Secrets, lying

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One trait of aspi's is honesty. I am high functioning, and I am honest about many things. However, I have this innate drive to keep things that are really hard to verify secret.

I also selectively disclose things to different people. My memory is a great help, I always know what I disclose and to who: person X knows x,y,z; person Y knows z,a,b: person A knows c,d,e, etc. X and Y share knowledge of z, person A shares nothing that I know with someone else. I also know who I can trust, so they know a lot about me, but not everything. Yep, there is always the risk of someone breaching trust, but I never really experienced that.

It gives me pleasure, controlling knowledge, people sometimes have no idea about the things I do not or selectively reveal about myself

There is guilt too, it feels a bit like lying, however I always tell myself that not telling differs quite a bit from lying ... . I noticed this pseudo-lying behavior in some other aspi's as well. I know very well when people tell stories to circumvent disclosing the truth.

How pervasive is this, or is it me only?

I sometimes lie about things that are completely irrelevant. If I can't remember details I'll make them up. I'd rather be able to pretend I recall something in detail in order to make a good story than fumble up because I can't remember certain things. I'm quite certain NT's do this all the time though.

I almost never lie to cover something up. Withholding information to get around red tape is something I've learned to tolerate but I still feel uncomfortable about it. Only because going through the world being completely upfront with every single bureaucrat I encounter would cause even more pain.

No one never lies and I'll tell someone a white lie if it means saving someones feelings over small thing, but in general I'm almost compulsive in full disclosure. I don't know why or think it's necessary but if I'm relating an anecdote I feel the need to fill in details that are not relevant to the story but still could leave an overall wrong impression. For instance if I'm talking about my stepbrother I feel compelled to mention that his father and my mother were married well into our adulthood and we were not raised together as siblings. I think it's more a dot your i's cross your t's thing. It the same thing for me in my insistence in being able to finish my sentences when interrupted no matter how inconsequential. Lying makes me feel unbalanced.

At different times I tend to either compulsively lie or be compulsively honest. My first instinct is complete honesty, even to the point of having to clarify things that others might not be concerned with, because I feel like I'm lying if the person I'm speaking with gets an incomplete image in their head.

But I do lie. I guess people see how honest I am in most cases that they don't suspect me in the others. I've gotten better at finding a middle ground, so that my behavior is more subtle; the difference is that while other folks middle ground behavior is instinctual, mine had to be learned.

I'm trying to make a point to tell less lies. But sometimes people treat me unfairly and I figure the best way to see justice done is to not tell them the truth so that they will hold me to their injust standards.

Perhaps that is wrong of me to do. But I'm not justifying it, just explaining my motives in lying when I do. Because it's hard for me to see the line between socially acceptable fibs and unnacceptable ones, I may seem to lie in inappropriate ways AND tell the truth in inappropriate ways. Fortunatley or unfortunately, it is primarily myself that sees this. The world sees me as a quirky but honest person. When I question my integrity, I never know whether I have reason to or not. All I know is that I trust other's honesty usually, but don't expect others to trust my own. And yet they do. I suppose that I'm probably far more honest than many people in some ways.

On the whole i believe it is a growth issue, the "need" to lie, the "need" to reveal...

We are only talking about relative truths in a chaotic world that we barely understand, and we barely understand our selves in this mess. So it is growth to learn to understand ourselves when and why we lie or when and why we may reveal, but not really to whom as we can never understand them though we may think we do.

So we may lie, but really why do we decide that? Or we may reveal, but why do we decide that? An aspy may desire order, a literal and stable environment, but this is not the world we travel, though we may desire to create it in various ways, in making this attempt how long do we test lying out? In how many ways will we test? How many differing permutations will convince us and of what?

At my stage of reason and insight i'm more aimed at revealing than lying, though i could see later a desire to create a perfect lie, after all we test to create and develop the personalities that we have, who is to say i would not grow or benefit someday practicing being a Scorpio when the Scorpios have power in this world and i have none?

I guess what really matters is finding one's own truths and finding people to share those things with, and so, what would lying do but save me in a moment and take that away from me in the long run?

Cor'e =)

My basic view on lying is that I find the world so difficult to understand I can't see how someone would purposefully make it more confusing.

I'm not sure if it's related or not, but I used to be really, well, really unable to open up about myself.

I'm a very, very, very bad liar.

but there's a lot of things that I don't wish to discuss with random people, and I've learned the hard way that saying "it's none of your business" is not the best way to go. so usually I just don't correct people's assumptions about me. to many people this equals lying or deceiving, but if they don't ask directly, but instead assume certain things without ever verifying them, then it's not a lie on my side, so I feel totally comfortable with it.

I have a definite pecking order of who knows what about me.

