Anyone know any compulsive liars?

[CompulsiveReader]

I joined one of the Mumsnet "due in X" groups and we have a WhatsApp chat which is lovely but there's one woman who comes out with the most unbelievable tales.

She tells these long stories with a lot of "she said this, then I said that, so she said this and I said that" just super detailed. The stories themselves are on the boundary of something that might possibly have happened on a weird day but the level of detail is just so high and screams liar to me. I noticed that the stories generally have the theme of people noticing something mildly unusual or impressive about her/her kids and making a big deal of it or else it's someone you wouldn't expect to pay you any attention (celebrity etc) having conversations with her.

I don't know why she does it though, nobody in the group ever really comments on or reacts to her stories, I suspect we all think they are lies (or at least heavily embellished).

Ultimately it doesn't affect me, I find it a little annoying but mostly amusing. But why does she do it?! Is this a thing that people do? Please share your stories of compulsive or suspected compulsive liars. I have never come across anyone like this before.

Oh, I also went to uni with a compulsive liar. He told all our mutual friends that he'd slept with me, when in reality, he'd followed me home under the pretence of "making sure I got back safe." I'd repeatedly asked him to leave on the way home, but he wouldn't listen and tried to kiss me at the end. At this point I stopped being polite and really told him where to go.

Thankfully our mutual friends immediately believed me over him; he had a reputation for fabricating all these outrageous stories and it was so obvious that this was one of them. It felt gross when the "news" first got back to me, but I was laughing about it a few days later.

It was less funny, however, when a girl he'd actually been seeing approached me in tears on a night out a few weeks later. As if it wasn't bad enough that he'd lied about sleeping with me, he'd gone and told her all these salacious details about what I was like in bed - apparently I'm a very talented dominatrix. Just WTF!!! The lying is one thing, but using it to make another woman feel insecure... what a monumental dick.

I never confronted him but I did ask a male friend to have a word with him, apparently the guy just doubled down on his lies. No idea what he's up to these days.

I know two compulsive liars. You can tell they’re lying by the fact they contact you with this tale that comes out of nowhere or giving information not asked about. It’s so annoying when you KNOW they’re lying but they either insist they aren’t, or glaze over the fact you know they are. It’s just best to humour these people. They don’t change, they just get worse.

My sister in law. She tells outrageous lies about me to her family to get sympathy. She used to ring up and demand that I drive her all over, at the drop of a hat, the scream and call me a horrible cunt.

She'd the DARVO and call family members, saying I'd said to her what she'd said to me.

If I'm unfortunate enough to be in company with her, she'll blurt out some character assassination of me and demand that I agree with her.

She'll twist my words, or just make shit up and then get all outraged. For example, when the Olympics was coming to London, she mentioned that Danny Boyle was doing the show and I said I'd never heard of him.

She roared, "What? Rubbish! I can't BELIEVE you've never heard of Train Spotting, ridiculous!" That's all everyone else there took in, despite me telling her she knew very well that I had said nothing of the sort.

My ex husband. He'd embellish every single story he told. Lied about many illnesses and injuries. Said he'd told me something (when he hadn't) said he hadn't told me something (that he had) or that he'd meant something else other than what he said.

If confronted with evidence of the truth he'd say 'that's what the Dr said' or double down or 'I don't know' and storm off.

I've known him close to thirty years and honestly I can't figure out if he believes his own lies or not.

There is a difference between a compulsive liar and a pathological liar.

A compulsive liar knows they are making things up, but they do it anyway, normally wanting to impress, escape from a bad past or due to an underlying MH problem/condition, or a combination.

a pathological liar is living in their own world and don't know they are lying because it's their reality.

there is a spectrum, so it isn't just one or the other, there are degrees of.

