Donna Anderson’s important latest post reminds me that one topic which will never be worn out is that of the psychopath’s lies and their impact on others.
This week I want to very briefly introduce yet another take on this inexhaustible topic. Everyone lies, but there’s something else at stake in the case of the psychopath’s lies.
To illustrate: you might say about any regular (non-psychopathic) person, “Things would be better if s/he was to lie less often. Her/his soul or psyche would be healthier as would her relationships.” That’s true. Now try this on for size and notice how wrong it seems: “Things would be better if the psychopath was to lie less often. His soul or psyche would be healthier as would his relationships.”
Weirdly, this is patently not the case. The psychopath will be just as sick/evil no matter how many or how few lies he tells. It’s not a quantitative but a qualitative matter.
It is commonly said that a defining characteristic of psychopaths is that they are pathological liars. This is right if you mean that they are profoundly dishonest and not to be trusted. It does not mean, though, that psychopaths lie a lot. They do lie a lot and those lies cause havoc. But as I hope my illustration above shows, lying less will not make them better people.
So, how does this work? The thing about psychopaths is that even their truths are lies! Or rather, whether or not they happen to be telling the truth or a lie at any particular moment is not what makes them psychopathic. What makes them psychopathic is that they use and destroy people; truth or lies are for them just so many weapons for pursuing their prey.
M.L. Gallagher said a lot when she wrote this:
He is the lie….
From hello to good-bye. I love you to I hate you. You’re beautiful to you’re ugly.
It was all a lie….When friends or my family ask, but what about this, or what about that, I tell them. It was all a lie. There was no truth in him.
If I spend my time trying to figure out fact from fiction, all I am doing is trying to prove I wasn’t so stupid. See, this was true. That’s why I fell in love with him.
Truth is. I fell in love with him because I believed his lie.
When I discovered the truth, I was so enmeshed in his lie, I couldn’t find the truth in me. And so I sank.
i dont live in fear of him like i used to, i would stand my ground while ignoring him, dont give him any reason to linger, like eye contact or a nod or a hello..i would just give him the look of “I know what you are, dont EVEN try to fuck with me”..i dont want to ask why or how, I know, and to even make eye contact with a vampire is dangerous, fear is a gift, we can use fear to our advantage when it comes to spaths.
hey 1steprs – thanx for those links last nite about the queer farmers etc, i had fun lookin at all the pics and reading the articles….
You are welcome hens. I thought that one looked really interesting. There are things going on in this world that we know nothing about.
The internet seemed like such a gift to me – it’s a way to find out and connect. I remember the very first thing that i found out about on the web that i never would have known about if it weren’t for the web: Argentine poet, Roberto Juarroz – had a very short but nice correspondence with a woman scholar in France about it – this was in 1999.
it can become a gift again, ’cause like duped said,” “it’s our world too, not just theirs.”
i try to spend time looking for things i am interested in, not just feeling like that spath owns the airwaves, so to speak. I found a REALLY cool art site: artbabble.org
when i was still on fb, i used to follow these folks – i love their sensibility (given my love or food, i used to contribute fairly regularly) ‘QueerFoodPorn Zine’ (don’t worry folks – no porn is actually involved) and the ‘Cake Wrecks’ blog can make me scream, ‘EEWWW’! (right now there are some truly cute muppets cakes at the top of the blog…but scroll down….)
Ox Drover:
I posted this on another subject in this forum, but wasn’t sure if you would see it and I wanted your opinion.
I have a question about something I did notice and anyone reading this who experienced this or who has any insight, please chime in. I noticed that sometimes he would tell the truth. He would blend it in with all the lies. Was this a way to throw me off track? To make me think that he must be truthful or trustworthy if he told me the truth about certain things? Or did he have an ounce of goodness in him???
1steprs
92044,
yes, that is what they do in the rare times they tell the truth. It’s what I call, “anchoring the lie with a kernal of truth”. Their lies are usually anchored with a truth. spath would say that he ate a hamburger when he actually ate a hotdog. The truth was that he ate. LOL.
that particular lie was just a test, to see how I would react to a blatent lie. There were other lies that were more conniving which used the truth as a tell.