My husband knows virtually everything. My friends, including the people I know online, know different subsets of information depending on who they are. My workmates know a little less. And my family of origin probably knows least of all. (It's not that they're not nice people...it's just that they live a very different kind of life and wouldn't understand a lot of what I do with mine. Also, until fairly recently there was one family member who used any information about me as fuel for emotional abuse. That's no longer an issue, but old habits die hard.)

I try not to actually lie, but I've often withheld information simply because there are some things I don't feel able or ready to tell certain people. I don't regard that as being at all dishonest. You shouldn't have to reveal everything to everyone, especially if you know they're likely to judge you on it. Offline, I don't reveal that I'm pagan around born-again Christians, I don't let on that I have tattoos around people who think any woman with ink is a slut, and I'm circumspect about who I let know that I have a history of depression. I've revealed all these things on here before, so it's no big deal, but in some parts of my life it might be.

While I value truth, I'm not a big fan of the old 'truth hurts' cliché. There are times when someone isn't going to like you telling them the truth - for example, if you're calling them out on abuse, or pointing out that their drinking or drug habits are ruining their own and other people's lives. Fair enough. But treating your own opinion as 'the truth' because you know it will hurt someone, and especially spewing it out at them when they have no confidence or resources to obtain any kind of second opinion, is an abuser's tactic in itself; one I've often suffered on the receiving end of, and one I refuse to practice or tolerate in other people.

Language comes in layers. A statement may be objectively "true" but lead to false assumptions, because it must be interpreted by a subjective individual.

Let's say you need some help financially and I offer to give you a hundred dollars. Let us say I am an NT and ASSUME that you understand that according to social nuances and based on the context of our conversation, that I expect you to pay me back. But I never explicitly said "I want you to pay me back". An entire HALF of the communication intended by one person was completely assumed and thus completely failed. The purpose of speech is to communicate after all. So if speech fails to actually communicate, despite being truthful, it doesn't matter whether it is truthful or not.

My husband with AS is this way. If his intent is to lie then he is a very poor lier, and he doesn't attempt it often. If his intent is to answer only as much as he wants to be known, he speaks in loopholes and technically accurate and very short statements that are easily misinterpreted and allows people to draw their own conclusions.

When he knows or could reasonably predict that the person's assumption will be wrong and he has any level of obligation to accurately answer the question, then I consider it lying by omission. I consider any question from a spouse to be an obligation of full-disclosure, making it a responsibility on the questioner, too, to not be annoying with the questions.

A big problem for us is that we have an agreed upon and recognized status quo, but if it changes then there's an expectation that the person with the knowledge of the change will bring it to the attention of the other. How much money is spent, who is coming and going in the house, where we go during the day...

When my husband kisses me and says he's leaving in the morning, grabs his work supplies, and heads out the door it is understood that he's on his way to work. When I ask if he has any meetings or plans at work, it is understood that I'm asking when I can expect him to be unavailable because we've discussed this. When I have need to call him at work and am unable to get in touch with him for hours and see that he hasn't checked his work emails, I start to worry if he got in an accident or if something else happened. When he calls me hours later to say that he had decided the night before to drop off the car, run some errands, etc this morning, which is far outside his normal routine, I get angry. He had this information, he could reasonably believe I would worry if he wasn't at work, and he should have volunteered it when he was leaving. His standard answer is that it didn't come up. It is frustrating when he didn't think of it, but I consider it lying by omission if he did and decided not to share it at the time, for whatever reason. We have conversations on tons of topics and varying levels of importance that boil down to the same theme.

I sometimes feel like I'm playing a game of 21 questions just to get essential information. It makes trying to communicate frustrating and at times I decide whether or not to pursue a conversation just based on the emotional energy it will take to do so with patience and love compared to how much emotional energy I have at the time. From his side of things, he completely doesn't see my problem because he wouldn't be distressed if the same course of events happened to him and it is like everyone and everything is categorized into little boxes and file cabinets in his brain and if he's got one open, he isn't consulting the others. We haven't found a balance on how to keep the conversations open but not overwhelming for both of us yet as we tend to go from too much to too little still.

Lying much like eye contact gets easier the more you practice.

^ Hmmm, so that's why lawyers are still Practicing Law

Truth is, that I inevitably result to premature disclosure.

Yep, that guy that you once asked :what time is it"

and the next thing you knew, you were late.

Well that was probably me. (sorry)

Next time, Best thing to do is

ask me what time it is again

I might get the hint lol

One thing is for dam sure, I will give you the correct time - whether I want to or not!

I was told at a very young age that lies are very hard to remember

and if you can remember them, then they remember you.

I found this to be very true, so I try to live by it.

BTW, They haven't put me on a cross yet.