An ex boyfriend when I was about 18.
I have no idea about his upbringing as I never met his family and it was very difficult to work out what was true and what wasn't! He said he had very rich parents who had disowned him as he refused to work for the family business. Pretended to be close friends with various semi famous musicians - and kept showing me songs he'd supposedly written which I later found out were actually by a band he liked when I saw all of "his" song lyrics on a CD cover inlay.
This was before Google so easier for him to get away with a lot of it.
That's just scratching the surface of the amount of crap he lied about - from the mundane to the fantastic. Even his surname.
I found him on Facebook a few years ago and he's STILL doing it! He posted an announcement that he had just been admitted to hospital and found out he was diabetic. So what the fuck the so called "insulin" he was keeping in my fridge (he told me he was a type 1 diabetic back then) actually was, I dread to think! Even his son commented "what the fuck, dad?" on that one!

My sister and its draining! Not only dose she liar about silly things but also serious things too! Her child's a genius(she's not she's just like any other 5 year old) 😂but then come the more serious lies like I've cheated on my husband or I don't know my children's dad ect (I've 4 children all with the same man) I've had to cut contact.
She also likes to fantasia and nobody could ever be a better mother then her!

Also my SIL - the most truthful thing she ever said was when she admitted to DH "I can't stop lying!" She does have mental health issues, and once said she had been clinically diagnosed as a narcissist.
Her lies are normally to either get out of something or to try and get money. She's blackmailed people and done phony GoFundMe campaigns.
She even managed to convince a journalist of one of her stories, and actually appeared on a special report on the news with her in silhouette form, with her voice distorted- talking about something she claimed to have happened to her which we knew was complete bollocks. As predicted, the story died a death and quietly disappeared.

My ex is a compulsive liar (amongst other things) he even lies about how we met. I was there I know how we met . A friend and I would just look at each other with a look when he was telling one of his 'stories'.

I found it embarrassing, it's like a need to be seen as something or someone special.

The worst lie though, he had cancer (twice apparently) and was allowed out of hospital the next day after having the tumour removed and came home on the train, no chemo, no other treatment, no follow up appointments, My uncle has terminal cancer and had been given 6-12 months, he knew that.

I had a friend who constantly lied. The strange thing was he believed his own lies. I later found out he used cocaine. I wonder if cocaine has warped his brain.

My ex-boss was/is a compulsive liar. If he’d said the sky was blue I’d have looked outside.

It was weird though because it wasn’t big or grandiose lies or even making himself a victim or hero, it was stupid things. He was a total shit stirrer and loved nothing better than saying someone said something about someone else, then telling the other person a different story. He would swear that x had happened then deny he’d said it when called out. He’d do things like not ask you to do a job, then swear blind he’d told you to get it done.

What fascinated me is that only a handful of us saw through him. The customers thought he was the most wonderful person on earth, even though he spent most of the time bullshitting them too. It helped that he was a jovial fellow well versed in the art of insincere arse-kissing.

I was that person at Uni who told lies and constantly embellished stories and looking back it was from a desperate need to fit in and be accepted. My dm was seriously overprotective and I landed at Uni with no life experience to find people who had been places and done stuff I could only dream off. I'd always been on the edges of friend groups through school and quite frankly I was socially inept!

They weren't huge lies like saving lives or knowing celebs but they were always in the vein of trying to make myself more interesting or someone people wanted to know. My self esteem was non existent

I'm much older now and finally settled in my skin and I look back now and cringe however it does mean I can usually spot a bullshitter at 50 paces!

I agree with @WitchyBits . This person is likely mentally unwell. You don't know them in real life and if you only come across their posts in the group and their posts are largely ignored then surely you just carry on as you are?

@whojamaflip oo interesting! Do you think it had the desired effect of winning people over? I wonder if this woman on my chat does it for a similar reason as her lies aren't super far fetched.

@Pickled21 I am carrying on as I am? I was just curious if this was a common thing, which it seems like it is.

