Wednesday: walk with M., convo with J.

I had a walk with M.

I had a delightful long convo with J.

I’m still trying to nail down how to spot a pathological liar. In general, I’m uninterested in the following questions:

Are they lying on or with purpose?
Do they know they are lying? In the moment? Ever?
Did they choose to start lying? To tell particular lies?
Can they stop lying? At all? Completely?

I don’t care. I just want to spot them as quickly and accurately as possible, and I want to be able to teach _other people how to do it too_. I want a mechanism for detection that is so good that once you see it, you can’t _un_see it.

With that in mind, I went over the characteristics of pathological liars according to therapist and other type websites, and here’s what I’ve got.

Absolutely number one, and maybe the only rule you need: in their stories, they are the hero or the victim. Ordinary people tell stories in which they do not appear or appear only as a bystander/audience. OMG, I drove past an accident shortly after it happened! I’m so glad I didn’t get stuck in the backup; it was probably epic. Not the hero. Not the victim. In the unlikely event this story was told by a pathological liar, they would either have had to do something amazing to avoid being involved, or they would have been traumatized by seeing it, or made very late to some extremely important something or other by having to wait for it or whatever. Everyone has _some_ stories they are the hero or victim in; pathological liars basically don’t tell stories in which they do not appear or are only the bystander. Every story is _literally_ all about them.

There’s probably some sort of bizarre addendum here like, if a real life story is unrolling around them, they will insert themselves into it. I’m not sure that’s always the case, but I suspect it happens a lot.

If in doubt: the double life. Pathological liars have a backstory and a way of thinking about themselves and what happens to them that centers themselves (see above) AND which is pretty resistent to reality testing on their own part (which they may or may not engage in) or anyone else’s. If someone has decided they are absolutely brilliant, way smarter than anyone else, their stories will reflect how smart they are, and if you point out that actually, they predicted the opposite of what they say they predicted, they’ll argue or leave in a huff and go back to telling it the way that works for their idea of themselves in the future as if you never inserted reality into the whole process. You can see this phenomenon in people like Rachel Dolezal, Sacheen Littlefeather, and in many, many, many of the cases listed here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fake_memoirs_and_journals

Weirdly, it is actually _not_ hard to detect the lies of pathological liars if you have access to their day-to-day existence and/or written records thereof. The siblings of Sacheen Littlefeather remembered their shared childhoods, so they knew that a lot of what she was saying just wasn’t true. And then there is the issue of documentation, whether photographic or paper records or whatever. _Love and Consequences_ was exposed by the sister of the author. Etc.

Further, _after_ you have seen the records that clearly refute the claims of the pathological liar, and then you review in your own mind what you believed and the basis for your belief, it is surprisingly hard to remember _why_ you believed the story. It’s weird. Pathological lying is a beguiling kind of camouflage that works okay until you see through it and then you wonder how you ever _failed_ to see through it.

I think this is how it works.

When something is presented as True, and there is no obvious reason to believe it might be a lie (viz. for monetary gain), and the person appears sincere (for however one cares to define that), implausibility makes it a better story.

When something is presented as fiction — like in a novel, or a scripted TV show — implausibility needs an explanation.

So these fictional memoirs are actually _bad_ as novels (because of the implausibility), which is why they are not sold as fiction.

If pathological liars were trying to sell us on something specific, we’d be suspicious and most of us would do a little vetting.

But if we are asked for nothing other than to believe a sincerely told story, it would be rude to question too much! And so we play along. Unfortunately, the hero / victim part means that implicitly we are being asked to join the team on their side, and over time, we _do_ start finding ourselves committed to things that had we been asked for outright, we would have drawn back from.

What to do?

I, personally, have decided that I will continue to validate my friends and family when bonkers shit happens to them. They are the people I love and care about and have committed to, and when crazy crap happens, I will support them. And also, I will not look forward to particularly juicy stories as a form of social currency to share in the future. I won’t ask for updates on the nutter relative or friend of theirs. I’m not going to ask them to cut that person off — not my business! They have their own commitments! I’m not even going to ask them to stop talking about that person. But I _am_ going to stop valuing Crazy Person Story for social purposes. That might be encouraging this nonsense.

I will also be listening carefully to how new people I meet in the course of my life tell stories. When I run into people who lead with hero/victim narratives, I’ll be keeping track. I won’t be signing onto their team without a lot more careful thought.