Ruining Life and Marriage

Hi Folks,

I want to introduce myself as a newly recognized (to myself) compulsive liar. I have told both huge and insignificant lies at various times in my life. Most of them were to cover over three affairs, broken promises, wrong doings, guilt, and trying to make myself seem better than my own horrible view of myself and total lack of self-esteem. While this forum is not an "affairs" forum, my lying and deceiving not only allowed me to have these three affairs during my marriage (I also had affairs before I was married and lied about them to the men I cheated on or the wives of married men) but gave me the unfortunate practice of becoming a better and better liar. I clearly am not bragging (in fact, I'm devastated) that my competency at lying and sounding completely sincere has developed enough that nobody knew I was lying. My lying cannot be separated from my deceit, disloyalty, betrayal, and making a mockery of my covenant marital vows (which I now value more than anything like my vow to God). I found myself a consummate con artist, and the power of being able to do anything I wanted, no matter how wrong, without anyone else knowing, eventually became habitual. Like many of us, I somehow conveniently convinced myself that if an affair was a secret, it wouldn't hurt anyone if they didn't know about it (and had no comprehension that secrets were the same as lies that only were killing me and the life I could have had with my husband and children). Boy, did I con myself on that one by not realizing that omission and silence are every bit as large of a lie as commission. Because of this, I have alienated my grown children and, even when I told my husband (and children) about my last affair a few years ago, my husband decided his love and care for me were worth taking me back if I would never have another affair or lie again. After working together tirelessly to rebuild our marriage, I began to feel a level of love, gratitude, closeness, and commitment to my husband that I never even knew could be so intimate and real. I truly set out to be a covenant wife who would honor and respect my marital vows.

Tragically, or wonderfully, a few days ago, I realized that I had been consistently lying to my husband and covering up. I also realized that I had told small lies that had no reason to lie about and was shocked to recognize that I was a compulsive liar, repeating the very pattern that almost ended my long term marriage. I certainly knew when I did something against my husband that I was doing wrong and then lying about it to cover my secrets—the very thing I swore I would never do to hurt and betray my husband again. Just like I've read in many of the excellent posts here, one of the key things that allowed me to keep on lying was my very convenient "forgetting" of such breaches (which could be seen as parallel to having an actual affair as far as my broken promises went). When I did things I knew were wrong, I knew it but cheated and lied at the time. I could not overcome my impulse to cheat and lie. However, the terrifying ability that liars have to forget would take hold in a few days and I would have no memory of my misdeeds, even when I did them again.

These facts scare me to death because I often am not willing to tell the truth when that is the only thing my husband values and asks for, especially if I know it will hurt him. We had a talk about this and the very next day I wrote an incredibly inappropriate email in which I outlined and outlined to a girl friend in detail how she and I could communicate behind my husband's back. So, after a couple of years of all my hard work, I was back at where I had been my entire life—devastated, self-destructive, and at the bottom of the pit. The lying was not only running me but ruining me. I can no longer tolerate this aspect of my evil traits and desperately, DESPERATELY want to stop but now have little conviction that I will even know if I can stop myself. I have put several guidelines in place to help me stop, such as asking myself: Do I love my husband enough to stop? Would I want my children to know what I am doing? Would I want God to see me in the act? Do I want to hurt my husband beyond repair? Do I want to lose my marriage that has become the only good thing in my life? Now, from this day, I feel I have my first chance with this forum to confess my lies or omissions. I am so desperate and grateful to have found you and am really begging for any help or suggestions that will allow me to keep the husband of my dreams and become an honorable person/wife instead of somebody that even I find repulsive. One thing you should know is that I will NEVER have another affair again.

Though I am clearly joining you out of desperation about my own life, I have no intention to be a passive parasite in this forum. I will do whatever I can to help any of you who are also taking the bold step to reach out for help. I feel that I have come to a place in myself where I can no longer abide the fact that I will need or want to lie ever again. I truly cannot imagine facing myself again over another lie. However, I must be honest with you all and tell you I have been at this place before and believed my intentions and desires were strong enough to stop my lying. I was wrong and, knowing the nature of this disease, I am not only terrified but fairly certain that without your help and God's, I will likely fail again. Like many of you, I have clearly abused the trust I began to build with my husband. Remarkably, he keeps helping me, and I have just begun to tell him the truth when I lie, even though my past deceits have destroyed his reality, sense of himself, and I have lost our children not just for me, but for him as well, because he chose to stay with me. He has endured enough pain, agony, humiliation and because of his love for me has continued to support me and I can no longer bear hurting him even one more time. Like many of you who are loved and love very fine people, I know I have used up all my chance cards and there will be no next time in my marriage. More than anything in my life, I want to be true to God and my husband, and I need HELP. I truly want and need my husband and cannot afford to blow my marriage. I cannot face myself or my husband again if I lie again. At this point, I have committed myself tell him if I have lied. He is putting his faith in me one more time because he loves me, but I have so damaged him that he is so broken that both of us know one more time will be the end, not necessarily of our marriage, but I will have removed any chance of hope and joy only to become a "hospice nurse" to a man who I will bring to the edge of death and drain his once vibrant and happy life to a lifeless shell.

