compulsive lying treatment — 1 fairly sure investigation

the elevator hums in a tone that suggests it knows. compulsive lying treatment, the article said, takes time. tom, mentioned briefly, took two years. not knowing is, around here, the cheapest form of therapy. the floor numbers count up. i count down. neither of us is keeping score honestly.

writing this from the desk, tuesday, 10:38am. carla is in a training session on the third floor, which she announced via post-it left on my monitor with a small drawing of a coffee cup. the meaning of the drawing is, i’m fairly sure, “you owe me one”. i have, by my count, the rest of the morning to assemble whatever this is into something publishable before she comes back with notes.

so. compulsive lying treatment. the phrase shows up in search bars at 2am, mostly, which i happen to know because i have been one of the people typing it. the working version of an answer, drafted between floors, is below. it is not advice. it is a working version. those are different documents.

compulsive lying treatment usually combines therapy aimed at the underlying anxiety, structured honesty practice, and accountability with one trusted person. clinicians who treat the rung describe it as months, sometimes years, rather than weeks, and they treat the lying as a symptom of a deeper pattern of avoidance. it is not a quick fix. it is not a willpower exercise. it is, in most accounts, slow, repetitive, and embarrassingly mundane.

at the desk. training started at 10. carla walked past with a binder she has not opened in three sessions. i interpret this as a sign she expects to be in there a while.

compulsive lying treatment, the working version

the working version, drafted at this desk where the working liar files his rungs, goes roughly like this. compulsive lying — the rung directly below pathological — is the rung where lying happens as a reflex under pressure, faster than the truth can assemble itself. the treatment is, broadly, slowing the reflex down.

that’s it. that’s the headline. the rest of it, in what i have read at the kind of websites that explain things in small numbered paragraphs, is footnotes. therapy aimed at the anxiety underneath. structured exercises in saying the small honest answer first, even when it costs something. one person — usually a partner or a friend, sometimes the therapist — who is allowed, by prior agreement, to call the lie when they hear it without anybody losing face.

the time frame i kept seeing was twelve to twenty-four months, with relapses considered normal rather than catastrophic. that’s the line that struck me. relapses considered normal. not because the rung is harmless, but because the reflex is older than most people’s strategies for managing it, and reflexes do not unspool in a calendar quarter.

i am not, for the record, currently in this treatment. i have, however, met the rung. i have a working acquaintance with the reflex. and i have, at least once a month, considered whether the small lies that lubricate my friday are creeping toward the slightly-larger lies that would put me on a different floor entirely. the answer, so far, is no. but i check.

the elevator where the question hit me

this question — what does treatment actually look like, in a building, on a tuesday — landed, for me, in the elevator. specifically the elevator at this office, the one that hums in a tone i have come to associate with a small, mechanical disapproval.

i was riding from the lobby to the fifth, alone, at 9:14am, with a coffee in one hand and a phone in the other displaying a search result i had not, at the time, finished reading. the phrase on the screen was the one in the headline of this post. i thought, as the doors closed: there is a treatment. people pay for it. people go to it. people, presumably, get better. and then i thought, while the floor numbers ticked up: i would not, currently, be one of those people. not because i’m above it. because the treatment requires honesty about the inputs, and i have been, for several quarters, careful not to assemble the inputs.

that is, in itself, a small lie of omission. a self-administered one. the elevator did not comment. the elevator does not need to. the hum carried.

by the time i got to my desk, the question had narrowed. the question was no longer “what is the treatment”. the question was: what would i, specifically, have to do, on a tuesday, to begin one. the answer is in the next section. you are not going to like it. i did not.

tom in therapy vs me in the elevator

i should mention, at this point, that tom — a man i went to university with, who now lives in a house with seats that adjust in fourteen ways — has, in his own quiet way, been in therapy for approximately two years. i know this because his wife mentioned it, in passing, at a wedding i did not attend, and a third party told me at a different wedding i also did not attend. the information arrived secondhand and i have not, in fairness, asked tom directly.

tom’s therapy is not, as far as anyone has told me, for compulsive lying. tom is, by every account, a punishingly honest man. his therapy is for what i suspect is a mild, well-managed midlife reckoning of the sort that men with a pension and two children sometimes book. i mention him only because the contrast is instructive. tom does the appointment. tom shows up. tom puts in the twenty-four months.

i, by contrast, have been in an elevator considering the question for, by my watch, eleven seconds.

