Has anyone with AS mastered the art of lying?

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Waterfalls
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30 Nov 2013, 10:53 pm

I would not want to rewrite my moral code, think carefully, it may not be worth it. Even if it's possible. Because you'd be radically changing yourself to fit others' expectations.

Although lying hurts, what sometimes can work is to let go of your own perspective and open your mind to the experience of someone else, lets you be truthful in a different way, speaking to their, not your, truth.



Last edited by Waterfalls on 30 Nov 2013, 11:31 pm, edited 2 times in total.

saxifraga
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30 Nov 2013, 11:10 pm

A skill I had to master at a very young age as a defense mechanism. I said whatever I had to in order to avoid, or at least lessen, whatever random punishment or beating or whatever was aimed at me that day. I'd a told my dad i was jesus christ himself if it would get him to get out of my face and leave me alone. Enough

LIttle white lies, sure, easy and no problem. Besides, its never in any guy's best interest to tell his wife that yes, that particular dress does indeed make your ass look big. "Real" lies, no. I'm capable enough but I dont. I even quit a job I like and made good $ at because it involved blatant lying to customers on a daily basis. Ate at my soul and thats unhealthy. Like any hunter or fisher, my six pound bass may have only really weighed four *wink* but for anything that matters,,, no.



cberg
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01 Dec 2013, 12:53 am

saxifraga wrote:
A skill I had to master at a very young age as a defense mechanism. I said whatever I had to in order to avoid, or at least lessen, whatever random punishment or beating or whatever was aimed at me that day. I'd a told my dad i was jesus christ himself if it would get him to get out of my face and leave me alone. Enough

LIttle white lies, sure, easy and no problem. Besides, its never in any guy's best interest to tell his wife that yes, that particular dress does indeed make your ass look big. "Real" lies, no. I'm capable enough but I dont. I even quit a job I like and made good $ at because it involved blatant lying to customers on a daily basis. Ate at my soul and thats unhealthy. Like any hunter or fisher, my six pound bass may have only really weighed four *wink* but for anything that matters,,, no.


This is precisely my experience with lies. I dealt with them by the pack passing between and coming from my parents, learning in the process where they could keep me away from undue stresses. It's not fair, but millions of kids must learn this ability to get by. It's also not fair to say they're objectively hurting others by doing so. This isn't all as black and white as everyone's making it out to be.


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01 Dec 2013, 1:41 am

As a child I lied to avoid getting into trouble and it never worked because people always knew I was lying. I didn't like getting punished and having consequences so I started to lie to avoid them.

I also remember the time when I was seven, a girl in my class brought her hamsters to school and she had a bunch of them. Then her mother had to come and pick them up at the end of the day. I liked those hamsters so I decided to say I have ten hamsters living in my bush in the backyard. My teacher wanted me to tell the whole class about it so I did and then a week later the classroom aid said she was going to call my mother and ask her if I have hamsters living in my bush so the next day I said they all died so I wouldn't have to keep telling the story and get caught in my lie. I am sure the teacher knew I was lying and she was trying to teach me a lesson, the story was implausible because no way can ten hamsters live in a bush outside. I am sure the aid saying to my teacher in front of me and the other kids she is going to call my mother was her way of getting me to stop with the story since I wasn't giving it up and confessing. But instead I made up another story saying they all died and never even confessed I made it all up. I didn't feel bad for lying, I just wanted the attention the girl got in my class.


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LupaLuna
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01 Dec 2013, 4:13 am

League_Girl wrote:
As a child I lied to avoid getting into trouble and it never worked because people always knew I was lying. I didn't like getting punished and having consequences so I started to lie to avoid them.


I myself did master the art of lying in this area for the very same reason you stated above. To avoid getting into trouble. I had to be good at this because I was always getting into trouble. As far as lying for other reasons like fibbing a story a.k.a stretching the truth or so-called "white lies". I am not at all good at this and to be frank with you. I don't like to lie at all. There just is no harmony in it and it feels dirty.



Jensen
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01 Dec 2013, 4:36 am

Omissions yes. My mom taught me about white lies, because I was very blunt, - but lies as such.....not good at it.
I wouldn´t want to seriously compromise my integrity, - though sometimes tactical lies are useful.
I haven´t been good at that either.
Once someone from the Royal Academy of Arts said: "If you just add this and this little stylistic element to you pictures here, you are sure to be admitted this year. They want that".
I couldn´t do it! Stupid stupid me!


