People lie about having trauma
How We Learn to Lie, Hide, and Be Inauthentic
Naturally, human beings strive to seek truth. Ideally, we also aim to tell the truth.
However, most people are highly inauthentic, overly worried about others opinions of them, and constantly lie as adults. Sometimes consciously, often unconsciously. And if you look at a very small child, at someone whos still for the most part untraumatized and unbroken, you notice that children can be exceptionally honest.
As I write in the book Human Development and Trauma: How Childhood Shapes Us into Who We Are as Adults:
Meanwhile, infants and small children are exceptionally authentic beings because their emotional reactions and their thoughts are raw and honest. If they are happy, they smile, giggle, exclaim in pure joy, and feel excited, motivated, curious, and creative. If they are hurt, they cry, disengage, get angry, seek help and protection, and feel betrayed, sad, scared, lonely, and helpless. They dont hide behind a mask.
Sadly, adults oftentimes see this natural phenomenon as a nuisance, silliness, or even a problem. Moreover, in order to adapt and survive in certain environments, lying is easily the best strategy. Then all these children, including us, grow up and we have a society where lying, dishonesty, fakeness, inauthenticity are normal.
Lets explore why children lie and hide their true thoughts and feelings, and then grow up into inauthentic adults.
1. Punished for telling the truth
As children, we are routinely punished for telling the truth. For example, if a child sees something that could make adults uncomfortable, they are encouraged not to say anything. Sometimes they are even actively punished or rejected or ignored for it.
Many caregivers sacrifice a childs authenticity for the comfort of adults.
2. Contradictory standards
Not only is telling the truth often disallowed, sometimes the child is held to contradictory standards. In some situations they are always expected to tell the truth but in others they are strongly discouraged from doing so.
For example, the child is expected to tell the truth about where they are going, what they are doing, and similar personal things. Here, truth and honesty are good. Yet in many families, if the child sees that, for example, the father is drinking again or that the mother is hysterically crying or that the parents are fighting, they are expected not to talk about it.
And so the child becomes confused about the value of honesty, and oftentimes about reality itself. The child also learns that sometimes its valuable to ignore reality, or at least that its unsafe to share your observations with others.
3. Disbelieved or not taken seriously
Way too often adults dont take children seriously. To give a more extreme yet painfully common example, a child experienced abuse and when they try to tell the adults in their lives about it, they are not believed or taken seriously.
This is incredibly damaging to the child because not only were they abused, but they also didnt receive validation, comfort, and support for it.
This makes healing from abuse tremendously difficult, if not impossible.
Moreover, you learn that you cant trust your caregivers, that others dont care about you, and that you have to deal with your pain alone. In some cases, the child even starts doubting what really happened. Its very damaging to a person’s self-esteem.
4. Punished for feeling certain emotions
In childhood, its very common for adults to forbid the child to feel certain emotions. For example, feeling angry at your caregivers is disallowed and punishable. Or you are discouraged from feeling sadness.
Even when the child is hurt, they are sometimes attacked for it, blamed, or even ridiculed. Adults snarl at them, Its all your fault! Or, You should have been more careful!
And so the child learns that expressingor even feelingcertain emotions is forbidden and dangerous. Here, the person learns to self-erase.
5. Bad examples
Children also learn to lie and be inauthentic because they see a bad example in their caregivers and others.
Unfortunately, adults dont see lying to children as a big deal. Quite the contrary, its often even perceived as amusing.
Adults prank or confuse children, or make up stories and justifications. Or lie to them for emotional and social comfort because its too painful to talk about certain things.
Sometimes children see adults lie to others to get what they want, so they learn to do the same.
Summary and final thoughts
By being treated in these damaging ways, the child learns that being yourself is dangerous, that in order to survive and be at least marginally accepted by your caregivers, you have to hide who you really are: your thoughts, observations, feelings, and preferences.