that is the gap. tom has a calendar, a therapist, and a wife who reminds him of the calendar. i have a phone, a search bar, and the rest of the morning before carla comes back. tom’s reflex, when a hard question lands, is to schedule a sixty-minute conversation with a professional. my reflex, when a hard question lands, is to write a 1300-word post about it from this desk and call the writing itself a kind of fieldwork. those are different reflexes. one of them is treatment. one of them is, possibly, content.

i’m not, in this paragraph, saying tom is winning. tom is, in his own way, working through whatever tom is working through. i’m saying the difference between the rungs, on a tuesday morning, is whether the question gets answered in a room with another person, or in an elevator, alone, between floors. that is, i suspect, most of the difference.

why ignorance, in this case, qualifies as treatment

here is where i would like to go on the record with a hot take that i have, over several quarters, become quietly fond of. ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy. it is not an answer i would defend in front of a clinician. it is, however, an answer i defend, daily, against the leaning pile of unopened mail by my apartment door, the voicemail that has been full since approximately august, and the drawer of certified letters i have stopped counting.

the case for ignorance, on the rung-chart, is this. the lies of omission a working liar tells himself — “i’ll get to it next week”, “the voicemail is probably scams”, “the certified letters are mostly the same letter” — are, technically, on the chart. but they are also, for most weeks, the only available alternative to a forty-minute phone call with the man who calls, which i am not, on a tuesday, equipped to take.

so ignorance becomes a kind of household management. it is not treatment in the clinical sense. but it is, in the personal-economy sense, a way of keeping the household running while the inputs are not being assembled. it is, as the hot take suggests, therapy in the loosest sense. the sense where therapy means “the cheapest available method of not blowing the whole thing up before lunch”.

i recognise this is a defence with a half-life. it works for a quarter, possibly two. it does not work at twenty-four months. tom, with his appointments, has the long form. i have the short form. they are different products. mine is, however, free. or rather: it is paid for in installments i do not, currently, look at.

when treatment is just routine in better packaging

here is a thing the article i half-read on the elevator did not say but i suspect is true: most actual treatment, for compulsive lying or for anything else on this rung-chart, is just routine in better packaging.

routine, in a clinical setting, is called structure. you go to the appointment. you do the exercise. you check in with the accountability person. you do it again. and again. for two years. the magic, if there is any, is in the tedium. the lying reflex, like every reflex, weakens when the alternative is rehearsed often enough to become a competing reflex. that is, as best i understand it, the whole game.

which is, frankly, a generous frame for what is, on most weeks, a very boring program. nobody sells you on therapy by saying “it is mostly tedious and the breakthroughs are rare and small”. but that is, by every secondhand account, what it is. the third yoga mat, currently still under the couch from 2023, is, in its way, also a treatment routine i did not stick to. the parallel is not flattering. but it is, i’m fairly sure, instructive.

my own structure, drafted at this desk, is: write the post. let the post be the rehearsal. let the rehearsal be the treatment, partially. that is not, on any clinical reading, treatment. it is, at best, a journal with delusions. but it is what i can fund this quarter. for cinematic context — the public reference most people reach for here is the 2019 mike birbiglia film about the small daily reflex of telling small lies, which is the rung, in dramatized form, that compulsive lying treatment is aimed at. the film does not, you’ll notice, show the treatment. the film shows the rung. the treatment is somebody else’s movie.

verdict, my treatment is the avoidance, refined

so here is the verdict, drafted with one eye on the clock and the other on the door. the actual treatment for compulsive lying — the one with the appointments and the structured honesty and the trusted person — is, i’m fairly sure, the right answer for anyone whose lying has stopped paying. mine, on a strict audit, is still paying. it pays, mostly, in time. time is, on a tuesday, the only currency i still have a healthy reserve of, and i have, in an earlier piece on the heavier rung above this one, made the case that protecting that reserve is not, by itself, a moral failure.

my own treatment, then, is the avoidance, refined. the pile stays. the voicemail stays full. the certified letters get filed in the drawer, which is a kind of filing system, technically. and the elevator, every morning, does the small mechanical disapproval, which i interpret as a daily check-in i did not have to schedule.

that is not the program. it is, however, what i can fund this quarter. when the rate of return on avoidance drops — and i’ll know, because the man who calls will get through, or the certified letter count will tick into a number that does not fit in the drawer — i will, at that point, consider the program. probably. honestly i’m not sure. but the working answer, on this tuesday, is: not yet.

training session let out late. carla came back with the binder still closed and a small pastry. i interpret this as either a productive morning for her or a non-productive morning for the binder. impossible to say.

the elevator, between paragraphs four and five, did the hum twice. nobody else got on. that is, on a tuesday, the closest thing to privacy this building affords.

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