Understanding the Habitual Liar

A habit, according to Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “an acquired mode of behavior that has become nearly or completely involuntary.” We all have certain behaviors that have become habitual, actions so automated that we have no awareness we are engaging in them.

Driving is a well-known example of a complex series of behaviors that you’ve completed so often that you no longer have to consciously remind yourself to accelerate, turn, shift, brake, etc. But when you were first learning to drive, you had to give significant mental focus and energy to each of the tasks associated with driving.

Lying can take a similar trajectory, from deliberate and intentional at first, to automated and habitual in the long run. 

The chronic or habitual liar is a person who at one time early in life made a choice to lie. As is often the case in youth, the lie might have been motivated by a fear of getting into trouble or some other unwanted consequence. For many who opt to lie under these circumstances, the untruth does not morph into a pattern of habitual lying. Here the sporadic lie is used strategically, and often the person grows out of the desire to lie. In this case, the individual discovers that lying doesn’t truly resolve issues (actually, it often breeds new ones), and therefore the person learns to adopt healthy problem-solving behaviors.

The profile of a habitual liar

In order to better understand why someone might habitually lie, it’s important to examine a few types of lies, each having a different motivation and purpose. 

Embellishment lies

“I told my partner so many lies about my life. He thinks I played minor league baseball and that an injury is the only reason I didn’t go pro. I also told him that my entire college education was paid for with a sports scholarship. The truth is, I hardly played any sports because I was mediocre at best, and I paid for college with student loans.” -Javier, 37 years old

Embellishment lies are designed to make you look good in front of others. Here the goal is to impress by telling tales of achievement, competence, uniqueness or greatness. In these instances, you are lying in order to feel better about yourself (or to not feel bad about yourself) by impressing someone. Whether this works to genuinely enhance your self-esteem is doubtful (since usually the individual remembers that the fictionalized superlatives are not reality), but that is often the goal. 

Embellishment lies might also be used to evoke a sympathetic or concerned reaction from another person. You might tell someone tales of a sorrowful upbringing that didn’t exist or make it seem like a medical issue is worse than it is. In these instances, you are seeking a particular type of attention, not admiration like Javier sought, but instead a type of caregiving, a sympathetic or nurturing reaction from another person. This lying dynamic might have come about as a way of dealing with parental care that was unmet in your childhood.  

Concealment lies

“As a kid it felt like I was always getting into trouble. My father was a tyrant and I had only two options to stay under his radar: Completely isolate myself from him by staying in my room as music as possible or lying in order to tell him whatever he wanted to hear. I became an expert in lying and I’ve never stopped.” -Terrence, 50 years old

Concealment lies have two functions: they are designed to hide something you’ve done (that would get you into trouble and/or hurt another person); or they are used to cover up aspects of yourself you find shameful (you might lie about feeling insecure or fearful about something). 

Initially, these types of lies functioned to keep you out of trouble with parental figures (“I’m not the one who painted on the walls!”). You blame your sibling or friend for some misbehavior. In these instances, you learn that you can act in ways that transgress rules without repercussions by hiding what you’ve done. While research shows that it is common for young children to lie in this way, many stop lying as they mature and learn to play by the rules of society. 

Internalized shame is a powerful driver for concealment lies and it is this influence of underlying shame — the fear of being psychologically exposed and seen as less-than — that can fuel chronic/habitual lying. When these underlying dynamics are at play, it’s important to explore and process the shame-based wounds that have continued to fuel these patterns of lying.

Purposeless lies

“I can’t help it, but I lie about the stupidest things, things my wife doesn’t even care about. I can’t stand this about myself, but the lies just come out of my mouth and half the time while I’m lying, I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why are you even saying this?!’” Louis, 28 years old

Unlike the embellishment and concealment lies, purposeless lies have no apparent function. The person who lies in this way often realizes that it makes no sense to lie, there is nothing at stake, and the lies aren’t making one look good (nor are they helping to hide something that would be disruptive if discovered).

The chronic or habitual liar often finds him/herself stuck in patterns of purposeless lying — this can be seen as an essential feature of habitual lying. 

In therapy, habitual liars describe feeling no sense of agency as these lies spill freely off their tongues. This is one of the central dilemmas for someone who struggles with chronic lying, the lack of awareness that they’re being deceitful (until after the fact). 

When a thorough history is taken during therapy of someone who struggles to stop habitual lying of the purposeless type, it’s often discovered that the earliest patterns of lying in this person’s life started with either embellishment or concealment lies (or both). For these individuals, truthfulness became associated with a sense of danger, and anxiety and lying became a means of self-protection. Developmentally, embellishment and concealment lies often start in childhood or early adolescence and slowly turn into a more rigid, persistent form of purposeless lying. 

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There are other forms of lying that have not been addressed in this article (e.g., narcissistic-entitlement lies; retaliatory lies), but the core dynamics that drive many forms of lying frequently start with the motivation to embellish and/or conceal particular issues. 

An understanding of the psychodynamics of lying demonstrates that lying was once a means to managing one’s emotional wellbeing and psychological equilibrium. Whereas being deceitful may lead someone who typically doesn’t lie to experience considerable anxiety about lying, it is often the opposite for the habitual liar: at one time in their life, telling the truth was a major source of anxiety and lying became the pathway to establishing emotional safety. 

When patterns of lying start early in life, lying can become highly automated, with an increasingly wider net of lies cast so that less and less thought is needed to carry out the act of lying. While this might free someone from the psychological toll of having to constantly assess emotional safety and decide whether or not to lie, the obvious problem is that lying in this way leads to a habitual pattern of deceiving others (including loved ones) that can negatively impact all areas of life. 

The paradox of lying is that while it may have been a solution to serious challenges early in life, at some point, this type of “solution” turns into its own problem, causing significant emotional upheaval to self and others. 

Rich Nicastro, PhD., is a licensed clinical psychologist with twenty-five years of experience. Based in Austin, Texas, he offers teletherapy to individuals and couples throughout the United States. To find out in which states he can offer teletherapy, visit his contact us page.