Why Do Psychopaths Lie?
Psychopaths lie all the time and it’s perplexing to us. Dr. Morgan Scott Peck titled his book on human evil, People of the Lie, because one of the most common traits of a psychopath is that they lie. They seem to be compulsive liars. Why do they lie so much? They lie about important things and about unimportant things. They will lie about what they had for lunch. They will lie about their names, where they live and what happened when they went into the 7-11 to buy cigarettes. They lie when the truth would actually seem to serve them better. Why lie about innocuous details such as what they had for lunch? Actually there is a method to their madness. The psychopath’s lies are usually 180 degrees the opposite of the truth. These lies serve the purpose of misdirection.
Covert Sabotage
Psychopaths know how to destroy a person by covertly sabotaging every aspect of their lives. Their goal is to make their victim perceive life as hopeless and unfair. The victim had the audacity to be happy and the psychopath intends to change that. Toward this end, psychopaths will learn all of your vulnerabilities, all of your values, everything you care about, all the things which bring pleasure to your daily life and everything that you feel an emotional attachment to. Then the psychopath will surreptitiously sabotage those things.
It might be your favorite TV show, he will make sure you never get to watch it. It might be getting the garbage out to the curb each week, she will make sure you forget by calling to distract you. Your favorite food will be poisoned and you begin to think you’ve developed a food allergy to it. Your favorite cat will get killed after you prayed to God to always keep him safe because you loved him so much. If you think your car is safe because you keep it well maintained, he will cut your brake lines. You will never get that promotion, instead you will quit or be fired because you are too sick from being poisoned to actually make it to work. If you’ve always been good with managing your money, he will arrange emergencies that cost you more than you can afford. Your friends and family may abandon you after he spreads lies about you to them, then you become isolated except for the ever present psychopath. In other words, the psychopath will make sure you never feel secure, you never feel blessed, and you never get what you hoped for.
This covert aggression forms the backdrop of your life. It builds a level of constant stress in your body so that the psychopath’s other machinations will be even more effective. Against this back drop of perpetual disappointment, the psychopath’s small acts of kindness stand out in stark relief, it’s what you look forward to daily. You begin to rely on him to make your life feel meaningful. He becomes your anchor in the storm. But he alternates kindness with cruelty. The psychopath giveth and the psychopath taketh away. Now he has control over your reality. His craving for complete power over life and death has only just begun to be satisfied. In the end, he wants to know if he can manipulate you into the despair that makes you consider taking your own life.
Disinformation : 180 Degrees the Opposite of the Truth
Because they use every single bit of information they learn about us, to control us, they assume that everyone else, is doing that same thing. They think we would poison their favorite food and cut their brake lines. After all, if they think that way, doesn’t everyone? When psychopaths lie, they are protecting themselves from being known and being vulnerable. All psychopaths are paranoid. One psychopath I know, fears and hates Google with a passion. He knows Google is collecting information on him. I can’t imagine what he thinks Google is planning to do to him! Instead of Google, he uses Duckduckgo as his search engine. In addition to using Duckduckgo, psychopaths handle their paranoia by giving disinformation at every opportunity. That disinformation will generally point in the 180 degree opposite direction to the truth and it creates their mask. There is only one thing that a psychopath really values and that is, his or her mask. Because most people can’t imagine lying about everything that they are, this mask enables psychopaths to con and manipulate, to cheat and to steal, even to kill and get away with it because nobody ever imagined what they were really like. They view life as a game to win and they want to win by lying, cheating and manipulating.
Slime
There are times when a psychopath lies and it’s painfully obvious. You might think that they would feel shame to be caught in a lie. They don’t. Instead, we feel embarrassed for them. When we’re faced with their naked lies, we avert our eyes to avoid being slimed with their shame. The psychopath doesn’t care, as long as we don’t question their version of reality.
Turning the Table on the Psychopath
It’s ironic that empathic people trust the psychopath because we can’t imagine being so duplicitous. Yet the psychopath, who relies on our trust and naivety, still feels paranoia, thinking that we will do unto them as they would do unto us. The psychopath actually has good reason to feel this way. He or she, knows that you might find out what they really are. You might realize that everything they’ve ever presented to you was a malicious lie. They believe that people will want revenge or will try to hold them responsible for their evil deeds. For psychopaths, that’s a very good reason to keep their identities, locations , “friends” and habits, secret from you.
