of counseling only feeds the sense of inadequacy. Also, it’s very, very easy to self-sabotage therapy. You decide the therapist hates you, and you find another one, decide that one hates you, and swear off therapists because they all hate you.
If my suspicion is correct – and I’ve no reason to believe it is or is not – then the subject of the OP needs a reason more important than herself to buckle down and do what she should. Such a reason need not be particularly earth-bending, as someone who feels inadequate often feels that others are adequate or at least not as pathetic.
The trouble is finding a reason, so to speak, that feeds not the inadequacy but the desire to be adequate.
I have no expertise in this, but have seen a TV program about people aged over 30 who were still living with their parents, paying no rent and having no job (nor indeed any prospect of employment).
So I think your family did the right thing telling her to pay rent or leave.
Maybe she just can’t meet the expectation the family has set for her, and feels that she’s letting them down or that she’s not good enough because she doesn’t particularly want for herself what they want for her. To avoid being told she’s a loser, she lies. Or because she really feels like a loser, she lies. It’s more painful to admit to these real or perceived failures than to avoid the confrontation through deception. Not a rare scenario at all, in my opinion. She needs to feel comfortable in her decisions or come to a solution in dealing with her shortcomings.
Both tesseract’s iampunha’s descriptions seems to pretty well fit what I’ve been seeing. The “failing on your own terms” mentality is a hard one to understand, though, as she can certainly handle the jobs she has held. Is it possible that she believes she’s failing at something even if she’s not? Kind of a double whammy, so to speak… she is not only desperately afraid of failure, but is also incapable of seeing any success she may be having?
I always scoffed at the self-esteem workshop kind of things, but could that sort of approach be helpful? Slowly build up her confidence in herself by highlighting her small victories while insisting that it’s not the end of the world if she screws up occasionally?
I dunno…society (that would be me, too!) is fine with people who live more modestly and within their means as long as they’re happy. Maybe the OP can tell us a little more about her. Do her interests tend toward less financially grandiose pursuits? Maybe she wants to be an artist or musician or work for a non-profit or something.
Short answer: no. She’s not an artist or anything like that, nor does she seem to be one of those “let’s save the world” types. I think part of the problem may be that she still can’t figure out what her interests are… I think she would be content to marry rich and be a stay at home mom, but things aren’t exactly headed that way right now.
Well, maybe she’s just your garden variety underachiever. There are millions of them (us) out there. I gotta say…she’s an adult, and as hard as it is to watch them underachieve (cough) my brother (cough), it IS her life. She needs to own it, whatever form it takes. If she doesn’t want to be the person who does well at each pursuit they try, you can’t make her care. But I also feel that you shouldn’t belittle someone because they don’t make of their life what others might have wanted, as long as she’s self-sufficient. If she’s not making her bills, that’s another issue. I’m just sayin’…this is not an accusation – just a thought.
What worked for me was a return to things that I still found easy. My mother somehow strong-armed me into taking my GREs despite the fact that I was just barely getting by in school. I’ve always done well on standardized tests, so I killed it and it restored a lot of my confidence.
Is there anything your sister does particularly well that might do the same for her?
Also make sure she knows that there’s always a backup plan. I know that might sound strange, seeing as it looks like she has no plan at all.
When I was having trouble getting a job coming out of college, my parents went out and dug up all sorts of opportunities that I hadn’t even thought about. You could go enter a beauty pageant, you could go to business school, you could take a summer-long course and then teach English in Korea, you can take a working vacation… It’s the idea that even if you fail, you don’t really fail. Ironically enough, knowing that I had something to fall back on actually motivated me enough to go out and get a regular 9-5 job.
I hear you. I tend to fall into that category myself, though not to the extent my sister does. And I understand the “respect her choices” point of view, too, but it’s hard to watch my sister self destruct over and over again.
As far as interests go, I’m not sure. The job she currently has (something like an aide at an elementary school) seems to be enjoyable for her, but she has started missing work again, which is what sparked this thread. The other issue is that she makes basically no money, and if she really enjoys it she needs something more than a highschool diploma to live off of it… which means going to school, which means we’ve made a full loop.
I called her today and asked a few questions about how things are going and finally got a “everything isn’t ok” response, but she had to go and said she would call later, which she never does. So I guess I’ll just keep on her until she can tell me what’s wrong, and we’ll go from there.
Hi. You can ignore me because I know nothing about you, your sister, your parents, or the truth about anything that’s happened.
I have learned, however, that mostly people don’t lie unless there’s an unacceptible penalty for telling the truth, which is something people usually learn early or not at all. She stopped showing up to meetings dedicated to the topic of what’s wrong with her? Shocking. She doesn’t like the jobs she’s offered as a non-graduate? Slightly less so.
Why don’t you let her deal for a while with people whose disapproval is, at least, not personal but professional and objective? It might redirect her attention, or yours, and either outcome might clarify things.
“I’m worried about you, I know it can be hard to talk about, but I don’t like to see you unhappy and I want to know if there is anything I can do to help you out, and even if there isn’t, I’m always here for you if you need me.”
No nagging.
No action plans for going to school.
Just find out how she is doing and what she thinks you can do to help.
If she doesn’t think you can help or doesn’t want your help, then just be supportive.
People don’t like admitting things aren’t going well and they don’t like admitting they’ve made bad choices, especially if they’re going to get lambasted for their bad decisions or given a list of things to do that seems difficult or unrealistic.