In this blog we develop a model (AAHE) of coping with stress that involves four essential ingredients: Acceptance, Accountability, Humility, and Empathy. Acceptance means working to understand yourself, and evaluating how your values and beliefs fit with objective reality. Accountability means that you are responsible for evaluating your role in events you experience. Humility means you believe in the value of recognizing that you are not always right, and you must listen to and respect others’ opinions. Empathy means you value understanding how others feel, seeing things from their perspective, not just yours.
How would the AAHE model can be used to explain the compulsive, habitual liar? I’m not referring to someone who occasionally “spins a tall tale,” but someone who makes a habit of lying and builds most of their life around falsehoods. Former congressman George Santos comes to mind. He claimed his Jewish grandparents managed to escape Hitler’s holocaust; his mother was in the South Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11; he claimed he attended Baruch College on a volleyball scholarship and got degrees in economics and finance in 2010; he added he had knee replacements from playing volleyball at Baruch. In an interview with WNYC following his successful bid for Congress, Santos also said he lost four employees in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. Santos, of course, is not alone as a habitual liar. Some folks falsify their resume’; others regularly claim they were present at some momentous event (“Kennedy’s limo drove right by where I was standing when the shots rang out.”), or lie about achievements (“I was high scorer on my high-school basketball team.”).
We all have coping strategies to help us handle the stress and conflicts that come our way. Some people choose lying as a primary coping strategy. Their lies appear designed to elevate them in the eyes of others; they are so dissatisfied with their “real self,” so filled with self-loathing and self-disgust that they must build an entire new identity, living in a fake world of their own creation. In the context of AAHE, they cannot accept their lack of notoriety in the real world; they refuse to evaluate their responsibility for their failures to achieve; humility is a threat to their fragile ego, and not an option because it would force them to face the real self they abhor; their expressions of empathy are phony and serve only to reinforce the fake world in which they are supreme. In short, they are tormented by deep unresolved personality conflicts that flood them with anxiety.
Most people lie occasionally for any of a variety of more superficial reasons than those noted above: to maintain control of a situation; to avoid disappointing respected people in their lives; to make themselves look good in the eyes of others; to avoid hurting someone; to harm someone; to cover up shortcomings in themselves. The thing is, most people are not compulsive, obsessive, or habitual in their use of lies; rather, their lying is functional, situational, and transient. Lies based on core personality conflicts, however, are unrealistic, baseless, and irrational; they service deep psychological insecurities in a desperate and futile attempt to cope with a disliked self-image that causes anxiety and self-directed anger.
Virtually all of us lie now and then, and most of them are not so bad when you think about it. Alicia asks Beth, “How do you like this dress I bought?” Beth hates it, but doesn’t want to criticize her best friend’s taste, so she says, “Oh, Alicia, it’s nice and looks good on you.” Conflict and hurt feelings avoided, right? The real problem with even those “little white lies” is when they are used habitually and automatically to cope with unpleasant situations. Eventually, you will earn a reputation as hypocritical, lacking in judgment, and someone whose words can’t be trusted; then your coping efforts will be compromised.
As a general of thumb, when it comes to using common defense mechanisms – such as lying, rationalization, projection, distraction, scapegoating, manipulation, etc. – keep it occasional. If your use of these ego-protection actions become habitual, you will lose the coping battle. Stick with AAHE.
Psychology and Stress 