Aspies can't lie

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Next to all people with AS are boys that is the biggest myth of the disorder. I lie all the time and am fully aware of it. Like the other day when I took my dog in the dollar store because the last time everyone awed over her and asked to hold her. This time it was a rude bitchy grouchy lady who told me animals weren't allowed in in case I didn't notice they sold food (No I didn't notice). I said I was sorry for bringing her in and the lady believed me. I was not sorry.

While I think AS can influence someone's ability to lie, it can just as easily make it easier to lie as make it tougher.

I can lie, and often do. My job requires me to lie often (tech support; you can't very well tell the person he/she is an idiot who is causing his/her own problems...).

This reminds me of an incident I had in the 6th grade where the teacher told us we needed to bring in a cereal box. I said that we didn't eat cereal, and she said that it could be any box, at which point I said we didn't eat out of boxes (which was true, the food pretty much all disappeared once my parents divorced). At that point she asked what we ate and I said Mcdonalds - again true, we did sometimes eat at mcdonalds.

Well she reported that I said we only ever ate at mcdonalds and I got in big trouble for telling people that. Even though I never once said that all we ate was mcdonalds. What I said was "we eat at mcdonalds."

I'm an Aspie. Aspies can lie.

There, I've just proved it. 'Cause if they can't lie, then I just lied, which means they can.

Interesting topic. I know when I play table games with others and bfore I became as aloof as I am now I did not have a poker face. My boyfriend now husband ribbed me constantly about it and I would laugh, but not being able to wear the correct social mask is no fun. What's even worse is to have the wrong emotion produced somehow by the nervous system and it confuses the others around you no matter how well you try to explain it. Arghhhh

I am in my mid fifties and am self dx. I had to learn to lie. I still feel creepy when I do, and I am not at all good at it.

This caused a religious problem for me. In Sunday school I was told - along with everyone else, but I was listening - that I was a liar and a cheat and would rot in hell. These same people were teaching me by way of example just how important it was for me to learn to lie.

Yeh, we mostly can. An entee emulation for a lot of us. One I would gladly shed.

it just is. even wen im tellin the truth my father deems it BS cause hes a dick

"I'm a Liar who hates Liars"

Try doing the math on that one and make it true. You can't, but it IS a true statement.

It seems strange to me that someone would be incapable of it, but I've talked to one person who said that he couldn't lie. I've also seen the concept in the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.


Personally, I wish that I wasn't so utterly convinced that "to lie is immoral and you'll go to hell for doing it" because of the church my parents went to, so I told the truth in many instances when I should have lied, with bad effects.

I still have the problem of being overly truthful and giving more details to questions than I should, but it's purely because of not fully understanding when it's socally expected to lie, rather than the inability to do so. Even when I do lie, I'm not very good at it.

I've also had many problems where other people lied to me, expected me to understand it was a lie, and also expected me to decode their true meaning. In a lot of those instances, I took what they said at face value, which also had consequences.

This is how I generally am too. I don't like lying, I can lie, but...well actually if put on the spot I tend to tell the truth even when it would serve a greater good to lie...I sort of struggle with it and can't pull it off.

At any rate as many have mentioned this is bogus. Just like the "aspies don't have a sense of humor!" nonsense.

When I was growing up, I was definitely one of the most honest kids I knew. My mother says that whenever she needed to find out which kid did something bad, she could just ask me and I would tell her. Looking back, I didn't learn the socially accepted reasons and ways of lying, so I didn't have the motivations to do so. For instance it's generally considered bad to snitch on someone a peer; lying to a parent to avoid snitching is something most people learn from their peers, but because I was closer to my mom than my peers, I didn't learn to lie to avoid snitching until much later.

I think the strong relationship between myself and my mother, being kind of a "mama's boy" was a big part of this. I was more motivated to "fit in" with my parents than with my peers. Telling the truth not only was easier, it also gave me brownie points that I felt good about getting. My mother was very good about engaging me by rewarding positive behavior and discouraging negative behavior, which also helped me to want to be a "good boy".

I remember an experience in my preteen years that was sort of a turning point for me. My friend and I did something bad (sneaking into his sister's room to wire a bug to listen in on her), and were caught by his parents. He just denied he did anything bad at all to his parents, but it was clear to me that his parents knew we were guilty, so I contradicted him and said yes we were guilty and we were sorry. He said "Shut up" to me, right in front of his parents, and I did. Then his parents proceeded to act as if his lie that the incident never happened was true; they ignored the whole incident despite the fact that I had admitted the truth. For several days I was absolutely puzzled by what had happened. How could someone have lied and not only gotten away with it but actually the lie seemed to work better than the truth. I finally realized that his parents were kind of lazy, and didn't really want to hear the truth; they just wanted to keep up the pretense that nothing bad had happened so that they wouldn't have to deal with the incident.

After that, if something was shameful to me, I would lie, usually by ommission, and would expend a lot of effort to make sure I was not found out. Often out of shame or wanting to withdraw. Unlike other kids who learned to smoke cigarettes socially, I learned to smoke cigarettes by myself in my youth, and kept it hidden from almost everyone. I had huge guilt complexes about it, but I did maintain the lie that I didn't smoke.

Also I would sometimes lie and say I felt sick when there was a test at high school that I was not prepared for. Funny, I would never cut school for social reasons, only to preserve my self image as smart.

It's only now that I'm thirtysomething years old that I'm really realizing that lying for social reasons, to make someone else feel better, is accepted and useful. I'm just now starting to tell people false excuses when I decline an invitation, rather than just saying I don't want to.

One of the big areas I struggle with these days is hiding my AS life from NTs. These days a large portion of my socialization is with other Aspies, and many of them are "closeted" high functioning Aspies. They don't want their NT friends to know they are AS, so I live in constant fear of having an NT friend of my AS friend ask "so how did you meet [the AS friend]?" And having to lie to avoid the truth that we met at an AS meeting. Even if I have days to think of an excuse, I just can't bring myself to say something false, and I can't figure out a way of avoiding the question, so I really feel trapped.

Any suggestions from those who say you're good liars on how to answer "where did you meet so and so" if you don't want to say?

Last edited by asperience on 13 Aug 2008, 12:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That's the whole thing, right there. It hurts to lie, but they force you. Some people are just better at it than others.

They call us crazy, they make us crazy, then they wonder why we are crazy.

I can lie easily and often and extremely convincing.

I still stand by my statement.

When I was younger and I would lie, I'd automatically close my left eye - funny how tourette's can give you away. I'm a lot better of a liar now-a-days though.