Hey, Sandy!

You present a VERY interesting question. Does everybody lie? And if they do, do they do it ALL THE TIME? Do they lie to themselves all the time? Or just to others? Or a mix of the two?

Wow. This is definitely a mind-stretching set of questions. Let me see if I can come up with what I myself really think on this topic.

I'd have to start out by saying that all people, unconsciously, themselves construct the worlds in which they live and that those worlds exclude aspects that are for whatever reason impossible for the individuals to accept or put up with.

For example, my mom was a horror to all her children. Do I remember this consciously? No. My mind couldn't put up with that, so I remember her as a nice lady. Was she really a nice lady? Absolutely not. My T and I have been around this block about 96 times if not more. She says I'm splitting and that may well be true. I'm seeing only her good aspects and not her many really bad aspects. Splitting is one way of lying to one's self.

So, I guess I'd have to say that UNCONSCIOUSLY we ALL "adjust" the truth ALL THE TIME. That's essentially (in my view) what the unconscious is for.

Now what about consciously? When anyone of us is sitting with another of either sex and talking with them how frequently are they lying to us? Well, first, I'd have to say that even though their eyes are open and their mouths talking to us, they're not entirely conscious of what they're doing.

But when people are truly focussed on what they say, when they, beforehand, have enough experience to know themselves, then, I believe people are capable of telling the truth. Most people at many times, but not always, are actually strongly desirous of telling the truth, of sharing their realities with others. If you can't do that, you're REALLY, REALLY alone. And that applies to both men and women. So I think truth is a real possibility, an achievable goal under the right circumstances.

However, unconscious behavior intrudes, I believe, into what we usually understand as conscious behavior. Well, then, IS THERE such a thing as "conscious" behavior in which we really do have a choice as to what we do or say? A choice whether or not to lie?

As said above, yes, I think there is truly conscious behavior, the problem is, of course, figuring out whether the person on the other side is telling the truth or feeding you a line.

In that regard, I'd have to say that all of us, almost without exception, have felt the pull, the tug, toward saying things that the person we're talking to wants to hear, but that may not be true. The whitest of white lies. Make 'em happy!

Can people descend from there into the blackest of black lies? "Yes, dear, sleep with me and I'll marry you next week!" Well, of course.

Is there anyway out of this labyrinth of deceit and despair?

Yeah. I think there is. Just as we're all programmed to lie to ourselves and to others (not all the time but lots of the time), we're also all programmed to sniff out the bs we receive from others. No, it's not automatic. Yes, it's something we actually "learn" over years and years of rather unhappy circumstances. But we DO learn it. Take any adult of average intelligence or greater, who hasn't lived in a dungeon all their lives, and that adult, male or female, will pretty much know what really is going on, even if they're being bombarded with lies. Which we all are, pretty much 24/7.

And even our evolved consciousnesses and unconsciousnesses are perfectly well aware that they need to amass as much information as they can about relevent situations. And so we have the absolutely factual attachment of women to movies, plays and television programs depicting the essence of all different kinds of male-female interactions known by the name of "romance." Men find such things boring. Why? Because the information gained from them is irrelevant to men's sexual strategies.

Women, on the other hand, need to know, even if they don't realize it, just how to discern a liar from someone telling the truth. Their evolutionary strategy depends on it. Women need to be able to tell apart the guys who really will be willing to work together forever raising and feeding children and those who won't. And watching soap operas and more sophisticated soap operas is by no means wasted time for women. It's all added to their central storage unit of information about reproductive strategy. And it's lifelong. I watch my own wife of 42 years still glued to the screen of programs and movies that feature up-close portrayals of women and men playing the oldest possible kind of poker, sexual and reproductive poker.

What does that say to me? It says to me that adults (and as far as I'm concerned, today in the 21st century that means people 16 or older) can be trusted to make their own decisions about what they're being told, truth or lies. Even if they make the wrong decision in one instance, it's a learning process. And that learning process works. Which means we can trust adults, male or female, to make choices that are pretty much in their own interest, whatever that may be.

The people we have to watch out for, the ones who need more help from us, are those who, for whatever deep psychological reason, keep making consistently bad decisions over and over and over. For whatever reason, self-punishment or anything else. And that kind of person has no hope of escaping their prisons without someone on the exterior pointing out (gently but persistently) that they're hurting themselves and that other outcomes really are possible.

So. While lies may be about as ordinary in human conduct as crossing the street or answering the phone, all kinds of anti-lie strategies have long since (from evolutionary perspectives) been integrated into our minds and hearts. So for most people, a trial-and-error learning process is sufficient. The ones who need our help are those who, for whatever reasons, can't engage in this learning process, who are stuck in a self-punishing cycle of being the sucker every single time.

Hope this helps! Take care.