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Shellfish
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01 Dec 2013, 5:23 am

My son is pretty good at lying, I think.
Nothing really big but little stuff, like I will ask him if he washed his hands after going to the toilet and he says 'Yep', really casually but I know he hasn't...


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invisiblesilent
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01 Dec 2013, 8:32 am

I /can/ lie pretty well, if I have time to prepare. I used to do so all the time and then I realised that I usually hurt myself more than the people to whom I was lying, so now I /very/ rarely outright lie. As someone else said, I would sooner avoid the topic/say nothing, although it could be argued that a lie of omission is a lie nonetheless ;)

edit: If I get put on the spot I can't lie at all, I get anxious and it's really obvious.



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01 Dec 2013, 10:15 am

I'm quite good at lying. Who was it who said: "If you can fake sincerity, you've got it made"?

I just think of an alternate explanation for something and convince myself that it's the truth for as long as it takes me to actually speak the words involved.

This can lead to problems, obvious, but 90 per cent of the time it doesn't.

And I would never tell a big fat black wicked straight-to-Hell lie. Unless it saved my scrawny neck in some way.



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01 Dec 2013, 12:10 pm

There is an episode of the Twilight Zone that I remember because I have always seen it as a metaphor for lying.

In this episode a man discovers a large mirror in the attic of a house. It has been painted over. He scratches a little of the paint off and discovers that underneath he can see a tropical scene.

After he removes all the paint, he discovers that he can step through this mirror as if it were a portal to another world. Of course since this is the Twilight Zone, he cannot find his way back and remains trapped in this other world.

Children often lie because they see it as the easiest way to get what they want. What they often fail to understand is how dangerous lying is. Truth is something rather fragile, if we loose our ability to recognize it, we ourselves become more vulnerable to those who are adept at twisting it. We loose the ability to find our way back.

I also look at lying from a Christian perspective (not a church perspective). A church perspective may have a rule that lying is bad. However Christianity was never supposed to be about rules, it was supposed to be about truth. Those who were of the truth would hear the words of Jesus.

Jesus promised his disciples that if they lived in his word they would know the truth and the truth would set them free. Although this sounds a little too abstract for most people, I have found it accurate.

Truth brings freedom. In a way it is a little like Aspie perception in that it is difficult to accept the soft comfort of delusion. Truth can bring discomfort and even hostility, but it undeniably provides freedom.



littlebee
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01 Dec 2013, 12:19 pm

Well, people lie to themselves and fool themselves and tell themselves all kinds of stories all the time, and this surely includes aspies, but if a person is unconscious of his lying, I guess this doesn't count, and I think this is not what the op is talking about.

The other kind of lying I cannot do, and have always been bizarrely cash register honest, except recently in my crafts business in maybe the last two years I had a big breakthrough. First I don't have prices on my items, and when people sometimes ask about my pricing, I tell them the truth-- that my prices go up and down like a yo yo. Previously for many years I always had a problem, though, because I started at the price I actually intended to sell it at, and then people would bargain me down from there. I could not and still cannot deliberately start at a place that is higher because that price is obviously too high. So about eighteen months ago I had to lower my prices drastically because of the economy, whereas before they were so much higher that I could take a hit if someone people bargained me down, but after I lowered them I could not do that anymore, so I started lying and saying I was having a sale and that today a fifteen dollar item was five dollars cheaper and a twenty five dollars item ten dollars cheaper.. This really works in that they can't bargain me down because I have already bargained myself down:-) Yes, the price did really used to be fifteen dollars---once. This has been an incredible breakthrough for me, and in the beginning, for the first years, I could not believe I was doing it. It was like being free, like flying.

However, this is as far as I could ever go. I have never once in my life lied to build myself up (though probably lied to myself lots of times, and also functioned from illusions of grandiosity due to low self esteem). The impulse to do it has come up on a few occasions over the years, but I have always fought it down, as to do it even once would be deadly.

Also,I would never lie to a customer about the quality of a product. If something has a possibility to break, I tell them it is not guaranteed for breakage, and if I am about to package a purchased item and notice any kind of flaw, I will point it out even at risk of losing the sale. Usually they will buy it anyway or choose another item if they have time. I even tell people if a product they are choosing from me is not so good.

