How to Be Immune to Liars

It’s unreasonable to expect a world without lies. What matters, though, is what’s behind the lie. There are white lies, told to spare someone’s feelings, and there are lies with more sinister motivations; those meant to control, manipulate, or exploit.

You might see yourself as an independent thinker, able to make your own decisions and live your own life, but you’d be surprised to realize how often you’re being taken in by some sort of lie.

There will always be people, corporations and institutions who want something from you: your money, your labor, your vote; some even want control over your body, and they’re going to lie to achieve their goals.

Many liars are successful, but only because we make it easy for them. As intelligent, educated and experienced adults, it shouldn’t be so easy for others to fool us, but even in this era of unlimited access to information, we’re still much too gullible.

I think that our tendency to focus on external attractiveness and charm is in part responsible for our being so frequently deceived by charismatic liars. Perhaps our educational system isn’t spending enough time teaching us how to be critical thinkers, either.

Whatever the reason, our willingness to be taken in by superficial attributes makes it possible for unscrupulous individuals and institutions to steal our hard-earned money, exploit our labor, misinform us about our world, trick us into voting for them and seduce us into their beds.

If we want to be more empowered in our lives, we need to stop allowing the liars of the world to put one over on us. This means opening our eyes and ears, asking tough questions and seeing the truth, so that we can do what’s best for ourselves.

When individuals or institutions are communicating with us, we have to stop and determine whether we’re being told the truth or we’re on the receiving end of uninformed opinion, misinformation, sneaky half-truths or pure fabrication.

Here are four basic tools for seeing through the liars in your personal and professional life and making sure that it’s a lot harder for these people to fool you in the future:Be your own fact-checker. Successful liars are especially good at making statements that seem credible at first glance but which don’t hold up to scrutiny. If you want to be in charge of your life, start by closely examining what your pastors, bosses, politicians and potential lovers are telling you. Some of these might be totally on the level; others, not so much, and you have to take responsibility for figuring out who’s who.

4 Tools to Be Immune to Liars

Liar Immunity Tool #1 – Listen Closely

People who want something from you will frequently make statements that are extremely manipulative, or more opinion than truth. It’s up to you to listen closely to what’s being said and be more doubtful, rather than accepting what you’re hearing as facts. You can easily assess the accuracy of these statements by doing a bit of research.

A boss who may have no intention of promoting you can demand unreasonable amounts of work, while dangling the promise of a brighter future. It’s up to you to look for the clues that indicate the likelihood of your hard work moving you forward, or not.

Explore other people’s motivations. When someone tells you something that you suspect might not be true, or something that sounds too good to be true, you should always examine why they might be saying this. If you look into the motivations behind someone’s words, you can more easily separate the liars from those who are honest.

Liar Immunity Tool #2 – Evaluate the motivation of others

2. Advertisers often exaggerate the benefits of the products they want you to buy. They make their living saying that these things will make you happier. If you stop and think before you part with your money you can see that often, it’s the advertisers and the companies they work for who’ll benefit the most from your purchases, not you.

If your colleague at work is suddenly acting like you’re great pals after months of behaving indifferently toward you, and part of this new workplace “friendship” involves you helping them with a project that they’re finding challenging, it’s not hard to see what their real motivations are.

Liar Immunity Tool #3 – Explore your own motivations

It’s important that you think about why you’re inclined to believe someone when they’re telling you something.

Some people think that if they believe what they’re being told, they’ll feel less alone in the world and less unhappy. This type of “belonging” just lets you be deceived by unscrupulous individuals who seek to manipulate or exploit you.

Some people look to certain types of people or institutions and accept what they say, unquestioningly. For example, people will often give their trust to teachers, politicians and religious institutions, rather than basing this trust on what they’ve observed over time.

See Also

Yajna, Feeding the Eternal Fire Within

Some people are believers because they want to think that everyone is basically well-intentioned and that the world is mostly a kind, loving place. This attitude is guaranteed to make you vulnerable to deception.

Liar Immunity Tool #4 – Stop lying to yourself.

Facing the truth about yourself, others or your life can be uncomfortable or upsetting, so you might be tempted to resort to denial or wishful thinking, instead. Unfortunately, when you lie to yourself, you make it that much easier for others to lie to you.

It’s easy to tell ourselves stories about how we’re feeling and what we want. Some people spend their entire lives lying to themselves about how they really feel in their marriage or their job. The more you believe your own stories, the easier it is for others to tell such stories to you.

You need to start being more honest with yourself, and in order to do that you’ll need to slow down and tune in to yourself. When you’re rushing around, you disconnect from your real needs and feelings, and that’s when other people can take advantage of you.

To summarize about immunity to liars

It’s important to cultivate an attitude of healthy skepticism, in which you don’t just accept what you’re told at face value. When you look beneath the shiny surfaces of things, question those in positions of authority and stop mistaking charm for honesty, you’ll be much better off.

When you stop lying to yourself and colluding with those who want to deceive you, you’ll become empowered in your life. You’ll be more able to achieve your goals and a lot less likely to be thrown off track by someone who’ll tell you lies in order to promote their own agenda.

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About the Author

Marcia Sirota MD FRCP(C) is a board-certified psychiatrist, that does not ascribe to any one theoretical school. Rather, she has integrated her education and life experiences into a unique approach to the practice of psychotherapy. She considers herself a realist with a healthy measure of optimism. Sign up here for her free monthly wellness newsletter. Listen here to her latest podcast. marciasirotamd.com