I have a family member who is a compulsive liar, they generally can’t help it, i just take it with a pinch of salt now as does everyone who knows her. But….. once she told a huge could be destroying lie about me to multiple ppl and I found out I went bat shit crazy we did have a huge arguement although these ppl didn’t believe her because they knew what she was like it wasn’t the point. Now we tolerate each other and she still twists everything but she also doesn’t speak to me as much and thinks more about what she says to me as she knows il pull her up. Contents though she did have very psychological bad background

@CompulsiveReader I was very lucky that I ended up with a group of friends who accepted me for who I was so the need to tell tall stories diminished. 30 years on we still meet up every couple of years or so.

Looking back I think the lies gave people an opportunity to laugh at me which made me paranoid so I just stayed on the cycle of trying to fit in by embellishing everything I said.

I've had years of therapy which has helped me see how destructive that particular behaviour pattern was and I now stick to the truth at all times.

Two, both colleagues in different places. One was both a liar and probably had Munchausen by proxy, although I believe it's called something else now. She had a history of 'debilitating illnesses'. Once claimed she had a terminal tumour and got a whole load of sympathy and money given to her. Of course, it wasn't true. She lied about everything. Once she pulled out of a meeting claiming she was in hospital. My friend actually passed her driving in her car, nowhere near the supposed hospital. She lied about her children being ill or having accidents and left work to deal with it. She was also nasty and vindictive and lied about colleagues, getting them into trouble. She lied about me to two other colleagues who then created difficulties for me. I kept my head down because I was leaving anyway.
Another colleague lied about health matters initially. She slipped in the car park on ice and it became she fell and hurt herself to she was sure she had broken a bone. I saw her slip. She didn't fall. She had cancer three times except she didn't. She then, after leaving our school, continued to lie about dramatic things which could literally never have happened without media involvement. Only one person kept in touch with her and continues to believe every story.

@whojamaflip thanks for sharing, I'm glad you were able to get to a better place through therapy.

My xh. Started out with slightly embellished accounts of something and when they generated positive reactions from people he would just keep embellishing them and was oblivious to the eye rolling etc of his audience. The more he told the story, the more convinced he became that it had actually happened, no matter how far fetched.

There was at least one incident that he liked to recount which inevitably had people asking (on the first time of hearing it) why we hadn't taken legal action. When people heard the story getting more and more embellished they soon realised why nothing had happened. Faced with an audience of people who knew a lot about whatever he was talking about, he would double down on insisting that something had happened the way he said it did.

It was a major factor in the divorce as you could never take anything he said on trust. I couldn't face socialising with him as he would get very angry if I said or did anything to indicate that I didn't believe him or failed to back him up.

He could never say that he had forgotten something no matter how mundane. If he overslept and was late getting somewhere there was always a massive pile up with roads closed and helicopters airlifting casualties. All easily disproved but he believed his own account and could never be dissuaded.

I met a woman when I was in hospital with high blood pressure, she lived not far from us and we got friendly. Everything that came out of her mouth, I didn't truly believe but my son and hers were close in age, (babies) and just continued to be friendly.

She would tell me about the things she made, and I would just be pleasant, when I didn't believe the lies.

Anyway, I called her out when it was her son's 1st birthday. She told everyone that she had made his cake 🎂 ok, maybe she did. The evening after his birthday, the cake maker I use posted the cake on her page. I tagged said friend in it. She immediately blocked me! She claimed she made the cake and even took the cake makers details of name off the box it came in.

I've since learnt that her type, is the type of dangerous liar.

Low self esteem perhaps.

My mother does the same.

My brother. He even told everyone he was born in another country. When my mum was asked about being in the other country, she said she had never been, my brother insisted she was wrong.

Yes. ExDP and exBestFriend.

ExDP tells lies by omitting part of truth. If you point out tbe missing part of the story, he has a tantrum. ExBestie tells total fabrications or adds loads of bells and whistles to the truth. She also has a tantrum when found out.

Both are narcissists.

A few over the years. Very much a case of if you had a black cat, they would have one blacker.