Lying, Compulsive pathological lying: George Santos and Lawrence Ray

Why do we still not recognize the origin of the lies?

Shame and Lying:

 I came across this and thought I would share it. A perennial theme: lying.

It was a bolt of lightning, so to speak, how “shame” so clarified the compulsion to lie.

Two remarkable cases that deal with compulsive lying and manipulation are representative: George Santos and convicted felon Lawrence Ray. 

And it immediately brings to mind a major politician we have been dealing with for several years who has thousands of documented lies. 

This was the initial question posed in a discussion by someone some years ago which is: “I have a question about lying. Why does a person have to lie and how is a lie shaming? Do shameless people lie pathologically? And why?”

An edit of my original answer: 

 Pathological liars must be managing a great deal of negative affect(feeling), principally shame. 

What is the purpose of a lie? To avoid punishment? To seduce? A common place to experience this most is in the realm of money. Someone borrows money or solicits investment money. Money is to be repaid on x date and it is not. The investment money is going to come next week but it never does. You pursue the debtor, but the evasiveness just gets worse. Whether the money was stolen, or things are not going as planned is not the point. In either case shame on their part is part of the problem and the force pushing them to either avoid or denie the theft, misuse, or failure. 

Like many words, we have always used and thought we knew what they meant when we understand the emotions that lies behind words insight is gained. 

I would suppose that 100 percent of people would, at first blush, always import to the ‘liar’ a conscious willful attempt at deception. But if we look at it as a "Script". A script is an automatic psychological response, or even a physical response, that our mind and body have learned as a way to protect ourselves. it is before we are cognitively aware of what’s going on. 

Once we understand this it becomes less clear about what is going on. In fact, it is often the case that the person would absolutely deny any intention to hurt or deception. How can this be? 

It is that their shame and guilt are so painful that they feel they must move away from them. They/we move away from the pain of shane by avoiding, e.g. I lie. Since my INTEREST was not in hurting you or deceiving you, I am SURPRISED when you say I hurt you by lying. I am genuinely surprised, as my whole intent, my real INTEREST, was to avoid more guilt and shame and pain within myself. I do something to soothe the pain and I am so confused at that moment I make up any story available to deny that you were hurt or that I meant to hurt you. 

Of course, a great many people will demonstrate shame if you call them on this activity for now, in a quieter moment, they realize what they have done. 

But we should make no mistake that there are millions of people that are so defended against shame that they are dangerous. They have thousands of sophisticated automatic responses through which they continue to seduce others and thus avoid any need for facing their own shame.

So we call someone that can maintain this constant frenetic activity of avoiding his or her shame- “shameless”.

This is a constant problem with the word shame and shameless. When we act crazy, when we hurt people, and then when we avoid taking responsibility, we are not shameless but are acting due to shame. Most of us even though we act on shame in an unhealthy way can recognize that it is coming from shame and, or most commonly we will call it guilt, and thus deal with it in more healthy ways. Those that cannot recognize that they are defending against more shame will double and triple down and lash out more. These are incapable of recognizing their shame as being the route of their problems.

A fascinating aspect of this is that pathological lying is not a psychiatric diagnosis. It’s been essentially ignored.

A psychologist the other day who runs a program about lying said pathological lying is a maladaptive pattern of lying. Seems a tautology to me as it doesn’t tell me anything about what caused the lying or maladaptation. The explanation is that their maladaptive is due to shame. 

This is from the first article that I list at the bottom which was published last year and you see that the author mentions shame and guilt. 

I say that almost all lying is due to shame although there is ethical lying see:

Even when these authors and myself refer to "normal lying" it is almost always due to some level of shame. It has been shown that if you tape record the conversation between two people that just met for 10 minutes there will be multiple lies. see:

"Most people tell lies occasionally. There are many reasons people might lie, such as:

• avoiding offending someone they care about

• protecting themselves from a perceived threat

• feelings of shame or guilt

• avoiding conflict or negative emotions

• acting out of impulse

• making themselves look better

• avoiding punishment

• creating justifications"

The TV show "Lie To Me" was based on the theme of finding the truth behind the lie. 

We can rest assured that Mr. Ray and Mr. Santos are suffering form deep shame.

Psychiatric aspects of normal and pathological lying

When Does Lying Become Compulsive or Pathological?

What to know about pathological liars

Why We Lie, And The Neuroscience Behind It

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/534347

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