If you haven’t watched the viral TikTok series yet called “Who TF Did I Marry?!?”, I would encourage you to look it up. In case you don’t already know, a woman who goes by ReesaTeesa created an hours-long series of videos telling the story of how she married and quickly divorced a man who turned out to be a pathological liar.
According to her, he lied about everything from where he went to school, his job, his family, his financial situation, and even the deaths of several family members. She talks about how deeply this betrayal has affected her and now several other former partners of this man have come forward describing very similar experiences.
I don’t know this woman but I don’t find it difficult at all to believe her story, because I have also dealt with a narcissist who told tons of lies.
Dealing with him made me feel mentally dizzy and exhausted. I would constantly question if I was in the right and go back and forth trying to decide what my next move would be. I would vent endlessly to friends, trying desperately to understand what was going on and what I should do. I eventually learned that simply explaining my feelings to him using lots of “I” statements and asking for different behaviour wasn’t going to work.
They say that “honest people don’t expect dishonesty”. If you aren’t already wise to the ways of narcissists or pathological liars, it can be very hard to believe that someone would behave this way. You might go along with the lies for a while because you wouldn’t expect someone to lie about things that give them no material benefit–they aren’t lying to scam you out of money, for example. On top of that, there has to be some level of trust in any type of relationship or it will fall apart; so if you are trying to make a relationship work, why wouldn’t you believe someone when they tell you about innocuous things, like where they went to school or how many siblings they have? (Reesa’s ex-husband lied about both)
Just like Reesa, I was left wondering, how could this happen to me? I’m a smart person, who sets healthy boundaries and has critical thinking skills–or at least that’s what I thought? It’s important to remember that narcissists/pathological liars are very good at what they do and are highly skilled at playing on your insecurities (we all have them) or qualities that they see as weaknesses (like being highly trusting), to get you under their spell. We don’t always notice red flags in the moment, as much as we’d like to think we do.
When you’ve known someone for a long time and they’re a part of your daily life, it can feel very destabilizing when you realize that everything was a lie and you really don’t know this person at all. Once I knew the truth, I couldn’t even see the narcissist in my life as a person, he was a monster. A human being doesn’t treat other people that way.
Fortunately for me, the narcissist I dealt with was not an intimate partner and was someone I could completely remove from my life. In her videos, Reesa says that she doesn’t even remember the person she was before she met her ex-husband. There is an upside though–if you have become entangled with someone like this, the person you were before probably didn’t see it coming because you couldn’t imagine that someone would be capable of treating you this way. You’ll most likely recognize the red flags from a mile away next time and run in the other direction.
If you think you’re dealing with a pathological liar or a narcissist, please get help from a therapist or trusted person.
You can read more about pathological lying here: https://www.verywellhealth.com/pathological-liars-7499222