For example: he was pretending that my brother in law was his enemy because he worked for homeland security and was trying to “bring him down with false accusations”. The truth was that the BIL was actually a trojan horse he sent to marry my stupid spath sister, so that more people could be used against me. He and BiL were good friends (as far as spaths can be).
So my spath says, “I will get revenge against Aaron and Raquel, (spath BIL and sis), but first, I will make them really happy so that their downfall will be that much worse. I will send them pictures of Auschwitz camp victims to make them happy because I know that these evil people like to see others suffer. Then, I will bring my revenge on them. So they’ll have further to fall.” Truth was he was trying to make me hate my own sister. (good for him, since she IS a spath now – infected by her husband-spath)
He knew that I had already percieved Raquel and Aaron as being evil. I guess he thought that I knew pictures of Auschwitz made evil people happy, but I didn’t (I guess it must be true about Aaron and my spath, liking the Auschwitz pictures). So you see this is how they intersperse truth and lies. They think that if you add enough truth, the REASON for telling the truth won’t be obvious. They think you will just assume that the truth is coming from a truthful person.
And that is how they live their entire lives, knowing what we will ASSUME. So, never assume anything. And no, there wasn’t an ounce of goodness in him. In fact, someone who uses the truth to DECIEVE is that much more fiendish and evil.
Farwronged, glad you’re happy. That others will speak of his bad character is something that will always happen. There are people who know there’s something wrong with them, even if they don’t know their problem is called psychopathy. But anyway, who cares a psychopath? Concentrate on you and your baby; with a bit of work and luck it will be a healthy and empathetic child.
eb92044
I agree with skylar, and yes, you’re absolutely correct. My spath did the same thing, he’d mix lies with truth so you were never quite sure what reality was.
He’d tell me he took a business trip to New York, but he’d say he went on Monday and came back Tuesday, when in fact he went on Tuesday and came back on Wednesday. So the truth was, he DID go to new york, but he went on a different day (and he probably slept with somebody while he was there).
My spath said he ran the marathon in 2002. The reality was, his ex-wife ran the marathon. So, it’s true that somebody ran it, it just wasn’t him.
How ridiculous.
I can’t quite understand why they do this. I know the result is that they keep you guessing, but what goes on in their minds when they say this stuff is beyond me. I haven’t seen it explained yet by any of the professionals. This is one of the reasons it is so hard to comprehend a spath.
Superkid
Sk and Sky – the spath i knew made up huge and horrendous stories for all her fake characters that she uses to con people (generally up to 20 per con). i know she uses her dupes life stories and weaves them together with her own life (as seen through a fun house mirror.)
after almost 2 years of reflection on some of the things she had said to me, i realize that she used many things from her own life…truths twisted, but that’s close enough to ‘real’ for her happiness. It took a long time to decode some of the things she said, and i am sure i will be realizing things for a long time yet.
i think they move information around so easily (something true, something they saw in a movie, the ex wife’s real life accomplishment) as they have no emo attachment to these things in their own lives. it’s like how they are with words. spath brain activity is the same in responding to the word ‘child’ and ‘murder’. – they don’t form emotional responses the way the non spaths do. without the conceptual emotional understanding of language they sometimes get it very wrong when speaking or writing; they are able to move words around like chess pieces, but its a weird game of chess. i think this is the same with the information they use to tell ‘their’ stories. they don’t have the normal attachment (although i think their rage and anger are forms of attachment) to their life experiences in the way that we do. So they can use theirs, ours, anyone’s – it’s the story and the con that matters, not the truth. Why tell the truth when there is no ‘truth’ (no attachments), lies are more convenient and useful.
I call those things – halftruths… And its biggest effect is that lies mixed with truth are
a) impossible to pull apart
b) if you get other info from someone else, you’re more likely to think “there must have been a mistake” and disbelieve the “outsider”.
So, instead of putting energy in finding out the actual truth, you give up on even trying as well as block outsiders from even trying to tell you the truth, because you want to spare yourself the mind warp.