She has lied and exaggerated her way through countless diagnoses and emergencies. Not to harp on my mom, but…guess who also has a fucked-up relationship with sickness? Funny how that happens. But my disastrous relationship with the truth is especially prevalent when it comes to health issues. Just…I guess, an excuse I could put in my pocket and use when it was convenient. I found out I was pregnant very early, I swallowed two little pills, I got a horrendous period. The truth is, I had had an abortion…the year before. This time, when confronted for an answer for why I went off the grid, I said I’d had an abortion that went wrong and I had been in the hospital. When I was ready to go back, I borrowed from my own painful experience in the past and used an excuse I had at the ready. (For the record, I was miserable the entire time and didn’t -COULDN’T-enjoy my “time off” at all). I had a mental freak out and didn’t-couldn’t- go to work. And I’d get a slap on the wrist or a concerned “glad you’re okay, please let us know sooner,” and then it would just become dirty bathwater under the bridge.Īnd then…THE BIG ONE. And it would take a couple days of compounding my own misery before I would go back to work, tail between my legs, with a story about getting sick or an unavoidable emergency.
And then I would feel so ashamed of going off the grid, I would…not go again. (It’s amazing how the desire to be seen as perfect exposes how imperfect we are, isn’t it?) So whenever I needed what I now call a mental health day at work, I would just…not go to work. Something dramatic was necessary to explain why I couldn’t be available and “on” all the time. I didn’t have the language to say “I am having a tough time and I need space.” I was too consumed with the idea of being perfect and not being the kind of person who needed help. My whole life, I followed in my mom’s unstable footsteps and lied to explain away uncomfortable situations. And believe me, it took a hell of a situation to even get me to start doing that work.īecause there’s one lie in particular that I define my life around. Part of the work I’ve done on this has been acknowledging that I’m not just a product of a messy parent. Not just for the sake of the people in my life, but for my own wholeness and wellbeing. And it’s my responsibility to hold myself accountable for doing it, too. She’s lied to my face about events that I was there for, how can I assume she’s a reliable narrator of her childhood? And really…does it matter? Does she need to have been through a traumatic childhood for her behavior to be, what, acceptable? It may not be her fault, but it is her responsibility. And I just happened to be raised in and around that bizarre liminal space where I saw the truth, and I saw what she said was the truth, and just accepted the dissonance as, well, normal.Īnd yet part of me-and I think many of us who spend time around liars do this-questions how truthful the tales of her trauma are.
Are pathological liars dangerous full#
She had a super fucked-up childhood full of trauma and abuse, and the armchair psychologist in me thinks she’s trying to escape it by creating her own reality. I don’t know where hers comes from, to be honest. But I did inherit this propensity for mistruths from my (lowercase “c”) creator. I didn’t just spring out of the dirt a fully-formed human with one fatal flaw given to me by my Creator. And it’s at the core of how I was raised and who raised me.
I am the person who will catch and release bugs and rodents because I can’t bear the thought of not helping someone or something, let alone actively hurting someone or something.Īnd I’m telling you this as much as I’m telling myself this, and for the same reason: I want us to agree that I’m not a bad person, and that this one flaw of being a pathological liar doesn’t make me an evil person. I am empathetic and I try to be generous emotionally and financially whenever I can. Now, for some background-I am not the “serial killer” brand of malevolent liar you see in movies.
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