Other times the child decides to lie to get their needs met, needs that otherwise would be completely ignored. For example, if the caregivers are emotionally distant, the child might lie or pretend that somethings going on just to receive some attention.
And, of course, if the child is routinely attacked or rejected for being authentic, they learn to hide and pretend.
In many cases, to the degree where they gradually lose connection to their authentic self and have no idea anymore who they really are.
This is tragic. However, its important to realize that, as adults, we dont have to be afraid of abandonment anymore. We dont need our caregivers to survive. We can endure and deal with all these feelings of betrayal, hurt, distrust, shame, loneliness, anger, and many others.
As adults we can slowly untangle all of these problems and slowly rediscover who we really are. We also can start working on trusting others who actually are trustworthy. We can become authentic again.
Lying as a Trauma Driven Behavior
Keep reading or listen on the podcast!
X-ray vision and understand the neurobiology of being relationally, socially, and behaviorally human means we get to free ourselves from scary beliefs that behaviors are character flaws, a representation of who our children are at their core, solely designed to manipulate us, or a reflection of our worth as a parent.
Lying is actually a completely normal human behavior.
Think about it- when was the last time you lied?
Be honest with yourself (ha, I chuckled at the irony).
It probably wasn’t that long again.
Ask yourself…why?
Be honest!
There are all sorts of reasons floating into your mind I’m sure- but they all land somewhere near the truth that we only lie because we are afraid of what will happen if we don’t.
We only lie because it doesn’t feel safe to tell the truth.
And when I say safe, I’m don’t necessarily mean physically safe.
It could be relationally safe.
It could be if I don’t lie, I won’t get what I want. And the relational repercussion of lying is deemed less bad than the possibility of not getting what I want.
Sometimes lying happens when we feel safe enough in a relationship to know that the relationship will withstand the eroded threat of the lie.
Sometimes lying happens because we are actually prioritizing the relationship in the moment.
Sometimes lying happens because we cannot tolerate the idea of what could happen to the relationship, even if it’s just for a moment, if we told the truth.
Sometimes lying happens because we cannot tolerate the idea of what could happen inside us (shame, dysregulation, etc.) if we told the truth.
There really are quite a lot of explanations for lying but ultimately it almost always comes down to it’s not safe to tell the truth.
What happens if you allow that to really sink in?
Does it change anything for you about how you see the behavior of lying? It’s OK if it doesn’t, I’m just prompting you to notice!
One of the biggest challenges with the behavior of lying isn’t actually the lie- it’s how being lied to makes us feel.
YOU HATE BEING LIED TO!!!
Your brain shouts all sorts of things! Things like:
Do you think I’m stupid?
You are a pathological liar and that scares me!
You are causing me to question my own experience in reality and that scares me!
I must be a terrible parent to raise a liar.
Liars can’t even have positive relationships and ultimately go to jail.
Truly. Those are scary thoughts.
And when all of us have scary thoughts, we often act in scary ways.
And then the fear increases for everything and the lying doesn’t ever stop.
What if you could replace your own scared thoughts?
My child doesn’t think I’m stupid- they are scared.
Continual lying is a behavior that will have negative long-term consequences but worrying about that in this moment doesn’t help me deal with the real life now problem.
I am a good parent who struggles sometimes- like all parents.
If you could replace those scared thoughts with true thoughts, you have one more moment of regulation.
Then you can ask yourself “why is this happening?” and maybe you can address that problem.
Or maybe your kid is too dysregulated in the moment for you to do much of anything beyond disengaging and not insisting on the truth.
Remembering to think about what is driving the lie will help you remind yourself that you aren’t just ignoring the behavior or allowing your kid to behave bad. You are using your thinking brain to realize your child is too dysregulated for you to deal with the behavior in the moment. Then you can shift your focus to offering connection, regulation, and felt-safety.
