I appreciate Louise’s comment. I understand the negative impacts of calling someone a liar, but when it is chronic, and likely tied to a personality disorder, there is no capacity to rebuild trust—the foundation for crucial conversations. I wish there was an effective adaptation of CC methods for dealing with that, but there are only so many times one can get burned by trusting before you avoid the stove altogether.

Learn to be humble. With many, many years of experience, I know with quite painful assurance that no matter how confident I am that I have all the facts, and know them correctly, I can still be wrong. No matter how much I know, I still have a lot to learn.

So if someone accuses me of lying, I strive to control my emotions and hear them out. They clearly have some reason to think that I’m wrong — that I have said something that is factually incorrect. And if they’re serious about the use of the word “lie,” then they seem to believe that I did so with bad intent. Now they could be right. I’m not perfect; I often make factual mistakes. And I’m not going to deny the possibility that I may have done something with bad intent. I’m no saint; nor am I an angel.

Now it is more likely that if I did wrong, it was through ignorance, carelessness, or maybe I was just “having a really bad day” at the time, and did not behave with my standards for maturity and respect for others that I do try to live up to. When I accept and work with well-intended negative feedback, I might find ways to improve myself.

Now people who have mutual respect for each other need to understand that there are limits to how much negative feedback a person can take at one time. And it can require some time to “digest” feedback and make changes, if needed. And we need to recognized that heavily emotion-laces accusations can be abusive. And we have to recognize that even though I may feel hurt and abused, this might have more to do with myself than anything that the other person may have done wrong.

So both sides need to find ways to approach these emotionally-charged situations with more human empathy, and understanding that none of us is perfect, we all make mistakes, and we need to find ways to better understand each other so that we can work out our differences.

It happens that I was just thinking about a situation I was in, working for a boss who was … let’s say “careless with the facts.” He’d often say things and give orders and make assumptions … that would turn out to be at variance with reality. And he was not very receptive to negative feedback.

So, over time, I looked for opportunities where I could find easily presentable undeniable evidence that the information he had given me was “not reliable.” And then I’d go to him with the “I’m confused” story of “You told me this. But I tried this and this happened.” or “I found this in the vendor’s documentation.”, “And I’m confused. Could you help me understand where I went wrong?”

Now that usually (in my experience) provokes a lot more blustering and making stuff up and such. (… what some people might call “lies.”) But when I check that information and come back later with more confusion and questions, … Well, eventually most semi-sensible people will realize that I’m not going be fooled by even more “puffing.”

So I can usually at least get to the point where they’ll admit that they don’t know. And if they’re sensible, they’ll back off on trying to impose their fiction on me.

This can lead to a situation of mutual respect. Or it can lead to a situation where one or both of you leave. Unfortunately, I’ve seen the latter more often than the former. I’m not sure that better technique would change that. Sometimes they don’t want to change.

(In the situation above, I left. And a few months later his superiors fired him.)

Thanks for the post. I have found that if someone has a real mental disorder, compulsive lying, that the rational approach you suggest does not work. They will continue to dance around the issue or make up some excuse or just shrug shoulders and say “I don’t know.” to separate themselves from accountability even if the facts are presented to them. And as you suggested, eventually, one just needs to protect themselves and get out of the relationship.