I Tell A Lot Of Lies, Always Have. Symptom Of Ptsd?

[Ipuri]

I'm right there with you. There are people like us out there, they're just difficult to find. I just started dating one (a 99% match on OKCupid), and it feels like home.

I've been friends with non-gifted people (felt alienated, fake, and unfulfilled) and tried hanging out with physics majors (they tended not to have very good social or emotional skills), so I definitely understand the pain of social isolation and misanthropy.

I love your Homer quote. :laugh: If you want to be friends or have any questions about the other aspects of giftedness like existential depression, hiding, boredom, sensitivity, divergency, perfectionism, etc., feel free to message me. I'm intensely curious and have read way too much about it. My username's Kendall S.

 

[Egaj]

I didn't realize it would change my anonymous name. Ipuri = Aki = whatever this post names me

 

[Vukuco]

Not everything is a consequence of PTSD/trauma. You have the power to not lie and tell the truth.

Agreed!

netflix "(dis)honesty the truth about lies"

I saw that, its good.

I agree that we all lie to a certian enth degree. Do you dont look fat, i left my phone on vibrate, etc. Also Dr Phil states that people that make up a grandois life as a lie, it is due to not being happy with their life. So why arent you dealing with that? I dont have friends but that is due to the fact that i refuse to hide myself for them. Deal with why you cant tell your friends and family that you spent the day in bed depressed. Why hide it? Because of that stigma, many good people die by suicide every day. And the good friends and people you need to keep close and the ones that you need to expel from your life will be revealed as a good friend might be upset but wont abandon you because of it.

Me, I lost my entire family and every friend I had due to telling the truth about my past and refusing to lie and make them happy; so telling the truth and being honest is big in my world. Yes, I still say my phone was on vibrate when it wasnt but i dont tell people something happened in my day (such as fishing or taking apart a lawn mower) when it didnt. If i dont want to tell them i was curled in my bed all day then i tell them i stayed in.

And in all honestey, as a friend, I might be upset about it but id have way more respect for you if you owned up to the lie than if i carch you in it.

 

[Abo]

Doesn't matter what's happened to you; it's not an excuse when you become an adult and know better.

I lied when I was a kid a lot. Why? Because it key to my survival. Then afterwards, at 11 or so, I realized that I didn't need to lie anymore so I stopped. Now I just do the white lies everyone does SOMETIMES. I Hardly lie anymore. Or act out. The last time was a year 1/2 ago and I was with a crazy roommate that was threatening us, so I lied, but then I told her the truth afterwards when she calmed down (she was later evicted for violent behavior, so I was right to lie when she was having one of her violent moments).

Sometimes, as does my mom and brother so it runs in my immediate family, I over exaggerate things. I don't do it often but when I do, I catch myself and stop doing it (unlike my relatives). So you can control most things; no excuses.

 

[Ravo]

I'm personally a little weary of high intelligence being a justification for anything. You're not doing that, OP - just, in general.

IQ isn't a measure of intelligence per se, it's an attempt to quantify aptitude for learning. While there's surely a correlation there, aptitude also declines for most people as they age.

I tend to look at Albert Einstein. He was arguably, a very brilliant man. Also, silly and funny and very sociable by all accounts. He liked meeting people. He appeared to have some kind of learning disability throughout most of his early schooling, and traditional educational models of his day didn't work with his brain very well...but once into adulthood, he was pretty normal, socially speaking.

So, yes, early intelligence can cause difficulty in traditional educational models, where kids are expected to develop at some kind of 'average' speed.

But once into adulthood...not so much.

Sorry for the tangent.

 

[Ele]

My earliest memories of telling lies are of being creative and imaginative in the form of telling what my parents obvious...

Hi OP,

You're doing the best can, anyone who judges you, including yourself, maybe can't see that.
I work really hard on knowing what's the truth as the imaginary feels so real at times when escaping the awful reality. And the effort to lie, the need to hide the truth, the depression, the other hard stuff, is so difficult, and so painful, it's a nightmare. When someone says hi, or asks you how are you, saying --" just got bitten today, really hard, I hope I hid my wounds good enough" isn't an option. Not when you are hiding and don't have anyone to trust with the truth.
I know how it's like putting the effort to look normal, to blend in, to pretend you haven't been traumatized.
I think pretending is part of staying alive. Of surviving. In that period of time. Until you are safe and can act differently. Until you can trust.
I hope you will find someone worthy trusting that will be good to you.
I hope I will too.

