Lying can become an addiction. All our addictions are ways we use to control ourselves within our environment because our sense of control is what we use as our predictability during the day. There is no greater form of control than controlling what other people hear, believe and think. A person who lies to gain control of the minds and thoughts of others would only mimic this behaviour because a parent or guardian etc would have lied to them and taught the child this form of control.

If you know someone who lies more than they should it simply reflects a certain part of the ego that’s usally doing the lying……………and that’s often the child ego. Unfortunately it’s hard to find inner peace (that good feeling in our gut when we wake up in the morning) if our child ego is running our day to day decisions and actions. Basically if inner peace is desired, the adult ego needs to be making at least 85% percent of the decisions on any given day. Children lie, adults don’t need to……so when lying is obviously in play within someone’s life they really need to understand why this is occuring and start seeing the inner child at work.

Adults don’t need to lie because adults know exactly who they are and what they stand for. That’s what a true adult ego is all about. Children (the child ego) on the other hand often wants to fit in with what ever situation is in front of them at the time and therefore is forced to lose themselves inside the desires and wants of others very easily. The child ego never wants to offend anyone and wants to be more of a “YES MAN” to whom ever is asking them questions at the time and therefore the lying is just part of this process. This is why children often lie when they’re caught doing something that other people don’t agree with. Where there’s lying, there’s always fear, judgement of self against other people’s expectations and shame. People turn into true adults when they learn how to let the fear, judgement and shame go. You’ll only lie when you consider the feelings and expectations of others before you consider the feelings and expectations of your genuine self.

Lying to others can only be mastered when someone lies to themselves for quite a long time………and that can only be mastered by being exposed to adults who taught that person that lying was an acceptable form of control to use in one’s life. Remember that all addictions and self sabotage are methods of control. With lying you get to  control what other people see, what they think, what they believe etc.  There may be no greater form of self sabotaging behavior than chronic lying because it’s one of the ultimate ways to control another person’s reactions toward yourself. Like all forms of self sabotage, the end result is to bring trickles of love and attention toward the self saboteur.

Lying is a pattern of thought and not a particular incident that comes up occasionally. What we think and how we act becomes who we are. The lying to self, which must be mastered before we can lie easily to others, has to be practiced over decades and there lies the real problem regarding turning this kind of programming around.

Lying to ourselves starts with parents or guardians shaming the child for certain behaviours and not shaming the child for other behaviours. Those shamed behaviours bring so much shame to a child and are so powerful that the child grows into an adult who would rather face any consequence other than admitting that those shamed behaviours are part of them.

This sort of shame can easily bisect the personality into good and bad sectors, which continually war with each other over a lifetime. The separation of the ego into warring portions can make someone experience levels of loneliness that can rarely be described or quantified. Losing yourself, inside yourself, is the equivalent to losing your mother at  shopping mall x 10. To lie to others about who you really are and what you really do just separates the ego mind further, sending each part of the shamed ego to cry with their heads in a mental corner. (within a person’s own mind)

Basically the lying to self and others never really allows ourselves to know who we really are or what we really stand for. Who we really are acts as a measuring stick in life that we can measure all our decisions in life against. Who we really are also acts like our internal compass so we can guide ourselves through life (via our own decisions….and not the decisions of others or decisions we were shamed into making in the past). Basically when we lie, we’re allowing an outside influence (other than our genuine self) to guide our decisions, which eventually gets us lost on our journey through life. When you consider others first, you live their life and not your own.

When you end up living someone else’s life, you feel lost, lonely and helpless. Telling the truth no matter what other people think means you’re living your own life, without caring or needing anyone else’s approval and that feels good because it integrates the ego instead of fractioning it into many pieces via shame.

For example, imagine a female teenager who dates more men than her farther would like. The father will often shame the daughter’s dating practices and tries to steer her behaviour with pressure regarding proper conduct between men and women. These ideas are in fact the father’s ideas and not the daughters…….in fact those ideas may be the church’s ideas or the great grandparent’s ideas or even ideas the father got from the TV etc.

The thing to remember is that the ideas being forced on the daughter are not derived from the daughter herself and because the ideas are not what the daughter is doing at the time, they bring a great deal of recorded shame into the subconscious mind. As the daughter grows up, she continually lies to herself and others when anything close to that subject comes into her life or when she’s questioned regarding a topic that brought shame to her in the past. Due to the fact that the daughter is now an adult but living someone’s else ideas she learned as a child (in conjunction with the shame she feels in general about men and women) she continually feels lost and obviously lies uncontrollably to hide her shame. All her energy in a day is to carefully calculate her actions into one’s that people approve of and hide the one’s people won’t approve of. It’s exhausting and when she’s alone, she often lets her frustration out on the people she loves in her life  etc etc. It’s a bad cycle.  No flow, all stress. No flow, just a big exhausting show.

This lady/daughter is in fact stuck in the past. The more important phrase to use here is that “this person is stuck“. Stuck in the shame of the past, stuck living someone else’s ideas and more importantly she’s hiding away from her genuine self. To break free of her past she must consider her past but make her own decisions and not allow her past to impact her future. If she continues to lie about the imagined shame, her father is literally still making her decisions for her.

If you know a person who lies, it would be imperative they first learn to see themselves lying to themselves and others. Without this first step, no healing is even possible. They must see their own lying and understand that there’s no shame in that but it does need to be observed and questioned. Second, the person who’s lying needs to place a shovel into the middle of their chest and start digging to find the shame. which is forcing them to lie. What subject do the lies always rotate around? The lies will always be an attempt to hide a part of the person away from the world and by hiding the real you from the world, it will be hard to find the peace and integration you need to be at peace yourself.

Basically, kids lie and adults don’t. The goal is to see what part of our ego is lying and why. After that we need to do some inner work to heal that part of us that experiences so much shame that it would rather lie to themselves and their loved ones, rather than admit certain things about their own behaviour. Adults don’t care if someone else judges them. Kids do care and that’s where the lying comes from. I hope this helps a bit with your inner journey of self discovery.