Pathological Lying

I am having the most bizarre experience at the moment been going on for some time now.

I have to deal with someone who is a pathological liar. I have actually made phone calls and caught this person out many times and when I question them they just tell me another blatant lie. No point blowing up because I just need to progress the work and get this person out of my life. Its time consuming and frustrating. Never had to deal with anything like this before.

Everyone tells a white lie from time to time perfectly normal, but this is totally different.

Anyone been fortunate enough to meet someone like this

Interesting info on this link

Truth About Deception

MTR

 

I used to work with a bloke that told so many porky pies he could never remember who he told what to. It was always quite funny at lunch time when youd hear at the crap he talked. It was all pointless stuff too, like what rare and expensive cars he had stashed away at home (he had none), You need a 4x4 to access his house his wife has to park on the road and call him and he had to go in his jacked 4x4 and pick her up (not true at all). I could go on for ever, 6 years I had to put up with it, he was a good solid worker never put a foot wrong with the business but you just couldnt take him seriously in the end.

 

Yep. My brother and one of my bosses years ago. In the case of my brother, he has a deep pathological need to be liked, so he will tell the person he is speaking to whatever he thinks they want to hear. I don't believe it is malicious. For example, he told my parents that he loves his house and wants to keep it. He told another person he hates his house and can't wait to sell it. It's all harmless as far as I can see but it means I never really know what he thinking or how he feels about something. Whenever he tells me something I wonder if that's what he really thinks or if that is what he thinks I want to hear.

My boss years ago had some kind of personality disorder. She was intentionally manipulative but it didn't seem like she was intentionally deceptive. She tried to pit all of her team members against each other by talking behind their backs. She didn't realised that we were all good friends and so we would regularly report on what she was saying about each person behind their back and have a good laugh. Needless to say she would get very angry when confronted with a one of her many lies.

I don't have any advice on how to deal with these people. All I know is that they won't care if confronted with proof they have lied. They will just make up another outrageous lie to cover it. Makes them very difficult to deal with.

 

LOL. you need to have really good memory to keep this up.

 

There's nothing you can do. If they're lying like that, fair chance that they are lying to themselves too...

You've identified the issue.....get out of there as soon as practicable.

Now with that out of the way I'm off to cross the Pacific in a gold plated raft made out of dodo feathers......toodles!

 

I don't think I have ever had someone like that in my life. I do have a friendsimilar to Perthguy's brother - One in particular, loveliest lady with a really big heart but I feel I will never know what she truly thinks/feels - just tells you things she thinks you want to hear or are interested in. I don't know why she does it and what the motivator is but it just means that I will not invest in fostering our friendship and simply class her as an acquaintance.

 

I have someone like that at work. I believe in patience and giving them a false sense of security of thinking they are in the clear but I am slowly squeezing them.

 

I have a friend like this, it's quite funny really. He's wage varies greatly every time he (for some reason) brings it up. I believe that there is a grain of truth to his lies and I always like to think where they start. For example, he told me that he is friends with the CEO of his company (His company has thousands of employees). I'm guessing maybe he saw the CEO from a distance and exaggerated accordingly. I've known him since primary school and I remember the first time I figured it out: He told me, in the first grade, that he had an indoor swimming pool, with a diving board and a rock pool. I was very disappointed when I went over to his house with my bathers... It doesn't really bother me though - he does tell a good story...

 

I used to employ (I use that term very loosely with this guy) who was an extreme pathological liar (he was the 'I was abducted by aliens - the Government paid me $billions for my story' type liar).

One day I was telling him a story (that was a true story) events that had happened to me a couple of years earlier when I was employed by my previous employer. It had some quite extraordinary details that were very unique to the situation I found myself in where I was working, how I got there, the job description etc. About 6 weeks later we were all in a group (my permanent staff and I - and we all joked about this guy all the time), and he proceeded to tell us that he had been MIA the last couple of weeks as he went on this 'extraordinary' trip for another employer. It was 'extraordinary' because it was an almost word for word account of the story I had previously told him earlier. One of my blokes started to pipe up about it not being true (because he knew it was my story), but I nudged him and let the guy keep going, just so we could laugh (and we did....hysterically). He believed it was true, all the way until the end where we burst out laughing. From there, we all used to tell him made up stories to then catch him out if he brought them up. Then, whenever he did tell a story that we hadn't heard before, we would then make up that it happened to one of the other guys and say he made it up. Guy could not even track the lies he told.

Anyway, we eventually made this guy quit. The last straw was when my brother epoxy glued his take-away coffee cup shut so he couldn't disappear for an hour at a time instead of working.

pinkboy

 

Naa. She lost the election.

 

This might be me

"Yes dear, I will be home in ten".....
"Me, drinking, no honey".....
"Yes darling, I do believe you are correct, again"..
"I will do/fix that tomorrow".......

So many times.......

 

I don't know why people want other people to believe they are richer than they really are, what can they possibly benefit from it?
When I worked in South East Asia a local colleague would make up very wild stories about how her family is from South Africa and owns diamond mines etc and how her hubby drives a Porsche, except she pronounces Porsche as "poo-s-Cher" very entertaining.
She also borrows English books from me, but she never read them. I know because I would make up names and plots such as "Oh my favourite character from Bridget Jones's diary is Keyser Soze, omg I cried my eyes out when he died for princess Leah." It was great fun to see she nod along and joined the discussion. I know it wasn't very nice of me to play her but I kept it to myself for all these years until today....

 

As ashamed as I am to admit it ... I was a chronic liar in my teens. It all came down to deep insecurity, a desire to be liked/popular and habit.

Fortunately I grew out of it by my 20's ... seems some never do

 

I've been very careful in my life to avoid pathological liars simply because they're trouble - the most difficult ones to deal with are the liars who are really good at their craft because if you are practised enough and capable of remember who you have told what then there's almost no stopping you. I once had a boss who was a very senior executive in an organisation I was working for and she was really terrifically good at telling lies - I'm not sure if she got there just because she was so convincing but she was really, really good at it - particularly at telling you things that she thought you wanted to hear.

My other observation is that there's a qualitative difference between pathological liars and other sorts of problems - my experience is that pathological liars tend to do so either because they're making up for some kind of perceived inadequacy or they have a malicious intent in trying to deceive or manipulate you for whatever reason. But this shouldn't be confused with straight out psychopathology or delusions. For example, I used to have an old friend who slowly lost the plot by developing a complicated set of delusions over the years to the point where he became absolutely impossible to deal with because he thought any time you were challenging his delusional system that you attacking him personally.

 

We occasionally have to deal with a selling agent who I'm sure lives by the motto "Why tell the truth when a lie will do?" I'm pretty certain he's been doing it for so long now that it's become 2nd nature for him. The problem being that he doesn't have a good enough memory to know which lie he's told to whom.

 

I thought this was another Donald Trump thread

 

Oh yeah so you did.
I honestly think Lyin´ Donald would give any of the other characters mentioned in this thread a run for their money. These guys are keeping a list, hundreds of porkies.
Donald Trump said 560 false things, total | Toronto Star

 

That's what usually brings them undone, you have to be really good at remembering who you have told what or the whole thing can come crashing down. And personally I always watch for the small casual lies because they ring alarm bells about what other things are false.