 

[Cebo]

OP here. I presented all of this to a counselor pretty much as stated in my post. I have been seeing this person for a fe...

No, PTSD and lying do NOT go together. Not for you or anyone.

Don’t confuse PTSD and trauma. Lying can come as a survival mechanism for trauma, but it’s not a PTSD symptom.

Maybe it’s a fine line, but a distinction that needs to be made.

 

[Furijo]

OP here.

Even after being aware of the problem and making the decision to stop at all costs I found myself still telling a lie now and then, and it was mostly pretty stupid and for no better reason than to keep a conversation going. I beat myself up over it for a long time.

The eye opener came to me not in a counselors office or on a PTSD forum, the real change came to me when a person that I considered and still consider my friend called me out, fairly and honestly and with a lot of emotion, on a few stories that he questioned.

In fact, the stories were true and exactly as I truly remembered them happening, but they had actually happened to another person and I had just applied them to myself, part of the habit I was and still am trying to break. I had changed the "they" to "I" as a hold over of my deep seated habit of covering for my very strange and far from average real life by filling in blanks with true but borrowed happenings.

I came clean and it was hard. I laid out the whole thing, not blaming the lies on my PTSD but explaining how lies started as a way to avoid trauma, and continued as a way to hide a past that was painful and needed to be hidden, and carried over into a skill that I wasn't proud of or willing to use to hurt anyone but possessed none the less.

That was hard. My counselor is doing back flips over this, but it was really just my deciding that I didn't like it and I wanted to stop it. It is a day to day, conversation to conversation battle but after my "coming clean" with someone that I valued, it is getting easier. By far.

 

[Ravo]

for the non sympathetic posters here, try this one on for size:

imagine that everytime you ran into a person that was in any way rude to you or dismissive of you, for your entire life, you had no choice but to assume it was your own fault because: 1) you knew you were less than honest and 2) you knew that people talked to each other and mostly about each other, and 3) therefore, someone knew you had lied and now everyone knew you were a liar.

try living a life where every rudeness, every sideways glance, every single one of lifes normal slights was something you had caused and deserved.

No matter what the cause for the lies, the consequences are quite the punishment.

 

[Ravuzo]

OP here.

Even after being aware of the problem and making the decision to stop at all costs I found myself still tell...

Well done! I think you are showing a lot of character to "come clean". I know it must be hard as your brain would have some strong byways along those lines. So important for any potentially valuable relationships that you continue to exercise your truth-telling new habits though.
People worth their salt will respect you for being authentic and showing yourself to them, even when it means sharing parts that carry a lot of shame and guilt attached to them.
That is something most, if not all, PTSD sufferers share in common.

Well done you for starting your journey to truth city!

 

[Inuko]

I read most of this thread and found it fascinating. I did the imaginary stuff as a kid. Other than that I tried to tell the truth, but I do find myself exaggerating sometimes, without realizing it until later. My trauma starts with my earliest memories just about, so I cannot say for sure if any lying started back then, but I do remember my parents rewarding me for telling the truth once when it was important that I did so. I think I was about 4 then. After that, I made an effort to tell the truth, whereas before that I had sometimes been lying to avoid punishment. My parents were not my abusers, thankfully, so it was much easier to tell the truth to them than it was to my abusers.

OP, I applaud you for going through all this, for telling the truth here and for making the effort to tell the truth in general. Thanks for sharing all this with us.

 

[Zazotiv]

for the non sympathetic posters here, try this one on for size:

imagine that everytime you ran into a person that was in...

Are you new here?

People are just being honest.

I’d say many of us have grown up in various webs of lies.

The strong reactions are because of that.

And yes, many people don’t tolerate liars. I personally relegate them out of my inner circle. Why? Life is too short for lies when you’ve grown up in a twilight zone of sorts.

I don’t think someone should come to a population of people who have dealt with waaaay more than their share of liars and expect sympathy or empathy. It’s just more stuff that added to the abuse.