The Three Steps of Telling a Lie

We all lie from time to time. Some people are pathological liars...they can't help it and it's fascinating to see, but a lie is a lie. I heard a guy, with a degree for those keeping score, say that there are three steps to telling a lie.

 Two of them are obvious and I and probably most people only considered those two, but there's another step that I hadn't really thought about, and it's a corker.

 Since the second step is what most people would think would be the first, I'll start with that. Obviously you have to make up the lie, and the third step is you have to deliver it. It's the first step that's key.

  First you have to stop the truth from coming out. That's heavy. For a nanosecond your brain flashes an image of what really happened...in other words the truth, but it goes: "Nope, WRONG! COUNTRADICT! CREATE BULLSHIT STORY IMMEDIATELY!" What a trip.

 Some people are much better liars than others, and way more convincing. In the case of narcissism, as hard as it is to believe, the narcissist actually believes their own lies, which become their truth. They'll say that night is day, and they'll believe it and expect you to believe it too. It's incredible to see.

 The idea of completely suppressing the truth and not letting any of it slip out when you talk is wild. The person telling the lie knows the truth, and sometimes so does everyone else, but they lie anyway. 

 To shove something as powerful as the truth behind a little door in your brain, and then struggle to keep it shut, takes a hell of a lot of concentration, and eventually even the best liars give themselves away.

 They say that if you tell the truth, you don't need a good memory. I love that. Chronic liars have to remember what lies they've already told and usually have to keep making up new lies to cover the ones they've told, and then keep up with those lies too. That takes up a lot of the brain's CPU. 

 I find that in the chronic liars, it's easier for them to keep track of their lies by simply flipping the situation around backwards. In other words if your "better" half threw a big jar and hit you square in the cheek, like my ex did to me not once but twice, they'd flip it around to where YOU did it, and tell that story.

 The problem with that is that chronic liars, especially narcissists, can be very convincing, but in the end the truth ALWAYS comes out. Liars' lies will eventually catch up with them, and they know that. They can't possibly keep track of every lie they tell, and eventually they'll contradict themselves. 

 They'll get stuck in the death spiral of "liar's loop," and they can't escape. They can't keep on lying because they're busted, and everyone knows that every word coming out of their mouth is bullshit.

 You have to remember that once someone gets caught telling a lie they become a known liar, and from that point forward people will have a very difficult time believing another word they say. The moral of this story? Don't need a good memory.