The story behind any expose of a compulsive liar involves human suffering and, until we understand more fully the psychology of compulsive lying, the story is likely to turn into tragedy.
Mixed Feelings About Admiration
The discovery that our admiration has been misplaced and manipulated can be exhausting. Admiration is usually a positive feeling, but it uses up energy. It stirs thoughts about possibilities for others and for ourselves. It reorganizes the mental map of our own challenges and achievements relative to others. We can genuinely enjoy our admiration of others while also feeling burdened by the task of managing our relative sense of worth.
So, alongside the puzzle as to how a compulsive liar can feel OK about lying to friends and colleagues is the frisson we may feel when their lies are exposed. This mean pleasure arises from anger at being duped. Being “taken in” by someone is disorienting. We feel vulnerable, even targeted for our trust. The anger arises from our increased awareness of vulnerability to being hoodwinked. Relishing their public exposure reassures us of shared standards and values.
The Fascination With an Exposed Liar
Someone who commands admiration for amazing feats of excellence—athletic, academic, or moral—and then turns out to have fabricated these achievements is also a focus for our fascination. This arises, partly, from the puzzle as to how someone can be content to live with a false face. How can you lie about what you’ve done and be comfortable with yourself? How can you enjoy others’ good opinion when you know it is based on lies? “They have no shame,” we often conclude. But shame is exactly what they do have.
A compulsive liar is very different from the frauds and con men we now come into contact with every day—those who try to trick us into giving away money or the personal details that allow them to steal our money. They are very different from undercover policemen or spies or reporters who present a “legend” for specific purposes. Though many crime writers explore the difficulty some people living their legends have at distinguishing their own false persona from who they “really are,” those living double lives for a shared purpose are generally not dependent on their legend to shore up their deep self. Some may feel some genuine attachment for others to whom they present a false self, and therefore feel bad about deceiving them, but they do not feel shame—the stripping down of the self. When frauds, con men, and undercover workers (spies, law enforcement, or reporters) are exposed, they simply move on.
The Lying Starts From Shame
A compulsive liar, on the other hand, does not so much aim to trick others as to cover the shame of their own lack of self by eliciting your admiration. Your admiration warms and enlivens the little bits and pieces of a self that seems, to them, to be deficient, empty, perhaps even ugly. Lying may be deeply uncomfortable for them, but it gives them, from this perspective, the best self they think they can get.
Because others’ admiration is crucial to their fragile and distorted sense of self, they need constant reassurance. So they keep telling lies to elicit further admiration. They hope to construct such a dense facade of self-flattering stories that the flow of admiration is constant. If they feel it ebbing through familiarity or inattention, they invent another story. The urge for that injection of admiration is so great that they are often careless. Outrageous claims of derring-do are unfiltered by reflection, logic, or plausibility.
We puzzle over their recklessness: Don’t they know they are very likely, eventually, to be found out? But their hunger for others’ admiration overpowers the fear of exposure. This does not mean compulsive liars do not experience guilt, but it is a moral discomfort they accommodate because lying is, in their view, the speediest and most reliable means of garnering admiration. This does not mean that being exposed as a liar has no impact on them. The opposite is true: Being stripped of people’s admiration leaves them with no sense of self—the ultimate experience of shame.
Shame is different from guilt arising from regret at failing to live up to our personal moral standards. Shame comes from our social mirror. It means “losing face” among others. As psychiatrist James Gilligan has shown, shame involves mortification, a term that stems from the Latin mors, or death, and facere, which means to make. Shame is the making of death for the social self.
‘Mortification’ as Social Death
Many people experience mortification at some point in their lives. Some people—those of a low “caste” or group or who are for other reasons ill treated or otherwise deprived of respect, care and acknowledgement—experience mortification on a daily basis with signals from others that say, “You are unworthy” or “You don’t matter.” Many survive experiences of mortification because they find other social circles in which they are respected and cared for (and about), with people who acknowledge their value and legitimacy. Or they ground their sense of self through pleasure in their activities and interests.
A compulsive liar, however, has no self beyond that reflected by others’ admiration. That is why their lies are out of control. They don’t mind that their social mirror presents a false image; their constant quest is for more and more admiration, regardless of the terms on which it is acquired. Of course, this leaves them extremely vulnerable when their lies are exposed. Without the trappings that clamor for others’ approval, stuck in the spotlight of public opprobrium, they have no self, a condition tantamount to death.
