THE HUMAN CONDITION / WHY WE TELL WHOPPERS : The One That Got Away -- and Other Tall Tales
Everyone lies.
Some stretch the truth; others mince it. This is a story about people who blow it to smithereens. Shameless revisionists. Hard-core, in-your-bald-face liars.
For these people, reality is reflexively rearranged into dirty packages of deceit. Psychiatrists say compulsive liars--one researcher estimates they account for up to 5% of the population--suffer from a personality disorder that leads them not just to tell lies but to try to live those lies as well.
“A lot of these people try to rewrite their personal history,” says Bryan King, a psychiatrist at the UCLA School of Medicine who has studied lying. “They often come from traumatic home environments. Their own history is so bad, they revise it.”
And, experts say, when compulsive liars start to believe their revised versions, a whole new fictionalized world opens up for them. A new self-esteem. A new sense of power.
“Some liars get a thrill that’s almost addictive,” says Charles Ford, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, who is writing a book on the subject. “They get an instant rush by duping someone. They think, ‘Hey, I must be hot stuff to pull this off. Look how clever I am.’
“If they don’t get caught, these liars just keep on lying, keep on building on the lies. They don’t care who gets hurt by it. A lot of these people have dry rot of the superego.” (In addition, experts say, compulsive liars are difficult to treat because therapy is based on truth.)
Ford gets no argument from Laura Belcher, 36, of Seattle, who says she “almost” fell in love with a compulsive liar earlier this year. As it turned out, what she nearly fell in love with was a mirror of her own dream.
In May, Belcher dated a man for two months. “In the first couple of weeks, he told me he was a King County (Washington) police officer on loan to the DEA and Justice Department as an undercover officer,” says Belcher, who works as a minister’s assistant.
“He said he’d been doing that for eight years. He said he was a retired Navy Seal, that he had worked in Vietnam and around the world freeing hostages. He said he had a master’s degree in physics, that he was a writer and a poet.”
In addition, he said his wife died during childbirth 18 years ago and that his daughter lived in Europe.
“He mirrored everything I could have wanted,” Belcher says. “It was like he was my clone. I like to play softball, ski, camp, read, dance. Everything I liked to do, he said he liked to do.
“He was a professional listener. He listened to what I said and took all of it and molded himself into what I wanted. He even talked about getting married.”
The man’s cover was blown about seven weeks into the relationship. Belcher’s mother read a news article in the Seattle Times reporting that her daughter’s boyfriend had been arrested for impersonating a police officer.
Upon investigation, Belcher says, she discovered that the man had been married twice, that he was never a Navy Seal and that he worked for a book bindery.
“I was terrified,” Belcher says. She figured anyone capable of such stratospheric deceit might not react positively to a forced re-entry into reality. Rather than confront the man face to face, she wrote him a letter explaining that she knew about the lies and that their relationship was over.
Emotionally, the myth was more difficult to dismiss.
“It was as if this person I was close to had died,” she says. “It was very traumatic, like a death.”
Looking back, Belcher believes her former boyfriend needed to gain sympathy and approval.
According to King, many liars come from backgrounds in which they felt wanted, needed and valued only to the extent that they were in some way extraordinary. If they don’t measure up to someone’s perceived standard, they use their imagination to elevate their stature.
David Thompson lived with someone who did just that. During a recent National Public Radio documentary, he said that in his sophomore year of college he had a roommate who raised imaginative lying to an art.
Over five months, his roommate at the University of Nebraska spun a tale that Thompson, 29, found to be concurrently bizarre and intriguing.
The story went like this:
The roommate was born and raised in Boston, where his father was an executive at a large international satellite company. But the father suffered from a serious heart condition, and doctors told him to quit working and get away from the fast-paced high-society life. So he moved his family to a small town in Nebraska.
In Boston, the roommate’s family had lived down the street from the Kennedy estate. His best friend was one of Robert Kennedy’s sons.
