Can you trust a liar

We talked to psychologists and mental health professionals about the Michael Cohen question: When a known liar starts telling what sounds like the truth, can we believe him? The drama! The grandstanding! This show had it all. How can we trust anything he says? Paul Gosar told Michael Cohen to remember the "old adage that our moms taught us, liar, liar, pants on fire," adding "no one should ever listen to you and give you credibility," while pointing to a poster with the phrase.

On the other hand, what did Cohen have to lose? Any falsity he utters under oath is only going to hurt him more. We both attended college together until I transferred. He also said he had a great job working for the university. I recently found out that his good grades, his job and the degree he said he received were all not true. It took me a while to get him to admit it. Now he wants to see if we can still salvage this relationship.

It just bothers me that all the business trips he said he went on were all elaborate lies, and his great grade-point average is more like a barely passing one, and that he lives off his parents for money.

I guess I should have known since he was always broke. He is It's strange because I know I love him, but I don't know what to do in this situation because even now I don't know if he can tell me the truth. Dear Too Many Lies: To honestly love your boyfriend is to know your boyfriend, but he doesn't even know himself.

And he doesn't seem to want to know himself. Therefore, it's impossible to truly love him or trust his love for you. He's a liar, and liars can't be trusted. Sadly, some people are so horribly uncomfortable with what lies beneath the surface that they alter reality. They get so used to lying and shading the truth that even they begin to believe their own lies. I was upset but not surprised at his proposition; it was common knowledge in our group of friends that he was regularly unfaithful to his wife.

Shortly thereafter, he groped another woman at a party in front of a number of people. His wife defended him against our friends opprobrium, saying that she believed him that it had never happened. As a psychotherapist, I have learned that it is not unusual for people to believe someone, even when they have substantial proof that the are being lied to. Examples include parents who believe that their children are not taking drugs, even after finding a stash in the child's sock drawer; lovers who insist that their partner is faithful despite unfamiliar underpants in the laundry; and business partners who believe that financial losses are for some unexplained reason other than that their best friend is stealing from them.

Why do we continue to believe someone, even when we have rational and substantial evidence that they are lying to us? One reason is that we have trouble reconciling the fact that someone is lying with what we perceive as expressions of honesty. In his book " Telling Lies ," Dr. Ekman also found that we want to believe that someone is telling us the truth, especially when that person is emotionally or psychologically important to us. It is painful to believe that someone we care about or trust is lying to us, as is knowing that we cannot trust them.

Denial of reality, or not crediting something that we know is true in some part of our brain, is a way we unconsciously protect ourselves from this pain. In his book " Emotional Bullshit ," Dr.

The reassurance can give a frightened psyche time and space to work on possible solutions, which is harder to do when you are in a state of panic, anxiety or dread. Sometimes the comfort of believing someone is the solution to their lies, as it was with my friend whose denial allowed her to stay with her husband.

When parents find clear proof that a pre-adolescent child is drinking alcohol or doing drugs, for example, denying the evidence can be highly destructive. Of course, it is important not to make unfounded or untrue accusations, but it is equally important that a child know that you will not simply hide from painful truths.