In the past, psychopaths have gotten away with evil by playing this game of lies, deceit and manipulation. Most of us observed some aspects of it, but didn’t know what it meant. Now the tide is turning. As knowledge of psychopaths and their machinations becomes more common, the lies that once hid these abusers, now reveal them. I wonder where they will hide next?
Copyright © 2012-2018 Skylar
Some great conversations here and some good advice as well,
Michelec you are indeed fighting an up hill battle…our friend who used to post here who is deceased now, had custody of her grandson (a special needs kid) because her daughter was a drug addict, prostitute who was also bi-polar and psychopathic…and the daughter sued her for custody (with a state appointed attorney) a GAL got involved and wanted to put this kid into FOSTER care so he would have a better chance of “bonding” with his mother. ???????DUH???? anyway, the GAL kept saying this or that outrageous thing TO INFLATE HER BILLABLE HOURS…not for the child’s benefit, but to get money for herself. The bill eventually totalled over 10$K, which the grandparents had to pay as the mother had NO money.
I’m aware of several other cases where the child was taken away from the protective parent and given to the abuser, there is even an association in California called the California Protective Parents Association, google them and contact them even if you don’t live in California, they have some good information and are quite politically active.
Psychopaths tend to want jobs with power, judges, politicians, police, military, etc so the courts are FULL of them. Also many therapists are ill equipped to deal with REAL LIFE and real trauma. I was fortunate like Truthspeak to find a licensed TRAUMA therapist and they ARE hard to find and our stories are so BIZZARE that many times they don’t believe us, Even mine after listening to me tell him for two how my entire family was “out to get me” had some questions and wanted me to bring in someone who could verify my outrageous story. And when he asked that (being a former therapist myself before my retirement) I actually quit crying and LAUGHED because I knew he thought I was psychotic. LOL
And yes, our stories are CRAZY….and sometimes only someone who has LIVED IT can totally relate.
There are several stages to healing ourselves, and we MUST HEAL OURSELVES before we can care for someone else. Many of us have come from dysfunctional families that have programmed us to take care of others but not ourselves and this vulnerability causes us to neglect ourselves and our own healing. Like the airlines tell you in an emergency if the Oxygen mask falls down, put on your OWN before you try to help someone else put on theirs.
The “crazy making” that psychopaths do to us keeps us so stressed out that we are hardly able to function on a basic level. I know I was a “blithering idiot” for quite some time, and slowly, slowly, I started to heal. We must find calm and peace in order to think rationally and I know I was irrational for a long time, able to do little but obscess and cry….Mine has been a LONG HARD STRUGGLE but I am at a place now where there is PEACE and tranquility in my life. Skylar and Truthspeak and I are “old friends” who have held each other’s hands through the rough spots. I can’t tell you that a healilng journey has an “end” because I think it is a JOURNEY that we must keep on going for the rest of our lives and not fall into the pit falls, sink holes and other things that will always crop up in LIFE…but by strengthening ourselves we are able to navigate the journey in a positive direction. God bless you, and just take one day at a time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/us/robert-dear-planned-parenthood-shooting.html?
This article in the NY Times, describes Robert Dear, the mass murderer, as “contradictory”.
This bothered me because from the description of his words and actions, I would describe him as a hypocrite.
All psychopaths are hypocrites but it seems that nobody would describe him as a psychopath until after he murdered 3 people. The article doesn’t mention psychopaths either, but it’s not a great leap.
His charming personality with women, whom he played against one another, marrying one while cheating on another, and soon moving on to the next one before he goes back to have a baby with a previous one…
that’s the story that gets told over and over when it comes to psychopaths.
But there’s more. He is described by each woman in very different terms. One called him by many names.
In the end, if he had never killed anyone, he wouldn’t be considered a psychopath by most. They would probably call him a narcissist. That’s why I like the term, “spath”. It’s not a medical term but it fits. This guy is a dangerous person. The red flags are that he abuses people he perceives as weaker than himself and he wears the masks of good people in order to do it.
Really, what more do we need to define a spath?
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