Simply put, a chronic liar will lie repeatedly and will not be able to stop lying, even when they want to and have tried to stop. Chronic liars have various motivations for not telling the truth, even when the truth would make their lives easier. Sometimes chronic liars enjoy the gratification that comes from lying to relieve the tension. At other times, they have found that lying gets the results that they seek in relating to others.
Chronic liars cannot make the connection between negative consequences, remorse, guilt, or responsibility and their lying.
Some chronic liars lie for other reasons, such as to con, scam, or to cover up drug abuse, pathological gambling or other criminal and embarrassing personal behavior. One recent trend is for criminals to lie so repeatedly and comprehensively that law enforcement cannot get enough information to charge them with any more of a crime than obstructing justice. In the Casey Anthony and other killed or missing child cases, repeated lying helps the guilty to confuse or confound the police.
The criminal consequences for lying in these cases are minimal, and the more determined criminals are fully aware of it.
In other situation, there are many people who lie as a function of their work, in order to avoid trouble, to make financial gains or to make themselves feel better about themselves. These people are not considered to have mental health issues.
A chronic liar is compelled to embellish, to construct absolutely false statements, to create drama or to engage in histrionic behavior. Some will develop fantastic and completely fictitious stories.
For some, this behavior worked for them by giving them immediate gratification, getting them what they wanted, or in controlling and manipulating others. This problem usually develops in early childhood. Later in life, it becomes a full blown personality disorder that is easier to treat in childhood, but more difficult to treat later in life.
For others, there are very different causes, making chronic lying a difficult and complex disorder to identify. One of the major problems is that lying is a part of most people’s life. Most normal people lie at some point or another in the course of a day. As a result, some lying is normal.
Three signs of chronic lying are: A chronic liar may start with a normal lie, perhaps to avoid something like a job or a test, then go further to develop the lie into grandiose proportions. A chronic liar will change the story when confronted with proof of a lie, building the new story into a newer grand lie. Finally, there is no apparent reason for the lying. There is no reward that is inherent to or expected from the lying.
As such, truly chronic lying can be in conjunction with other disorders, such as the narcissism, histrionic disorder, and psychopathic disorder.
Where does chronic lying come from? There are no hard or fast rules. There are either biological or behavioral sources. Either there is a neurological disorder or there is a behavioral “addiction” to the results from lying. Children go through normal stages of lying, but grow out of it before they begin to have problems in their expanding world and in school. School is where the first stages of serious or pathological lying are often identified.
Chronic lying is pathological when the individual will not or cannot stop, even when the consequences or damage are catastrophic. Otherwise, when lying is the main way that an adult has for dealing with problems, then the lying is a serious problem.
