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Why do People Lie?

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  • #163094
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear serenity:

    Would you like to start a thread with your the struggles you described above? You can share about your childhood and all relevant information. I will read it attentively and reply.

    anita

    #163096
    Anonymous
    Guest

    * didn’t submit correctly…

    #163100
    serenity
    Participant

    dear anita,

    i just did and i would love for you to read it that would mean a lot to me.

    love,

    serenity

    #163138
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear serenity;

    I am pleased to see that you started two threads! Will not get a chance to get to them until I am back to the computer in about 17 hours or so. I am looking forward to read them when I am back and I will thoughtfully reply then. In the meantime, I hope other members will reply.

    Till the morrow, take good care of yourself.

    anita

    #163234
    LonelyGirl97
    Participant

    Hey guys I can relate to this post, when I was younger, 11-12 I used to lie about big things.. I mean I was such a trouble back in school, wish I could delete it from my memory..i lied mostly because i felt insecure

    #163236
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear LonelyGirl97:

    It must be bothering you very much, your past lying, so much that you wish you could delete that year from your memory.

    Even though you remember that year, it doesn’t define you. It is not who you are. If you would like to start a thread about that year in your childhood, about having lied then, or about any part of your life, your thoughts, feelings, please do and I will be glad to read and reply there.

    anita

    #170287
    Musafar
    Participant

    … because she is in love.

    #388704
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Reader:

    More than 4 years since the last post on this thread: my topic was “Why do people lie?“- some people lie so to re-write history in a way that makes them look good, which entails making another person look bad. The logic goes something like this: the more I make the other person look bad, the better I look; the more I Lower the other person, the more I Uplift myself; the more I Downgrade another person, the more I Upgrade myself.

    This is how parents often treat their children, this is how a romantic partner often treat the other. This is how one group of people treat the other.. downgrade the other via lies and exaggerations so to upgrade oneself.

    anita

    #388731
    anna
    Participant

    Yeah, these points are so real for people, especially man.

    #388761
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear anna:

    Tell me more, will you, about lies people tell. I hope to understand more from reading about your experience and thoughts on the matter.

    anita

    #388816
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Reader:

    Some people lie because they don’t value telling the truth. Some people lie because they don’t value the people they are lying to. Some people  have a story to tell, and they don’t want anything like the truth standing in their way of telling the same old, same old story, a story that is immune to truth and insight. They want someone to listen to their story, however untrue, however nonsensical,  and say nothing other than: you are Right, everything you say is just how it is.. no need to examine anything, no need to adjust anything.

    When a person says: “I love you!” and then proceed to repeatedly and intentionally hurt the “loved-one”, the “I love you” is a lie. It reminds me of the story of Dr. Mengele, the horrible Nazi responsible for the unspeakable pain and deaths of millions- he liked a certain young gypsy boy, treated him well, day after day until one afternoon he led the boy to the gas chambers. I bet the gypsy boy believed that Mengele loved him, based on Mengele true affection and preferential treatment. But love does not  intentionally harms, and when it does- it is not love.

    We are weak when we believe and submit to lies,  and strong when we confront lies and the people who tell the lies. By lies- I don’t mean unintentionally told untruths, I mean intentionally saying what the person knows is untrue- so to promote an agenda, and agenda like..  a person’s same-old-same-old unexamined and unchallenged Story.

    anita

    #388825
    Grace
    Participant

    I feel uneasy when I lie.

    #388855
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Grace:

    Thank you for posting in my thread. I hate lying, and pretending anything, but once in a while I still find myself not genuine: trying to please a person by saying something that I do not fully believe in. When that happens,  I feel uncomfortable and do what I can to correct myself and be genuine the next time I talk to that person, and to all people.

    Tell me more about how it feels for you, to lie, and in what circumstances you find yourself lying, will you?

    anita

    #388913
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Reader:

    This post will be about my mother’s lies- lies I grew up with, lies that created a twisted understanding in my mind, a twisted understanding of people and life.  Before I go back in time to her lies, told before the internet existed, I want to mention what is widely known:  that we currently live in an era of lies, aka disinformation, spread massively through the internet. Old fashioned journalism where facts were reported objectively, without opinion, is almost a thing of the past, and what exists now is non-journalism with a narrative, or a Story, reporting only the facts that support their Story, and adding claims and suspicions that are not supported by facts, so to support .. a Story, non-journalists promoting the Story that their audience wants to hear, for financial profit.

