Narcissists are pathological liars full#

There will be gaps in their stories and in their lives. They may have tons of friends, be the life of the party but no one knows the whole story. They want you to buy the fiction that the storefront is so dazzling you wouldn’t need to come inside.

Narcissists are pathological liars full#

They can’t invite you into the store because the store is full of empty discarded garbage. They can’t ever let down their guard and let anyone in.

The narcissistic personality is more of a storefront designed to hide that there isn’t any there, there. The lie is more a PR stunt, a marketing ploy rather than a cohesive integrated set of values. The narcissist is operating from a place of defense all of the time. The self they have built from those lies can easily cave in on itself under the weight of truth. The secrets, the layers of lies, become a fragile house of cards. And, the defenses keep them unaware of the emotional pain that would otherwise swallow them up, or so they believe. That set of defenses stand as armed guards against a horrible cauldron of self-loathing of which they are mostly unaware. That self, however, is a set of defenses, not internalized values. For them, the lie is a necessityto preserve what they regard as a self. The lie is not inconsistentwith their sense of self. Different because their sense of self is different. When their life becomes a lie, their lying is different. The difference is that their life has become a lie. The narcissistic calculation is a different algebraic equation.Ī narcissist’s lie also comes from his or her sense of self. What happens when a narcissisttells a lie? We feel bad because who we know ourselves to be and our values don’t match up. If we aren’t a liar we feel bad, sometimes really bad. We make the calculation that an untruth is worth telling. Given enough reason, fear or perceived gain, most of us will violate our sense of integrity, our internalized values.

What happens when otherwise good people tell a lie? A self-based on opportunism instead of values. It isn’t so much an undeveloped sense of self as it is an impaired/fragmented sense of self. The three-year-old, mouth rimmed with chocolate, who declares with impunity she was NOT the one who ate the half-eaten candy bar, is given a pass because we all know intuitively she doesn’t have a fully formed sense of self. Thus, we all act in accordance with our sense of… who we know ourselves to be. This gut check is a calculation that happens automatically mostly at the unconscious level. When confronted with the opportunity, to tell the truth, or tell a lie, most of us check in with our inner-selves to see if our answer feels right. What’s the difference between a person who tells a lie and a liar?