"A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself as a liar."
Mark Twain
This is one of those posts where I share an embarrassing story. I seem to have a lot of those lately, but I think it's important to share the lessons I've learned in life. I hope my insight may be of value to others, as it might serve as a tool to understand those that have or have had the same types of behaviors that I once did.
I had an unimaginable amount of guilt and anxiety as a child. I remember when we would have a baby-sitter over, I would lay in my bed at night praying that she wouldn't give my mother a bad review. I was always on my best behavior, but the idea of disappointing my peers was so very scary to me. To me, that was the ultimate punishment, and the anxiety would eat me alive. I was, at most, eight-years-old. I'm lucky I don't have stomach ulcers from all the stress I caused myself at such a young age.
I was taught to never lie or steal, so I never kept secrets. I clearly remember a visit to the grocery store where I snuck a grape off the vine and ate it, without actually buying the bag of grapes. I felt absolutely terrible, and came clean to my mom the next day. In public school, my homework was always done. I was not once sent to the principal's office, or given detention. I was the perfect example of an indoctrinated child, and because I seemed to have been born with a very loud conscious, public school took extreme advantage of me.
I was taught all of these morals and values as a child, which I believe I would have stuck to had I been treated with the respect every human deserves. But I was not rewarded for always being on my best behavior, getting good grades, or having a strong work ethic. Quite the opposite, actually. I lived with a very strict parent, who watched my every move like a hawk. If I was five minutes late from school, my mother would call me and tell me I had sixty seconds to get home, or the police would be called. I was constantly punished for irrational reasons. I was also physically abused, and when social services were called (this was somewhat of a regular occurrence), I would protect my abuser. I had no freedoms whatsoever, and the result of this kind of abusive upbringing led me to rebel; not in a healthy way either.
By the age of sixteen, I started lying, and I became very good at it. I had learned how to sneak out of a house that was damn near impossible to sneak out of. I started skipping class. I began to flunk my classes (something I had never done before), and I would have to run home as fast as I could to grab the report card in the mail before my mother did. I began having a lot of casual sex. I started vandalizing people's property. And for a brief period of my life, my conscious that weighed so heavily on my soul since childhood was struck quiet. I liked lying. I could get away with literally anything my very confused heart desired. I felt like for the fist time in my life, I finally had control over any situation. But like selling your soul to the devil, I paid a nasty price later on.
By eighteen, I wore my lies like a tie around my neck. I had told so many lies that I didn't even know who I was. My entire life was a lie. My habitual lying got so bad that I would hear the lie coming out of my mouth at points and would literally ask myself, why did I just lie about that? Like a bad addiction, I had no impulse control. My best friend at the time once told me, "I think I'm the only person on earth who actually knows who you are, because you lie to everyone else so often."
People eventually caught on to my lies because they became so ridiculous, and truly unbelievable. And unfortunately (and fortunately at the same time), I lost my first love because of my behavior. I lost multiple friends, I lost my job. Even my family couldn't stand being around me. I had managed to manifest my deepest childhood fear; I had disappointed everyone who was important to me, and I was ostracized for it.
After I had lost multiple relationships due to my totally unacceptable behavior, I started to reconnect to the feelings of guilt, anxiety, and shame. I realized I had a major issue, and knew that I would never have meaningful relationships if I did not learn to change my behavior. I truly wanted to change, but I felt so stuck in my habits that it seemed impossible.
The first step was admitting my lies to the people I loved. I started with my ex-boyfriend. I emailed a lengthy letter to him, confessing all I had lied about. Naturally, he was angry. He asked me if I knew how different things would be if I hadn't done what I did. I told him yes. There was no hope of getting back together after all I had done, and I knew it. But the biggest part of my healing was first admitting that I had done wrong.
One of the most important things I've learned about the universe is that when you send out a frequency of REALLY wanting something, you will receive the life situations to get you to that point, but only IF you truly want it. I truly wanted to change, and by some grace of something holy, the tools I needed to do just that showed up at the right place, at the right time.
One day, after essentially losing everything I cared about, I found a book called The Truth Heals. It was the first self-help book out of many that I'd ever pick up. The woman who wrote the book used to be as big of a liar as I was, so much so that she became a defense attorney. In her book, she explains that lying expresses self-hatred and low self-worth. She also explained the Chakra system, and how when you lie, you essentially throw your energy field off balance. I had never heard of the Chakra system before, so I was very interested. It's ironic, actually, because I had ended up in the hospital due to an extreme kidney infection not long before reading this book. Your kidneys are a part of your Sacral Chakra; your creative and sexual energy. Eerily, I learned that the kidneys represent self-worth.
I think I read this book four times over. I took so much from it. And not long after I started my healing process, I learned the truth of the nature of our government. I couldn't believe that I had been lied to and manipulated for twenty years of my life!
9/11, WWII, The sinking of the Lusitania, the Golf of Tonkin; they were all inside jobs! The Federal Reserve, the Patriot Act....WTF?!? My world was flipped upside down. I was irate. I couldn't sleep for months. An entire country...no...most of the WORLD was being manipulated on a daily basis! And we believe what they tell us!
Ironic, eh? The former liar, angry because she had been lied to? I am just realizing now, that learning what the government truly is (violent, corrupt, and unneeded) gave me a very important lesson on the topic of empathy. I used to manipulate people's reality all the time, not really understanding the damage I was doing to their psyche. I lost people's trust. I made people question reality. I did some of the shitty things our government does, and to the people I supposedly loved! It's frightening to come to this conclusion.
It is said that lying can trigger the same feelings as cocaine. I'll admit, I occasionally (and when I say occasionally, I mean once or twice a year, if that) like doing coke because it gives me a false sense of power for a small amount of time. I feel invincible, like I could do anything. And then it goes away, and I accept that and don't do more than I need to. And from being a liar in the past, I know that the effects are similar. With cocaine, you eventually want more, and more and more so you can hold onto that false sense of power for just a little while longer. It's no different with liars.
"A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying - to others and to yourself."
-Fyodor Dostoevsk