Thank you all for any and all help or suggestions and just for reading my pathetic story.
Cynwyd

Sticking with this forum and being active in has helped me and I am a woman in your exact situation minus I am not married to my boyfriend. Although my lying has brought us to a place I do not want to be. I am 15 days lie free. It is the most difficult thing I have ever done and you can do it too. I just came out a couple weeks ago, forcibly. Get therapy, join group if you can. Unfortunately for me my depression has gotten significantly worse but lying has stopped for the time being and I have never done this. THis is the longest I have ever gone. Your husband love you, remember that. You have love, adding the other ingredients are just he beginning. Trust, loyalty, confidence. I love the way you told your story. Bravo. Now, do something about it. Peel this layer of skin off and enjoy the new you, lie free. Im here to share in experiences if needed. As a matter of fact that is what I am looking for. Be proud of yourself from coming out on this forum. This is just the beginning


Ocean_Floor

You are so lucky to have a strong person by your side. I am glad that you understand and realize this.

I found that my greatest comfort is to create an online journal. I wanted to go the same path as you and admit to my lies whenever they occur, but I found if I could not tell the truth the first time, it would be even harder to admit to it.

I started an online journal (lots of free sites available to do this) where i committed to telling the truth every day. I gave it to my ex-girlfriend, and I intend to give it to my other victims, and most likely any of my future partners. I make every effort to update my journal every day, and in it I detail my lies for the day, and I detail my victories over lying. This way my partner has a record of every lie I told, so they can hold me accountable, and I can keep a record of my accomplishments.

People don't understand how hard this is. They don't realise how hard telling the truth can be, and I find it really good to pat myself on the back for my accomplishments.

Send me a PM if you want to start a journal where I started mine, and we can monitor each others progress, and support each other through the harder times.

Thank you chrono_liar and Ocean_floor for your compassionate responses. As you know, I have ruined my life and the lives of my family. This is now my 4th day (so far) of not telling any lies or keeping any secrets. I am focusing almost all of my attention on discerning the causes of my lying. Yesterday, I found myself having a brief impulse to contact a female friend about something I promised myself I wouldn't. I actually noticed my impulse and stopped dead in my tracks. I was relieved that I stopped myself from creating one more mess to ruin my life and was also pleased that I was able to do so. I am seeing that impulses are a trigger point for me that I never noticed since my actions blinded me to my own impulses, fantasies, temptations, etc. Why have I been driven by temptations and fantasies to do things that I know are wrong, not ever stopped myself, even at times in my life when I thought I was very happy?

Why would I have an affair when I had three and even then four beautiful children and a happy marriage? How could I have believed that as long as my affairs were secret from my children, they were no more harmful than having a piece of gum and not telling my husband? As I look back, I can make no sense of how I could have had such totally crazy but obviously self-serving ideas. One thing I have learned recently is that I had no clue what a relationship was or required. That I could believe that having sex with another man had had no implication on my marriage makes me wonder what planet I grew up on. Why would I do wrong, risk everything that I cared about, lie about it, and build walls between myself and my husband when I was already happy? I need to get to the crazy thinking that leads to my impulses and in the past to truly unethical, dangerous, hurtful actions. Those of us liars who think our “secrets” have no effect on the real world are almost delusional. I am seeing the devastating effect of the lies I kept secret. I was building a wall between myself, my family, God and reality. WHY did I throw away my life and family for affairs and secret communications with “girlfriends” who, in truth, I really had no relationship with and could not really care about except as much as they applauded my “empowerment” (the new word for lying).

Now, I am finding that, since I realized I'm a compulsive liar, I am paying much more attention to the behaviors surrounding my lying. In fact, I am focused on on all aspects of integrity, morality, and ethics. Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter (“The Culture of Disbelief”) writes of integrity as “first among the virtues that define good character. He defines integrity operationally as consisting of three traits: knowing the difference between what is right and wrong; acting on the knowledge of that difference; and an open and public commitment to acting on that difference. He writes of everyday experiences, of events in his own life, and of major public events, in which displays of integrity may or may not be apparent. These lead to discussions of the possibility of requiring that people always act with integrity and to the place of traditional visions of Christian integrity in public discourse.”

