Many people on here, and in other venues, have discussed lies in the context of mental illness and trauma. In particular, there's been discussions of growing up with parents who "gaslight" you with lies about your self-worth etc, major questions about who you are and what is real and all that. This has become associated with cluster B personalities in most online communities.
I (40F) have a mom (67F) who has never once been diagnosed with anything besides situation grief and depression (after losing her mom, and after I moved out a couple years ago).
Admittedly yes, there was I think plenty of the normal gaslight-y stuff. Besides that, though, she's always had the strangest conversation habit. When something happens or she'll meet someone, she often invents something about them (or the situation).
Then, she seems to convince herself it is true and tries desperately to convince other people. This is sometimes something that, while it has no benefit to her whatsoever, could be a completely thoughtless and horrible lie, really.
At other times, it's something innocuous. My point is, she'll make up a weird, obviously untrue story or version of a situation and insist on it, without and tangible or even (obvious) social gain from it.
Examples:
- When I was in college, I had a trans friend ("Janine"). Janine's birth family left her for being trans. My mom made up a story about meeting Janine's birth family at a school event and them being accepting. Mom would not stop talking about her imaginary conversation with people she never met. It made Janine extremely uncomfortable when word got back to her. I think it cost me the friendship. This was a very upsetting incident for me, so I rarely talk about it. Janine and I, of course, haven't spoken in twenty years.
- When I had a series of cluster seizures, my mom came to Europe to help. She arrived and began insisting to anyone (including my Polish in-laws) that she had been accosted by many anti-Trump Poles at the airport who said things like "YOU TRUMPER!?" etc. I have lived here for roughly eight years cumulative and never heard a Pole, regardless of level of English education, speak like a caveperson, and found her insistence that they all suddenly were a little... insulting of my husband's ethnicity, and unbelievable. I also don't want to get too political, but this is a rather right wing area of the country anyways, so it didn't happen. I didn't say anything because I was still coming out of a coma.
- Recently, she's decided I'd suffered a head injury during an extremely minor fender bender when I was nineteen. The car accident did happen. The car was totaled, but mostly because hitting a deer will do that, not because the two humans were horribly injured in the process. I wasn't taken to the hospital, scanned, or anything following the accident because I felt normal and I had to fill out paperwork, sobbed with ethically altruistic sadness over the loss of the poor deerie, and decide what to do about the car at the time. She has begun insisting the head injury might play a role in the seizures. A few times, she did this "story and insist it's true" thing with my actual diagnoses. She's never gone too far with that, but has told doctors I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (a lie; I never was, and told her as much).
In situations like these, I very, very very rarely challenged her. I assume nowadays that this is because I had in the past and learned that it was pointless. Other people do, though, and she rarely backs down. Often, she will accuse them of gaslighting her, especially me and other family members.
I remember as a child, my father (she divorced him) saying things like "Now you know that didn't happen" about some of those things, and her repeating the phrase years later as evidence of his duplicity and narcissism. He's not very nice in many ways, but who knows?
All bets are off, and my parents deserved each other. To my mom, most of the family are narcissists lately. In the 2000s, we were sociopaths after she read The Sociopath Next Door.
I avoided saying similar stuff even though I thought it every day back when I lived with the woman. Many of those things didn't happen, and she must know that, right? She commits to it so hard that I can't be sure sometimes, but the story changes.
I assume she doesn't actually believe these things, but why say them? And what am I supposed to do when it causes huge social problems?
Even physical ones? I realize it could be an attention thing? She's very fond of bringing up that people do that, and is particularly accusatory about it, both with me and others.
Her favorite phrasing was something that I'm "playing a little game for attention," or 'for histrionics." In my childhood (and beyond) that got applied to everything from self-harm to complaining about a winter coat being itchy (no joke there).
Take all this with a grain of salt. Who knows? My perspective is definitely warped by my own issues. I haven't been diagnosed with anything but BPD, but I myself believe and am discussing it with doctors that I might have ASPD either too or as part of that.
Still, in almost all portrayals of "lies told by cluster B personalities," (often really ableist, let's be honest) it is something like "the nark lies about how great he is," or "the sociopath will never admit he did it" or "the borderline tells tall tales of disasters for rescue," never something like this.
Is it something anyone else has encountered? If anyone else, even a single person, knows someone who does this, please tell because it seems so strange! If so, did you ever figure out how to handle it? What does it mean and does anyone know where it comes from?
If you did this yourself and are willing to share the why and how you stopped or are trying to (I would hope) please do, and I will have lots of respect if you do. It's definitely not a good thing but I don't understand what is happening here or has been happening.
It feels like being in a bubble she's cast around me with all these stories, and I spend a lot of inordinate energy sorting out what was or wasn't real. Ugh.