On various weekends, the roommate would fly back to Boston in his father’s private jet to visit the Kennedys, who happened to be paying for his college education.
“I basically believed it,” Thompson says. “Or at least never really thought it was worth my while to doubt it. (The story) had been going on for months until one Sunday night he came back after being away all weekend. He was acting funny, kind of sheepish but grinning a lot, as if he had a secret. I could tell from his behavior that it was the kind of secret he wanted me to ask him about.
“So, finally, I asked him, ‘What’s going on? Why are you acting so funny?’
“He said, ‘Well, I swiped my father’s plane. I went to Boston (for) Rose Kennedy’s 92nd birthday party.’
“At this point,” Thompson says, “I was having serious doubts about anything he said.”
A few weeks later, Thompson ran into a friend who also knew his roommate and had heard the Kennedy stories. She told Thompson she had discovered a set of directories to all the towns in Nebraska. She had looked up the roommate’s name and discovered that his father was an electrician’s assistant.
“At that moment,” Thompson says, “the lie seemed very sad.”
So why did he believe his roommate’s story for so long?
“Up until that time, I had lived in Nebraska all my life,” he says. “I wanted to think there were people around who did stuff like this. I mean, why couldn’t someone from Nebraska jet off on weekends to see the Kennedys?
“So, in a sense, I guess I was having fun with the whole thing, too.”
Research shows that, in general, people want to believe what they are told, even if it is an outlandish lie. Complicating matters is the fact that many compulsive liars have a sense of how far to push their lies.
“They have an uncanny ability to tell people what they want to hear,” Ford says.
“People are likely to believe things that are just a little extraordinary,” adds King. “Even in nature, if something is a little too good to be true, it is accepted. Look at the cuckoo bird. They lay eggs in the nests of other birds, and since theirs are slightly larger and more appealing than the host bird’s eggs, the host bird will look after the cuckoo’s eggs rather than her own.
“We all have a desire to see things bigger, better than they really are.”
Maureen O’Sullivan, a professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco, helped conduct extensive studies that ended with the discouraging conclusion that most people--even members of the FBI, CIA and numerous police departments who were tested--simply cannot tell when they are being lied to.
“(Some liars) give no indication, no emotional clues that they are lying,” she says. “They look you straight in the eye.”
O’Sullivan suggests that liars can be uncovered by those who concentrate on the overall consistency of a story and take notice when the suspected liar hesitates at junctures where it’s unnatural to pause.
Also, experts say, it’s worth remembering that compulsive liars are, well, compulsive. Chances are they won’t leave well enough alone. If their lies are readily accepted, they may reach further and further until their tales truly are implausible.
“One of the strange things about being involved with a liar is that they rely on you giving them the benefit of the doubt,” says Thompson. “They abuse human generosity when it comes to trusting other people.”
It is destructive for the liar, experts say, because the self-esteem he seeks is always just over the next mountain of lies.
“The liar doesn’t win in this,” says San Gabriel psychologist Larry Langlois. “They try to build themselves up, but in the long run it has the opposite effect. Even if others believe them, they know they are lying, that they are not what they are projecting themselves to be. It ends up tearing them down even more. That’s the biggest lie of all.”
Rearranging Reality
Compulsive liars are capable of truly wild tales. Consider the following examples, culled from interviews with experts:
* A woman tells friends that she is an Israeli freedom fighter who has liberated countless hostages held by terrorists in Lebanon. During one mission, she says, she was captured and tortured, and later she made a daring escape. In truth, she has never been outside Los Angeles County.
* A husband tells his wife that a woman who regularly writes him letters and refers to herself as “your wife” is a Mafia princess and that he is getting out of the mob. Later, she discovers that her husband has had multiple “lives.”
* A man who spent time in the Army tells his family he’s been decorated for honorable service and received the Purple Heart. In fact, he was booted out of the Army for drug abuse.
