3 posts tagged “lies”

Ok, so I've said a lot here about lies and justification, so now let me talk about recovery.  When you analyze the nature of lying as it relates to your own lifestyle, this leads you towards recovery.  They say the first step to recovery is admission of the problem.  This is often not as easy as it sounds.  There have been a lot of lies and you know that full disclosure of those lies would end up hurting people even more.  Although it would be more desirable to confront those you have hurt, be open and honest with them about what has occurred and apologize for your carelessness, it's not at all an easy thing to do.  Often the lies have been so structured and complex that you can be afraid of what they'll say or do in rebuttal, or - even worse - what they'll say or think about you as a person.  And ultimately you worry about how much more it will hurt them if the lies were revealed as what they really were.

So the last topic I covered was the nature of my lies.  So when you finally reach a place where you decide that in order to have real things in life, you have to BE real, it's a hard process to break the cycle.  You decide that lying in all forms is self-defeating, you can't just resolve to stop lying to others, you also have to pick out the thorns in your side that are causing you to lie to yourself.  I lost a lot of really great things in my life early on and I have to sit back and question just how my life would have turned out differently if I had decided early on to be better than my nature and if I'd truly been able to understand that lies were self-defeating.  This leads back to the "they'd do it to me" or the "they deserve it for reason X" or "No one's being hurt by this" or living under the false assumption that lying to someone was giving them what they wanted.

When I was younger I used to lie.  It was a matter of nature.  I was a liar.  I'd lie about who I was, what was going on in my life, what I had, what I'd done, who I knew.  I'd lie about problems to get attention, I'd lie about events in my life to get sympathy, I'd lie about what I was going to do to appease those who asked me for things.  I was a liar in my nature and in my heart and since it always appeared to move me in a place that improved my existence, it seemed that lies were a good thing.  No one really knew that I was lying most the time, so what did it really hurt?  If I wanted attention, I could lie to get that attention and then the need was covered.  This seemed like a good thing, as it was a simple case of supply and demand.  I wanted something, I lied to someone and I got it.