Have you ever known a pathological liar?

No!.... Yes, I lied just now.

My first wife turned out to be a pathological liar. That was one of many reasons that lead to a divorce. I didn’t cope, I got out of there as fast as I could.

My twin brother was for most of his life. He was so insecure he felt he had to. He still “enhances” everything he says.

@jeffgoldblumsprivatefacilities At least you admit it! That’s the first step…

@jeffgoldblumsprivatefacilities You stole my answer!!!!

Yes. It sucks when they are beautiful and sexy and worship you.
Because at the end of the day it is still bull shit.

Yes, I think so. One of my best friends in high school lied about pretty much everything to everyone, except me.

She would lie about everything from her grades to her family history to where she was going to who she did or didn’t hook up with to what she ate for breakfast.

I thought I was somehow exempt from being on the receiving end of her bullshit. Then she slept with the guy I liked and lied to me about it. Buh-bye.

Is there anything we can do to help or change their behavior? I would always sit down and talk to my ex about it. I told him time and time again that no matter how bad the truth is, I’d respect him so much more for telling it. He still stuck to his made up lies. Nothing seemed to work.

There is no cure from this disease. Run, Run, Run is all you can do!!

I have known a pathological liar. She was my “best friend”. She would tell me lie after lie and swear that it was the truth, no matter how much proof I had that it wasn’t. I mean at first, I thought she was an honest girl…but I figured it out later, by which time she thought she’d figured me out and thought I was stupid…(she always thought she “knew someone so well” even if she didn’t have a clue. The point is, she started to tell lies where it was incredibly obvious that she made it up, and I yelled at her for it so many times. Also, the girl would tell the entire world anything that I said to her privately, but if someone told her not to tell me something; her lips were sealed! I didn’t even understand why in the world she wanted to be my friend in the first place anymore, so I threw her out of my life. She’s tried to come crawling back; and when I rejected her friendship, she tried to spread rumors about me; but by that point I had already talked to my friends about what she was doing to me, and so her credibility was destroyed. Now, she’s pushed all of her real friends away, and is so desparate that she started hanging out with this girl she used to make fun of to me all the time, and that’s pretty much her only friend these days. I guess that’s what you get when you mess with an Italian ;)

Don’t think so.
I have one friend that seems like he makes up a lot of (dumb) stories, but he never denies truth about things that matter.

Yes . . . she’s my sister though so it’s not like I can end the relationship. Which I am okay with, seeing as I love her and all . . . I guess . . .

What I do is try to understand why she is telling the lie, and loving the person beneath the lie. My theory is that it’s a mixture of someone liking to manipulate others and insecurity. Once you pinpoint that it’s easier to tell who she really is.

I have a friend who’s similar but our mutual friends and I generally tell him to simply be quiet (or less courteously to shut up) when he’s halfway through that anecdote about the time he ate an entire moose for breakfast. This Pavlovian approach has helped the situation somewhat.

I think i know myself pretty well.

Yup. There was a girl in my class from 5th to 8th who could not stop lying about any aspect of her life. It turns out she was still traumatized from the death of her young mother in 4th grade and her dad had just sort of drifted off into his own head. I sometimes wonder if his age played a part. When we were in 8th grade, he was about 70.

Yes, he was a friend for a long time. How did I cope? I cut him out of my life because it was so unbearable.

Yes. A guy I went to high school with. We were pretty good friends and I really believe he is a good person. He feels his life is so boring or insignificant or… something… that he needs to make it soundmore exciting than it is. It is also to keep people from seeing his real feelings like if a girl rejects him or someone makes fun of him, which happened a lot in HS. I guess it is his coping mechanism.

I called him on it a few years after HS and told him I would rather hear about the real him, no matter how boring he may think it is, than some made up person with far-fetched stories. He was embarrassed, but admitted that is what he did. He stopped for a while, but then was right back to it and I gave up.

Sigh, I don’t think I’d be able to handle it but I sure hope people get help for it

@PapaLeo: haha! @jeffgoldblumsprivatefacilities is a liar AND a theif!

Two of them, sigh. One was just an acquaintance of mine, so no big impact, the other was my boss… twice. Both were quite enjoyable people to be around, charming and well spoken… you just couldn’t believe a word either said!

it’s interesting some times, because most people like that are great speakers, cool, calm, collected and often pretty charming (for lack of a better word)
you’d think with that natural sense of conversation they wouldn’t waste it on lying.

@ABoyNamedBoobs03 And they were both good looking, too! Why on Earth do they feel the need to lie? And about the stupidest shit, too.

@augustlan it’s always menial and trivial things. It becomes such a habit and it really is hard to break, it just becomes second nature, and sometimes they tell a small lie, but then realize that they’ll have to lie some more latter in order to cover up that initial tiny lie, it snowballs on them quickly.

^^ One of the main reasons I try not to lie.

haha you just have to let a person like that go. It’s a sickness,it’s pathological. I dated one a few times, then the other day when I was looking something up his name popped out- all the court orders, leins, fraud convictions haha. I’m trying to find his email addy so I can say haha you ass! He always lied about how much money he had, how women were falling all over him, I’m gonna say haha you old, broke, toothless ass!

I have never met a pathological liar, but I have come across a number of people who are indifferent to the truth. If they don’t know the answer to a question then they make something up.

Yes, two. One was my first best friend in college. My excitement at being away from home and on my own for the first time was all wrapped up in my joy in having a wonderful new best friend, and so I was very slow to see what was becoming obvious to everyone around me. She told long, elaborate stories that I completely believed. I was the only one who was surprised when she got pregnant and dropped out in the second semester. She taught me to be a whole lot less trusting and gullible, and she showed me how easily I was seduced by genuine charm, which I mistook for character. I was 17.

The second was a babysitter who came to our home several times a week, bringing her young daughter, to look after my two preschool-age sons. I noticed little things not adding up but didn’t really put it together until she accidentally tape-recorded herself on our message machine taking a very long phone call that revealed the truth about a lot of things, from made-up stories about my husband to the fact that she was having an affair with her husband’s father. I listened to only enough to be sure what I was hearing. Then I fired her fast but worried for months that she would come back and do something to my kids. Scary. To this day I sometimes worry about her daughter.

If there have been others, they have fooled me, and so I guess I don’t really know how many.