Lying is such a common and sticky behavior challenge that I created a thorough 90-minute webinar that gets into the nitty gritty. The webinar looks at the why even more closely than this article could and then moves into concrete, actionable steps to take in the moment of the lying. The Lying webinar is a part of the webinar library that is available to all members of The Club.
Robyn
Would you like to explore further into this complete paradigm-shift on how we see behavior? You can watch my F R E E 45(ish) minute-long masterclass on What Behavior Really Is and How to Change It.
Just let me know where to send the links!
- Author
- Recent Posts
Robyn Gobbel
Are you searching for a community of parents who get it?Who offer connection, co-regulation?A community where the moment you show up, you feel seen, known, and not alone? We are waiting for you in The Club! This virtual community for parents of kids impacted by trauma (and the professionals who support them!!) opens for new members every three months!We are waiting for you!
Latest posts by Robyn Gobbel (see all)
Parenting Superpower! X-Ray Vision
Next >Child always dysregulated? Try this!
Post Views: 7,027
Why people lie.
Five types of manipulators Psychologists and scientists divide lies into active (deliberate disinformation), passive (innuendo, silence), and also conscious (for salvation).
Hysterical artist
© GIPHY
Lies without preparation, sometimes stupid, but does not admit to deception, because he does not remember the specifics. There are two explanations for this behavior, said Svetlana Filatova, an expert in lie detection.
- "Bold lies" are practiced by either really mean and arrogant, or very artistic people who do not remember what is happening, because they act impulsively and immediately forget the events. This type of lie is inherent in hysteroid personalities and children, , the expert explained.
Artistic deceivers are willing to do or say anything on impulse to impress. Well, then they simply forget or do not even fix some subtleties and details in the process itself. That is why "artistic liars" sometimes sincerely do not understand what they are accused of at all, and do not even remember their own words and actions, flatly refusing them.
- They play another role, without going into details, as if "letting go of their brains" during their theatrical performance, - says Svetlana Filatova.
This type of deceiver "in disguise" is not as dangerous as the really arrogant paranoid liars. The latter hardly believe their own nonsense. However, they actively convince others and never blush, suppressing a sense of shame.
Paranoid liar
© GIPHY
Unprincipled careerist or megalomaniac fanatic. For the sake of his goal, he will go over the bones, experts explain. If it is beneficial for such a person to deceive, there can be no question of any embarrassment or shame. For persuasiveness, so as not to blush and not stutter, he can even rehearse his false speech, calculate everything and prepare steps for retreat. It is difficult to bring such people to clean water, they have everything calculated.
For the paranoid, deceit is not considered shameful at all, the expert clarified.
They are distinguished by purposefulness, all resources - feelings and emotions - they need only to achieve their "great goal", but not for repentance or spiritual growth.
Rescuer
© GIPHY
To lie or not to lie is not a question for them, when deception is justified by good intentions, and sometimes even vital.
— A white lie is justified when it comes to survival, existence, priority issues for life and health. When you actually save someone other than yourself with that lie. Or your life like cheating on a criminal or whatever0007 - said the psychologist Yulia Zolotareva.
Among the liars of this type are many doctors who hide the truth for the sake of the health of their patients. There is still a serious dilemma in the medical community: whether or not to tell a person about his condition and the manipulations performed, if this information can ultimately harm his health?
- In my work, I generally abandoned the concepts of truth and lies, - explained psychiatrist Alexander Fedorovich.
- There are such severe health consequences from the truth that you have to tell patients that I prefer " sweeten the pill " . From strong excitement, for example, some patients are provided with a hypertensive crisis, in which there is such a violation of cerebral circulation that it can cost lives, , the doctor said.
In Western medical practice, there is the concept of informed consent to any activities and procedures. There, on the contrary, it is believed that a person not only has the right, but is obliged to know about his condition and all manipulations performed with him.
Adventurer
© GIPHY
Lies for gambling or because of a mental disorder. “Yes, he was always a debater, he would push him against the wall - he would refuse, he went through the corridor and ended up with a wall, it seems,” with this quote from Vysotsky’s song, psychiatrist Alexander Fedorovich described the behavior of lying adventurers who walk along the line all their lives, but under pain of execution they do not recognize in deceit.