    Similarly, my mother infected my poor, assaulted brain with massive (pre-internet) disinformation aimed at promoting a Story, her Story. The theme of her Story was that she was GOOD and everyone else was BAD, including me. She then .. reported to me only the facts that supported her Story, including claims and suspicions not supported by facts. Some of her claims were lies (untruths told intentionally, aka disinformation), others were her mistaken beliefs (untruths told unintentionally, aka misinformation). To promote herself being GOOD she promoted others being BAD, the idea being that the more other people are bad, the more .. good she is. (I see this practice in these forums, from time to time, when more often it is a woman who lies/ exaggerates the claimed badness of an ex romantic partner, so to promote her goodness). As a result of my mother practicing the demonization of everyone else, at length and repeatedly, I believed that she was indeed the only good person in the world and that everyone else was bad, including me.

    This belief led to my extreme loneliness and isolation as a child, a teenager and an adult because on one hand, I was not at all close with my mother, I was most distanced from her, and on the other hand I didn’t trust anyone else.. so no closeness with her, no closeness with anyone else. Closeness was not possible with my mother because she claimed that I was bad, so I was filled with ongoing, chronic shame and guilt.. and anger, a tormenting combination of emotions that do not allow closeness.  In my mind, buying into her Story, my only chance to be free from Guilt (for being BAD), was to one day give her enough money/ luxurious life so to compensate her for my Badness: that became my life-goal. I remember crying in the bathroom following one of her you-are-bad dramatic displays, saying to myself convincingly: I am so bad. I must not live for me. I must live only for her until such time that I compensate her financially for my badness. Only then will I be free to live my life for me. I was imprisoned in Guilt for decades, and no matter how much money I saved so to pay her back, it was never enough, never buying me freedom from guilt. It is only recently, in the last few years, that I progressively experienced the freedom I longed for, freedom from guilt. But am not entirely free: this is why I am posting this, wanting MORE freedom from guilt, and more freedom from her Lies.

    Her I am Good, you are Bad theme of lies included the following repeated claims: (1) that in her mind and heart, I was the focus of her life, that all that she did, she did for me, that I was the reason she was alive (that otherwise, she’d kill herself), that all her hard physical work every day- was done to benefit me. Here is a startling part of this claim: when I was 6-years-old, she brought my newborn sister to me, in her arms, and told me: this is a gift for you, I made her for you. I remember thinking to myself: this baby’s skin is so wrinkled.. what a strange, wrinkly gift.

    The truth, supported by facts: I was far from being the focus of her life. As a matter of fact, her siblings, her nieces and nephews, neighbors, neighbor’s children, and strangers were her focus, while I was last. Whenever in the company of others, her focus was on them while insisting that I was to be nice and quiet, accommodate the others in every way. I remember once, visiting a girl from school, as a teenager: the girl’s mother answered the door (at the time, people did not call before visits) and told me that her daughter cannot visit with me because she was busy. I was SHOCKED: I didn’t know it was an option, for a mother to put her daughter first, before a visitor. I am still feeling the shock of it. Another memory that stuck to my mind: in a visit to an uncle, I was a preteen, I think,  he asked me questions about what I thought about this or that, asked with a smile and an attitude of respect and curiosity. I was shocked, I was never asked that with such an attitude, I didn’t know it was an option. Fascinated and feeling alive by the question, I wanted so much to to try and answer, but my mother was sitting to his left, giving me a threatening,  uneasy look.  In summary: I was not her focus, nor was she curious about me as a person, and I was the last on her priority list. She claimed she worked and earned money for me, but she kept spending her hard earned money on her siblings, their children, neighbors and strangers and their children, buying them expensive gifts and feeding them often with the most expensive foods. She wasn’t saving her money for me.. she spent it on others, on people she was focused on. To those others, including strangers, she talked oh so lovingly, oh so respectfully, flattering them, going on and on about how great they are. She didn’t talk like this to me!