None of this is about telling lies to save my skin, like with my landlord. People will generally lie to save their skin in certain circumstances, such as I might say a temporary roommate not under my rental agreement is a relative visiting me. Never had a problem with this kind of lie and I do not think most people do.



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01 Dec 2013, 12:30 pm

timf wrote:
There is an episode of the Twilight Zone that I remember because I have always seen it as a metaphor for lying.

In this episode a man discovers a large mirror in the attic of a house. It has been painted over. He scratches a little of the paint off and discovers that underneath he can see a tropical scene.

After he removes all the paint, he discovers that he can step through this mirror as if it were a portal to another world. Of course since this is the Twilight Zone, he cannot find his way back and remains trapped in this other world.

Children often lie because they see it as the easiest way to get what they want. What they often fail to understand is how dangerous lying is. Truth is something rather fragile, if we loose our ability to recognize it, we ourselves become more vulnerable to those who are adept at twisting it. We loose the ability to find our way back.

I also look at lying from a Christian perspective (not a church perspective). A church perspective may have a rule that lying is bad. However Christianity was never supposed to be about rules, it was supposed to be about truth. Those who were of the truth would hear the words of Jesus.

Jesus promised his disciples that if they lived in his word they would know the truth and the truth would set them free. Although this sounds a little too abstract for most people, I have found it accurate.

Truth brings freedom. In a way it is a little like Aspie perception in that it is difficult to accept the soft comfort of delusion. Truth can bring discomfort and even hostility, but it undeniably provides freedom.


Yeah, but there was another Twilight Zone episode in which a man sold a car which always made the owner tell the truth, and the kiss-off line was that the final purchaser was Nikita Kruschev. Bet they don't teach that one from many pulpits.

Jesus could have a very ... ah ... ductile sense of truth when it was convenient: "Render under Caesar..."

Besides which, we are not talking about some 2000 year old religious sect in the Middle East, but about today's complex world in which the truth is no often going to get you anywhere. I wish it did, I worked as a journalist, but it just doesn't. Teach the beauty of truth to your kids by all means, but don't expect that beauty to survive much contact with the real world.

It should be a principle, more often than not it's an aspiration, honoured more in the breach than the observance.



Bodyles
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01 Dec 2013, 12:54 pm

I dislike lying.
A lot.
In fact I have a lot of trouble just not blurting out the truth most of the time even if I know I shouldn't.

I've developed methods to allow others to deceive themselves by only telling them part of the truth and not the whole thing.
I generally don't do it though unless it seems necessary to spare someone's feelings or avoid confrontation.
I can lie, but I really try not to unless I'm really, really angry at someone or I'm in a lot of trouble and a lie is the only thing that will save me.
I wouldn't say I've mastered the art exactly, but I can be convincing when I need to be.
I feel very bad about it afterwards, though, when I do, and it takes me a while to get over it.

Guiltless lying seems to be something NTs do well, and it's something about them that I hate and drives me crazy.
I just moved out of an apartment with a roommate who perpertually lied to me, so many times I lost count, and I only lived there for two months and we barely spoke, meaning he lied to me most of the times we did.
Moreover, the couple times his lies upset me enough that I pointed out that he lied to me, he threatened and tried to intimidate me.
What a shmuck he is, I'm glad to be out of that situation.



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01 Dec 2013, 1:11 pm

Jensen wrote:
Once someone from the Royal Academy of Arts said: "If you just add this and this little stylistic element to you pictures here, you are sure to be admitted this year. They want that".
I couldn´t do it! Stupid stupid me!


I'm an avid amateur photographer, and have taken some evening classes where people bring in their work to be critiqued. But even if I agree that the teacher's suggestions would improve a photo of mine, I feel like I can't take his advice and then still claim it's my work.

When I think about this rationally, I know I'm being silly - for one thing, learning is partly about taking advice and incorporating it into one's understanding; and for another, most art does benefit from other people's input before actually reaching the public, the most obvious example being books, which usually go through an editing process but which I see no less as the work of the author because of it.

But when it comes to my stuff, I feel like I'm cheating if I accept anyone's advice. :roll:



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01 Dec 2013, 1:49 pm

Yes, but as I'll often say, not all those things that are not the truth are lies. In between lie qualities such as tact and diplomacy.

"Does my bum look big in this?"

Well, what level of answer you give depends how well you know them....



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01 Dec 2013, 7:22 pm

Nah, I'm usually just a very terrible liar...