- There are severe internal neurotic mechanisms that make a person say this or that, lie, distort reality, - said the doctor.
Saboteur manipulator
© GIPHY
Speaks ambiguously, trying to blur or distort the essence of the transmitted information.
- Manipulating the quality of information, moreover, consciously, is also characteristic of other types of liars, but manipulators lie for their own benefit or in the name of fairness that they understand only, this is a rather subtle question, - says psychologist Yulia Zolotareva. — The deceiver thinks that he controls others by lies, although in fact, because of it, he cannot even control himself.
It is believed that inappropriate information is used by the interlocutor to redirect the conversation, diverting it from facts that are dangerous to him.
Why do we lie and why do we lie? A psychotherapist tells
The most interesting information from the article about lies on the portal
Onliner.
by from a psychotherapist Elena Karachun :
9012 — What is a lie? Why do people lie so often?
- A lie is a distortion of the truth . The word comes from the Greek for "curve" and "truth" from the Greek for "straight." I think we can say: the meaning of a lie is to avoid clashes and conflicts, conditionally - to go aside.
From the point of view of psychology, lies are different, each lie has its own goals. I will rely on psychoanalytic theory, because here the lie is considered as a phenomenon of the attitude of the individual to his ideas about the people around him. According to one of the classifications, there are three main reasons for lying, all of which have roots in our childhood and run through our whole life.
The first reason is that we lie when we are afraid of being unpleasant, we think that we are not worthy of love, attention or respect, and we try to look more attractive from our point of view, distorting the truth.
This type of lie is expressed in the fact that people in everyday life exaggerate or embellish something, hiding the truth about themselves. I think this has happened to all of us.
In the worst case, for example, when the child was not accepted in the family, could not be open and truthful, he has to create a shell of "false self". The term was introduced by pediatric psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who noticed that some children, trying to maintain relationships with an unfriendly or indifferent environment, begin to adapt, forming an image that is convenient for others, in which they themselves believe. This can affect their entire future life: as a rule, such people then come to therapy with a feeling of emptiness, they say that they do not feel real. A person suddenly discovers for himself that the appearance or qualities that he possesses are liked by others, but he himself does not give any pleasure.
The second reason for lying is an attempt to hide something that could be dangerous for us.
In the pathological version, if we return to the parent-child relationship, such a lie appears when the parents begin to attack the child, not accept him, take away what he likes. As a rule, this type of lie is formed in a relationship with a persecuting, totalitarian, controlling person. In nature, we would call it mimicry, an attempt to blend into the background. Keeping information secret is still lying, because such circumstances distort the image of us in the eyes of others.
The third type of lie is very dangerous. It occurs when a child is faced with hard things, reality, for example, he learns that his parents are not so rich or that he does not have the ability to play sports or study. If these revelations are traumatic, but also fueled by the environment, used as an excuse for humiliation, the child experiences shame. As a result of the key factor - humiliation, there is a sadistic lie.
- What is the difference between a lie and the truth from the point of view of psychoanalysis?
- In fact, everything is very simple: the truth does not belong to anyone .
I'll try to decipher. Scientists are trying to understand how the world works, they are looking for the truth. This requires a lot of effort, the ability to see the world through the eyes of others, testing theories for consistency. Or looking for the truth about yourself means questioning yourself, reflecting on who you are, testing yourself in relationships with others, receiving feedback. All this is a search with a result that is very difficult to predict in advance. This is a meeting with a stranger, which always causes anxiety, and also requires considerable internal resources to search. Curiosity, which is characteristic of all people to a greater or lesser extent, helps this process.
Lies are always creation. It returns to the person the illusion of control that is comfortable for him. In this case, a paradox arises: a lie never gives support - neither to the one who lies, nor to the one who is deceived, because they do not know exactly what is really happening.