    There were many lies, many re-arrangements of facts and fiction so to promote the theme of her Story. I need to continue to take apart her Story so to free myself of it more. Maybe I will post more about it later.

    anita

    #388939
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Reader:

    I had the image last night, of my mother, being maybe 30 something, maybe 40, and very anxious, like she often was, talking and talking and talking in that agitated way I remember too well, on and on and  on.. And I felt empathy for her and in my mind I took her in my arms, hugging her and hushing her.. quieting her, calming her.. because that’s what she needed! I later realized that this image I am telling about, is the image of a mother (me) holding an agitated baby (my mother) in my arms, gently comforting her.

    We daughters of very unwell mothers do get confused when it comes to who is whom. We love her so much, from such an early age.. that even after years or decades of anger at her, we still love her, still want to comfort her, to help her.

    I had a repeated dream, as an adult, I remember it clearly: there was her face looking at me angrily, silent and angry. Nothing happened in that repeated dream.

    The first time I remember her angry at me was on the night when at 5 or 6 years-old, I heard her scream out loud that she was going to kill herself during a fight with my father, then she ran into the night. I was scared but walked into the night, looking for her, imagining finding her dead. When I finally saw her on the street under the moonlight, alive, I was overjoyed. I ran to her, calling her name: Mommy, Mommy, you are ALIVE!!! When I got close enough to her, I clearly saw that she was angry at me, I remember her angry face. Her voice was angry too as she told me accusingly: “And why shouldn’t I be alive?” (Looking back, I think that what angered her was that neighbors heard the commotion, went out to the street, and when I ran to her in front of the neighbors, and said what I said, she felt that what I said made her look bad to the observing neighbors.

    The last time I saw her angry was the last time that I saw her, back in 2012 in her apartment, with guests present, she looked silently angry from across the room.

    There were many times when she was angry at me and LOUD about it, saying lots of shaming, angry things against me, hitting me etc., during hours-long marathons of rage,  but it is her Silent Anger that I remember most, and dreamt about.

    I  am guessing that she was angry at me because I was a breech baby, causing her lots of physical pain and shame, as the hospital staff gathered to watch the unusual birth. I am guessing that she was angry at me for not eating enough, for following being isolated by the hospital for weeks or longer, following a severe case of dysentery, and not allowing her to be with me (a common practice at the time), when I was finally brought to her, at a year-old or so, I turned my back to her and held on to the nurse.

    In defense of the baby that I was, I didn’t turn upside down in her womb because .. well, it was not up to me. I didn’t make it happen: she was bulimic during her pregnancy with me (and for years after) and under-weight, so much so that at 9-months, her pregnancy didn’t even show. And not eating enough after birth- she has always been in the habit of over feeding people, and being a small baby, I didn’t need much food. So, again, not the baby’s fault. Neither is turning away from her after being in the hospital for so long- it is known that a baby gets attached to the nurses when the mother is not present.

    But my.. sins against her, in her own mind, started before my birth and increased throughout decades of my life, culminating in her ongoing, intense anger against me, a timeless, frozen anger, never to thaw.  I loved her so much, chased her to love me for decades while not even knowing that I was chasing her. It was an instinct, a habit- wanting to thaw that angry face, and change her frozen Anger into warm Love. But all along, she kept building her already overly loaded case against me with lists of alleged wrongdoings on my part- against her.

    I am tired, I don’t want to detail any more of her anger, her words, those shaming words she used that burned through my soul, and how strange it was, how creepy it was to hear her say later words of love in regard to me, how creepy it was to feel her touch when it was soft. I want to close this post in this “Why do People Lie?”, with the What, not the Why: her biggest lie, in the context of her and me, was that she loved me and I hated her in return for her love and sacrifice. The truth is that I loved her and she hated me in return, sacrificing me to feed and maintain her Anger.

    As I live the rest of my life, I don’t want to feed anyone’s anger. I want to encourage people to stay away from abuse, to hold abusers responsible, but I do not want to fuel any anger that is not in the direction of a sensible, fair resolution. I want the rest of my life to be guided by.. Sensible Love, not by blind, misguided Anger.

    anita

Viewing 15 posts - 16 through 30 (of 42 total)

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