Over the years I have turned to women “friends” to confide my make-believe troubles to for, in fact, I was not unhappy and most of what I told them were lies. But, I have also found that friends are often not what I thought they were. They have their own agendas and angers (often against their husbands). I can now see that they did not have the courage to deal with their own real problems and therefore kept cheering me on, encouraged my attacks on my husband and kids, and wrote e-mails about my husband that were even more hostile and disgusting than what I said and wrote (the fact that they may have never even met him, when to the rest of the world—and to me when I was sane—he was a loyal, devoted, kind, and loving husband and father) made sense at the time, but now I see they were encouraging me to do what they wanted to do to their husbands. I was a convenient dupe and proxy to have the affairs they were afraid to have themselves. Many of my “friends” (even several therapists) had encouraged me to “follow my bliss” and have a wonderful fulfilling affair. I know that in our desperation, many of us recommend professional counseling. I was very careful in my choice of therapists and sadly have to report that for me every one of them made the situation worse and increased my immoral behavior and lying. Many therapists told me “not to tell my husband” things that if I had, I might not be in the dilemma I am in now. Like “friends” they played their sick game out with me as a willing and paying co-conspirator. All of these therapists, instead of realizing I was lying and needed help, joined me and often escalated the attack I began on my husband and children. Did they ever ask to speak with them? No. Why would they just buy my story? I am a consummate con, but I thought therapists were trained to recognize pathology instead of supporting it. Again, all of these therapists actually successfully replaced my husband as my intimate relationship. This was really sick. One therapist told me about all his affairs as he encouraged me to have affairs and, of course, this would be our “little secret.” Why, oh why, did I not just tell the man I loved and married what was going on in my head instead of leaving him to pay for relationships that betrayed him and further ruined our family and marriage? Was I so sick or so stupid, or so intimated by authority figures? Neither friends or therapists even thought to question the “other side” of the story I told.

I am keeping my postings completely public so that I leave myself no room to hide or keep secrets, which I no longer wish to do but am terrified that the “lying me” will re-surface and this time truly finish me off. I found this short piece on just how bad friends can be to someone vulnerable like me. In an APRIL 20, 2011 posting by JEFF MURRAH, he says that: Friends can make an affair situation better or worse. The cheaters so-called friends are often catalyst that can tip the cheater one way or the other. They can encourage the affair or discourage it, depending on their values. When such friends encourage affairs, they function like a terrorist group filled with secrets, relish in doing things destructive to your marriage, enjoy the emotional drama and enjoy the turmoil and show that surrounds the affairs. You and your spouse do not need friends like that, no matter how “fun” they might appear. A good friend will be willing to confront and get things out in the open, rather than hide behind secrets and loyalties. Loyalty is typically a good thing, until it is used to conceal wicked acts. (Yes, I consider an affair wicked in consideration of the destruction it brings to all it touches and its immorality). Those friends may say that they just want the cheater to have "fun" and have some happiness in their life, yet in reality they are contributing to your spouse's emotional, relational, spiritual, and physical destruction. Affairs always end in death, be they emotional, relational, spiritual, or physical. It is important to know who your spouse's friends are and the kind of influence they are in their life. Your marriage may depend on what kind of friends the cheater has.

Oh, how I wish I had read this decades ago. However, the truth is that I can read the bible all day and then lie that night with absolutely no awareness. Having a compass that points in the right direction is a inspiration for me but does NOT give me the behavioral skills I need. It is as if I read a book on flying a plane. Intellectually I get it, but I certainly would not have the embedded skills and habits and would clearly prevent me from crashing and burning.

So, my advice to all of us struggling, based on my own oh-so-flawed life, is to take it one day at a time, slog through depression, anxiety, self-hate, etc., and just try to keep focused on rooting out the seeds of lying and use every ounce of energy to STOP a lie. Sometimes I have found that if I have already begun a lie and think I can not stop it, I immediately confess my lie instead of making it worse by keeping it a secret (thinking that the magic potion of liars that makes us believe we have control can manipulate reality and almost magically make our bad deeds go away).

One of our grown sons is here on his way to his summer job and is rude, irritable, contemptuous, and silent to me most of the time. He looks at me with total contempt, which is excruciating but is probably deserved. Since he hardly knows about all my lies and affairs, he is living proof that “secrets” only deceive liars. Children and young adults know who we are—they feel it and know not to trust us even if they don't know every evil deed we committed. I realize that he is only a mirror of who I was and it is terribly frightening to see that many of my behaviors that I thought were the opposite of the (lack of) parenting I received are just what I did, but below the radar of my consciousness. As I cringe at the way he treats me, I realize he is acting exactly like I did to my husband for years. I have created clones of my worst self, so I feel the guilt of taking lovely children and molding them like me with the horror of them treating me like I treated my husband. This is extremely painful. I expect my married child and spouse to come to our town soon, but they will not even stay with us. None of these are “visits” but convenience stops. Seeing that they are as disconnected as I was is excruciating, and feeling what I made others feel may be a just punishment, but it truly unbearable. It is very awkward now that, after two years, they are beginning to visit our town (not necessarily my husband and me), but that they are not connected to us in a close and personal family way. NOTHING personal is “allowed.” So, my once innocent, open, and beautiful children are four more versions of “me.” I have blown our future hopes of children and grandchildren as being the focus of our later years. When I hear others talk about all the phone calls, e-mails, visits, family Christmas's etc., I mourn our loss. I had it all and systematically destroyed my own life and those about me. I fear for my soul and MUST change my ways. Now that I feel I have told most of my sorrows, I will keep future postings shorter. Thank you all for your help.