Is it useful to lie sometimes?
- Is it possible to say that the social norm "it is important to tell the truth" is supported by something? Maybe it's just an arrangement that is completely optional? Or is there something more important than a social norm?
- Here I would talk about unconscious contracts - rules that we take for granted, accepted at an unconscious level.
Still, when it is possible, it is better to tell the truth , if only because it allows you not to distort reality, to leave relationships between spouses, friends, and colleagues transparent and based on a solid foundation. Of course, the ideal state is one where people understand very clearly what is happening in the country and trust its leadership. Definitely the truth allows you to build healthier and more fruitful relationships.
Another lie is very closely related to a sense of justice, because even two people can have completely different ideas about what is fair and what is not. Balancing within their scale of values, someone with a low income may consider that they are not doing anything wrong by deceiving another very rich person or, for example, the state. For some, this may even be an act of restoring justice.
But in fact, the world is not black and white, our opportunities are not equal. Someone can earn more, someone is more talented or more successful.
It is very difficult for many to live with the awareness of this fact, which, perhaps, should be called the truth. Once again, the truth is not that if you do not have money or a certain talent, you are worse off. The truth is that we are different. This is difficult, so some decide to go along the curve, step aside, or hold on to their own version, defending subjective justice.
Lying kills trust , this is a global problem. I would really like to know for sure that the taxi driver taking me does not want to sleep right now, the doctor I'm going to see took care of his qualifications, the state to which I pay taxes will spend them on maintaining well-being - mine and the people, really those in need.
Some are ready to accept it at a certain moment: not earlier and not later. Forming an idea of the world, we often lie to ourselves and others, because it is painful, embarrassing, scary, sometimes unbearable to learn some truth.
In sadistic lying, one person believes that he is a puppeteer, and the rest in his world are puppets to play with.
It turns out that the puppeteer humiliates others with his lies. And when we discover the truth, we have two ways to react: you can protest, telling the liar that you are not ready to put up with humiliation, and defend your point of view through discussion, with the help of facts, actions. The second way is to agree with the lie, but then you remain humiliated, silent - and this humiliation will not go anywhere. As if not noticing what you were drawn into, you continue to live with this sensation that distorts your reality. It is often said that the truth is associated with fear, but this is more likely not a fear of knowing the truth, but fear of being humiliated e because of being deceived or used.
Why don't people like truth-tellers?
— What qualities should a person who constantly tells the truth have? Is it good for society? Pravdorubov are often compared almost with the blessed ...
— Let's remember: lie protects from fear and shame .
Imagine that someone in a sharp form begins to expose unpleasant moments in front of you. You are not ready for this, you, in fact, do not want to know the truth. There is always an unconscious contract in a couple: each of the spouses “doesn’t notice” something in a partner, the same contracts exist in relations with the leadership or in the interaction of a citizen and the state. It is important to understand here that all these painful questions are not buried - sooner or later they will come up, they will have to be faced, because, as we said earlier, truth, unlike lies, exists on its own, regardless of our desire.
A colleague told me about a case from practice. He showed the dependent person tests showing that he had cirrhosis of the liver. Do you know what the reaction was? The patient thought for a moment and said: "Hmm... I can deceive my wife, but I can't deceive my liver." And if a patient told me this at a psychotherapy session, I would show him that there are two parts of his personality.
The first, like his wife, does not want to know the truth, is ready to be blind and deceived, not to think about the consequences. The second understands the truth and is afraid of it. And then we would talk about this conflict.
As for the truth-lovers, I have not met in my life positive examples of people who would be called that. I suppose, because such a characteristic applies more to those who not only know the truth, but also want to use it as a weapon of attack, consoling their pride.
But after all, there are people who, methodically defending the truth, set themselves the goal not to effectively humiliate, but to restore the balance . Their behavior is distinguished by a desire to hear opponents, to test their truth for a fortress. The influence of such people may not be so striking at first, but it is obvious that the expression of such an honest position has a beneficial effect on everyone.
