compulsive liar treatment — 6 things i drafted in ikea

the ikea aisle for shelving, on a saturday at 11:23am, is itself a kind of compulsive liar treatment, because every flat-pack box in there promises room for a life i do not, in any active sense, lead. the drawer at home has eleven certified letters in it. the landlord caught me by the parking sensor this morning and i told him, with full eye contact, that the move-in date was thursday. thursday is a placeholder. thursday is always thursday.

writing this from the desk, sort of. i drafted the first half at 9:47am between a procurement email and a calendar invite called “synergy alignment” that nobody i recognise sent. the second half got finished, in fits, on the notes app in the ikea aisle, which is where the post properly belongs. carla messaged from the loading dock asking if i wanted a hot dog. i said yes. she has not produced the hot dog.

so. compulsive liar treatment. the search bar suggested it after i typed two words and gave up. the autocomplete knows me better than my dentist. the cluster’s working liar definition i return to whenever the man who calls calls again already lays out the rungs. this post is what happens when you take the heaviest rung, type “treatment” after it, and discover the result is a saturday at ikea instead of an answer.

compulsive liar treatment refers to structured help — therapy, accountability frameworks, cognitive work — used to interrupt the habit of small, repeated, automatic untruths. in practice it requires a person who books appointments, opens certified letters, and turns up on a thursday that is, for once, an actual thursday. the literature points at CBT. the kitchen drawer points elsewhere.

TREATMENT. IMPLIES. A. GOAL. I. DO. NOT. HAVE.

that goes on the inside of a microwave door, if microwaves still served as bulletin boards in this apartment. the seventh is, technically, on the kitchen counter, but its door has not closed properly since february and the magnet keeps slipping off.

compulsive liar treatment, the version i drafted in ikea

the version i drafted, leaning against a billy bookcase in oak veneer, goes like this. compulsive liar treatment is three things in a trench coat. cognitive behavioural therapy, applied to the moment between a question and the small invented answer. motivational interviewing, applied to whether the person lying actually wants to stop. and group accountability, applied to the part of the brain that has, by friday, gotten very good at telling itself it is fine.

i copied that paragraph, more or less, from the inside of my own head while a woman with two children wrestled a flat-pack PAX wardrobe into a yellow trolley. the wardrobe was 2.36m tall. her ceiling, she muttered, was 2.40m. she was lying to herself by four centimetres. that would be the strategic rung — the rung most of us are on most days.

the heaviest version — the one the cluster handles in the line i refuse to cross on the word pathological liar — is not what we are talking about here. compulsive is the small, repeated, automatic version. compulsive is what i did to the landlord at 11:08am when i said thursday. there is no move. there is no thursday.

the certified letter drawer i finally counted

before driving out here i counted, for the first time since february, the certified letters in the kitchen drawer. eleven. the count was twelve until i moved one to recycling because the postmark was from a utility company i no longer use. that one i opened. it was about a refund. i should have opened it in march.

the remaining eleven are a feature of the apartment by now. paper aged in a kitchen drawer, with the faint memory of a takeaway receipt. seven are red-bordered. four are bureaucratic beige. the drawer does not lie about what is in it. the drawer is, in this respect, more honest than its owner.

the cluster has a long working note on what the pathological lying meaning actually adds up to in practice, and that note did the work the dictionary refused to. but i am not asking what the word means. i am, ostensibly, asking how to stop. the drawer keeps the score on whether i have, or have not.

the landlord left another note, predictably

the landlord intercepted me, as mentioned, by the parking sensor. he is a soft-spoken man in his sixties with a clipboard he carries even when he is not, technically, on the clock. his notes — taped to the buzzer panel, twice a week — are in a tidy slanted handwriting that suggests he was, at some point, a draftsman. they say things like “please contact the office at your earliest convenience”, which is a sentence designed to sound polite while also being, on a careful reading, an alarm.

this morning he was in person. “the move-in,” he said, in the tone of a man who has already opened seven of those letters, “do we have a date.” i said thursday. he wrote thursday. he underlined thursday. he did not look up.

that is rung two of the appliance lie. the english version of the noun, drafted in plain syllables for the search bar that wants confirmation would call it a fluent and unconscious untruth, with no clear gain. i delivered “thursday” with the casualness most people use to confirm a sandwich order. the landlord’s pen did the rest.

why “treatment” implies a goal i do not have

treatment is a real thing. people, real ones, work through compulsive lying with a therapist over months, sometimes years, with measurable improvement. there is a 1997 jim carrey vehicle, liar liar, the picture where a lawyer is forced into a single day of pure honesty by his son’s birthday wish, that frames the cure as a deus ex machina with a deadline. real treatment does not work like that. real treatment is a thursday that arrives every week for forty thursdays and slowly does its job.

the trouble with treatment, for a person at my rung, is that treatment requires a goal. you sit across from a clinician and they ask “what would you like to be different in six months”. and that question, on any saturday i can think of, leaves me with a kind of hum in the chest where an answer should be. i would like, broadly, to open the drawer. i would like, also, to not have to. those are not the same goal.

the heavy use of the word, in this household, is itself a verdict and a punctuation mark. treatment, by extension, would be the appeal. i am not ready to file an appeal on a verdict i have, on most days, half-agreed with. mike the warehouse philosopher would call this being a coward with a kettle.

the plant in the corner has more discipline than me

there is a plant in the corner of my apartment. a pothos, i think, bought from a man with a van in 2022 who said only “low light, low water, low expectations” and walked off before i could ask the latin name. the plant has, since 2022, never lied. it has wilted on schedule when i did not water it. perked up on schedule when i did. it has not, at any point, told me the move-in date was thursday.

on a saturday, in an ikea aisle of glazed terracotta pots, my working line returned, unbidden: plants are silent landlords. it occupies a corner. it sets a standard. it does not enforce, but it keeps a record. that is, on the relevant rung, more than i can say for the man who told another man, this morning, the move-in date was thursday with full eye contact.

the plant, if asked about compulsive liar treatment, would have nothing useful to say. the plant has no comment on CBT. but the plant is, by sheer botanical inertia, doing the work the literature describes — present, consistent, observable, unembellished. the broader noun stupid gets used the same way liar does — as a verdict, a punctuation mark, a way out — and the cross-cluster file on why the word stupid keeps getting used to dodge harder ones makes a parallel case about evasion. the plant does not have access to evasion. the plant gets exactly one trick and, mercifully, sticks to it.

verdict, treatment is for people with appointments

slack notification: someone called sven from the property company has tried to reach me. i have not, in any active sense, opened the slack. carla never produced the hot dog. that is the second small lie of the morning, but it was, charitably, hers.

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