I recently wrote about “the most dangerous liars” and some of the tactics they use to confuse, deceive, disempower, manipulate and dominate others. Having psychologically assessed many such individuals, I liken the process of trying to squeeze the truth out of them to trying to handle a slippery eel. But that analogy does not do justice to the experience.
This special breed of liars is used to being able to talk their way out of most situations by employing the various strategies described in my previous blog, with perhaps the most important and effective one being the ability to speak with great confidence or conviction. In addition, they tend to disorient or overwhelm the person trying to challenge their claims by:
- talking quickly
- jumping suddenly from point to point or topic to topic
- being overly specific about certain points while being maddeningly vague about others
- throwing around a wide variety of supposed facts, allegations, rhetorical questions, innuendo, gossip, humourous anecdotes, emotionally laden statements and other manipulative communication devices.
These liars also usually mix in just enough truth in order to make their falsehoods seem more plausible. Plus, when someone tries to point out what appear to be lies or inconsistencies in what they are saying, they keep trying to redirect attention to the few factual or verifiable aspects of their story. No matter how often the other person tries to focus on the fabrications, liars will try to stress the importance of the few truthful elements of their story, even if they are trivial or irrelevant to the matter at hand.
Liars are aided by the fact that most people cannot remember exactly what they are told, especially when it is delivered in the manner described above. As a result, if someone hears discrepancies between, for instance, what the liar claimed another person said and what that other person later indicates he or she actually said, the person being lied to might mistakenly believe that the two versions of events are in fact similar. At the very least, they may assume that they must have misheard, misunderstood or misremembered what the liar told them; or, they give the liar the benefit of the doubt and attribute any differences in accounts to an honest mistake on the liar’s part.
Some liars are so cunning that they end up causing many different people to run around trying to chase down all of the misrepresentations, half-truths and outright lies being attributed to various other parties. It can sometimes get to the point that literally everyone involved in the situation must be present in order to trap the liar. Otherwise, he or she will avoid being properly held to account, at least temporarily, by targeting the words and actions of anyone not there to defend themselves or to provide proper context to what they have said or done.
Things get really interesting during the relatively rare occasions that the most talented liars come across someone who will continue to question them no matter how much they try to zig and zag their way out of reality. They are not used to being confronted by someone with the tenacity, intelligence, speed of thought and composed temperament to enable them to keep asking about the same specific issue countless times and in different forms, no matter how evasive, skilled, tricky and deceptive the liar may be.
Whatever the circumstances, when these liars finally realize that they are cornered with no way out, they will usually admit to one small part of their deception. They will then quickly move on to something else with no indication that they have done anything wrong. Even if they are directly reminded that they have just been caught in a lie, they will often look at the other person with an almost “so what?” type of expression while trying to direct the conversation away from that lie. If the other person persists, they will likely look at him or her with contempt.
Such liars cannot understand why the other person wants to dwell on their falsehoods, since they have already “admitted” to their deception. Nor can they understand why anyone would question their honesty and integrity. They compartmentalize their lies and the reality of what they have done—including the impact of their actions on others, as they are unable or unwilling to truly see things from anyone else’s perspective but their own.
Tomorrow’s blog will shed further light on these liars and their false or quasi-admissions. As many people may be discovering recently, it can be very difficult to determine whether these liars are driven by extremely dangerous personality styles or whether their lies are part of the destructive syndrome of addictions. Oftentimes it is a potentially deadly combination of the two.
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