— Often lies are justified as “lie for good” .
Is this even possible?
— A very subtle question. In any case, it is important to ask oneself here why a person who lies for the good left himself the right to decide whether to tell the truth to his opponent or not.
- In Soviet medicine, there was a widespread practice not to inform terminally ill people about the tragic consequences that the disease would lead to: it was assumed that the patient might not be able to cope with the truth, it would only harm him ...
“Doctors still do not like to talk in detail about difficult diagnoses, to discuss them. For some time, Belarusian medicine tried to introduce informed consent, but this did not take root in all areas. As a rule, the doctor simply does not have time to feel the patient's problems, digest them and respond sincerely, with sympathy. This is a bad example of lying for good.
In general, I think this way: many say they lie so as not to injure a loved one or not to aggravate the situation.
We have no right to such a lie, since it concerns another person, deprives him of the most valuable thing - the ability to control his own life. By lying, by not saying anything, we reserve control over his life. Such control is, in fact, sadistic lie .
In the Soviet system of education, orphans were not told who their parents were, believing that in this way they were protected from stress. This practice has been extended to many other countries as well. The French psychoanalyst Françoise Doltot turned the tide by greatly influencing the institution of foster parents and orphanages in France. She believed that a child is able to survive any truth and it is not the truth that injures him, but just the same secret - a lie. The trauma lies in the fact that at some point a child who does not know the truth breaks down the picture of the world. Therefore, orphanages in France were the keepers of information about the natural parents of adopted children.
The child, at any time when he felt that he was ready, had the right to come and find out who his real father and mother were.
Danger of self-deception
- A person, often repeating a lie, at some point begins to believe in it himself. How can this be explained?
- This is a completely understandable situation: in most cases, a person simply does not want to know the truth. I have repeatedly observed how people who come to me for help readily believe in obvious lies from partners, forbidding themselves to see the real, but very uncomfortable state of affairs. Simply put, they preferred to love not a person, but their idealistic idea of him. They felt that, having learned the truth, they would not be able to control it, it would make them look differently at themselves and those who were nearby. Self-deception created illusion control i .
Another version of self-deception is that a person cannot see in himself the cause of his misfortunes.
In this case, the one who deceives himself believes that there are enemies all around, interfering with his prosperity. This lie protects us from the truth that there is a side of us that we really dislike, that we can be ashamed of. This lie is based on projection - I see things in others that I don't want to know about myself.
- Crisis periods in the life of many states, as a rule, divide society into several warring parties, each of which firmly believes that it is the bearer of the truth, while opponents are either fools or liars. How can this phenomenon of such “many-faced truth” be explained?
“In the event of major upheavals, society finds itself in a situation of splitting and regression. Roughly speaking, it rolls back to the early stages of thinking, in fact, to the period when the world in the view of mankind looked like a fairy tale, where good and evil were clearly divided. Let me try to explain: speaking about our everyday life, many of us will probably say “everything is complicated here”.
We notice halftones, we understand that things can have double, sometimes contradictory meanings.
It is noteworthy that the enemies (this has always happened, in all conflicts, all over the world) will accuse each other of what they themselves are doing. And more and more often we will hear "the fool himself, the fool himself, the fool himself ...". Splitting and primitivizing opponents, we endow them with all the negative sides of absolute evil (including our own, which we no longer have the power to notice), and we see ourselves as purely positive heroes - absolute good.
Unlike animals, humans are endowed with self-knowledge. In imagining ourselves, we tend to fall into extremes that were imposed on us by circumstances and internal defense mechanisms. If a person says that in his childhood absolutely everything was terrible or, conversely, beautiful, this is a sure sign that he has serious problems with a distorted view of the world. After going through therapy, comprehending and accepting what was happening, he will most likely say that his childhood was different: both good and bad.
