The television show, “Lie to Me,” I suspect helped popularize the science of reading facial expressions and body language to ascertain if someone is lying or telling the truth. As someone who works in the field of human psychology, I can attest to have read a lot of literature on the science of how to tell if someone is lying. And the result? Well, as far as lying goes, the results are inconclusive. The information on reading someone’s nonverbal cues, is primarily consistent in determining someone’s attitude and feelings towards you and others. I primarily use this information for my work with Asperger clients.
However, there is one way to become an expert lie detector, and that is to become more cognizant of the lies we tell ourselves. We are emotional creatures, while our emotions primarily act as a gauge to tell us whether things are going our way or otherwise, we also can be creative. This means that we can find more than one use, for tools and abilities. So, while our emotions serve as a gauge of things going our way or not, we also tend to trick ourselves into experiencing favorably emotions so as to avoid painful truths.
So, if you are in any type of a relationship with someone, and you are concerned about if they are lying to you. The answer to your question lies in your ability to determine if you are lying to yourself. From intimate relationships to relationships with colleagues, if you are concerned about honesty in the relationship, you should ask yourself if you have excused any behavior exhibited by that person which would be inconsistent with the formal and informal terms and agreements on how you two should treat each other in the relationship. If you have answered yes to that question, the next step you should take would be to identify the frequency of the behavior along with how you enable the behavior.
Chances are that you have lowered your expectations for relationships in general, and subsequently you have lowered expectations for yourself as person. This is usually due to low self-worth issues from early life experiences. To become effective at detecting your own self-deceit, you must first identify what it is you desire. This requires you to take a full accounting and inventory of yourself, this must be done objectively and with compassion. Often, people find it a lot easier to do this with a therapist or life coach.
By being honest with yourself, you are forced to habitually reassess your habits for the better, which makes it difficult, if not highly improbable for you to be manipulated by others. The con artist uses the greed and short sightedness of his mark to his advantage. Likewise, someone who lies to you, uses your character deficits, be it an eagerness to please, a desire to fulfil a role, or any other character flaw to their advantage for the lie to be successful.
So, the next time, you believe or suspect that you are being lied to, ask yourself what you could be doing on your end to facilitate the lie. Are you on an ego trip? Do you feel that you must control the situation? Are you taking things too personally? And so on and so forth.
Ugo is a psychotherapist and life coach.
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