Speaker 1: Hi, guys, it's Andrea with a bonus episode this season
Speaker 1: on Betrayal, We're telling the story of Caroline Brega. After
Speaker 1: two decades of marriage, she discovered that her entire life
Speaker 1: was a mirage. Her husband, Joel, an honorable cop, was
Speaker 1: anything but For years, he'd been spending his time on
Speaker 1: the clock having sex in his police car. On top
Speaker 1: of that, he'd had dozens of affairs for Caroline. This
Speaker 1: betrayal was not just about what Joel did, It was
Speaker 1: about the lengths he went to to cover it all up.
Speaker 2: Our marriage has just been lie after lie after.
Speaker 1: Lie, day after day. Joel deceived her. He lied about
Speaker 1: where he was, who he was with, and what he
Speaker 1: was really up to all those long nights on duty,
Speaker 1: And even during his investigation by the Colorado Springs Police Department,
Speaker 1: when he signed a document guaranteeing honesty, he continued to
Speaker 1: hide the truth.
Speaker 3: To me, this is the.
Speaker 4: Most disturbing piece of the entire case. The fact that
Speaker 4: you like the fact that you're willing to put this
Speaker 4: on a third person is absolutely horrific and constitutes a
Speaker 4: violation of your owth in office.
Speaker 1: While reporting on Caroline's story, our team has been fascinated
Speaker 1: by the idea of liars, people who refuse to be
Speaker 1: honest even when their back is up against the wall.
Speaker 1: We wanted to understand why people lie and how someone
Speaker 1: like Joel could have kept lying for so long. So
Speaker 1: we track down two of the world's leading experts in deception.
Speaker 2: Drew Curtis and my name's Chris Hart.
Speaker 1: They're both psychology researchers and professors. Together they wrote a
Speaker 1: book called Big Liars. What Psychological Science tells Us about
Speaker 1: Lying and How you can Avoid being duped. They've spent
Speaker 1: years studying pathological lying, so I asked them to define
Speaker 1: it for me.
Speaker 3: Most people are honest most of the time, but it's
Speaker 3: a small percentage of the population who tells excessive amounts
Speaker 3: of lies. So there's these groups of prolific or big
Speaker 3: liars who tell lots of lies, and those lies don't
Speaker 3: always put them at some disadvantage. And then there's a
Speaker 3: smaller subset of individuals who would say are pathological liars,
Speaker 3: where their lies do disadvantage them, typically in their relationships,
Speaker 3: causing them to stress and so forth.
Speaker 1: You guys say in your book Big Liars, that lying,
Speaker 1: at its core is the attempt to persuade. Can you
Speaker 1: tell us a little bit more about what you mean
Speaker 1: by that.
Speaker 2: Oftentimes our goals and ambitions are in alignment with other people,
Speaker 2: but there's always a certain degree to which that's not true,
Speaker 2: and so we're always navigating that tension between satisfying our
Speaker 2: own goals and trying to match someone else's goals. But
Speaker 2: I think ultimately we all find ourselves bending the truth
Speaker 2: and sometimes outright lying when we feel like that's our
Speaker 2: best option at persuading other people to essentially do what
Speaker 2: we want.
Speaker 1: People are coming to the show because in some ways
Speaker 1: they relate to either Caroline story or Ashley or Stacey's
Speaker 1: story from past seasons. In a lot of the cases,
Speaker 1: they were with someone that deceived them for their own game.
Speaker 1: What kind of resources could we give to anybody who's
Speaker 1: trying to help someone who cares about the liar? Where
Speaker 1: do you start? Where do you go to help advocate
Speaker 1: for them to get help? Is there actually a path
Speaker 1: forward for these individuals?
Speaker 3: What you're saying makes me think of two pieces to this,
Speaker 3: and one is how do we overcome deception within our
Speaker 3: relationships or betrayals that are coupled with deception. One of
Speaker 3: the challenges with exception is that it really damages trust,
Speaker 3: and so the restoration of trust is a kind of
Speaker 3: at the seat of this. But you're right, there's not
Speaker 3: a lot of help. And to make this clear, pathological
Speaker 3: lying is not currently recognized as a formal diagnostic entity
Speaker 3: in the DSM.
Speaker 1: For those unfamiliar with the term, the DSM is a
Speaker 1: manual for mental health professionals. It lays out diagnoses recognized
Speaker 1: by the medical establishment, and doctor Curtis is saying the
Speaker 1: pathological lying is not something clinicians can formally diagnose.
Speaker 3: And so that leaves a lot of people helpless, you know,
Speaker 3: who might reach out to me or Chris or experts saying, hey,
Speaker 3: can you help me?
Speaker 1: Why do you think that this isn't a formal diagnosis
Speaker 1: in the DSM.
Speaker 3: It's surprising to me because some of the most prolific
Speaker 3: writers in psychiatry and psychology identified pathological lying and it
Speaker 3: comes with different names. And that's one of our hypotheses
Speaker 3: is that maybe it was too fragmented. We called it
Speaker 3: all these different things, and maybe it didn't cohesively come together.
Speaker 3: The other part of this is a lot of the
Speaker 3: research on pathological lying and the case studies were late
Speaker 3: eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, but after about nineteen fifteen,
Speaker 3: there's really not a lot of writing on it until
Speaker 3: maybe the nineteen eighties, so as the DSM was really
Speaker 3: being developed in the fifties, you know, it doesn't necessarily
Speaker 3: make its way in there, but I'm hopeful. I've been
Speaker 3: working with some colleagues psychiatrists from Yale and Colombia, and
Speaker 3: we're working actively to get it recognized.
Speaker 1: How would saying curtly this is a diagnosis help the
Speaker 1: individual or help other people? Like, why would that be important?
Speaker 3: One of the most important reasons is just a standard
Speaker 3: label by which we can communicate as professionals but also
Speaker 3: communicate with patients. You know, so you think of any
Speaker 3: kind of disorder like major depressive disorder. When we say that,
Speaker 3: all clinical professionals understand the cluster of symptoms that come
Speaker 3: with that. But then also people who receive that diagnosis,
Speaker 3: they can associate that label with the symptoms they already feel.
Speaker 3: So it gives a standard language for people to communicate.
Speaker 3: That's kind of at the very basic aspect of it.
Speaker 3: More pragmatically looking for like insurance reimbursement, so insurance is
Speaker 3: not going to reimburse treatment of something that what are
Speaker 3: you treating where you're not treating anything that actually exists
Speaker 3: or that's formally recognized. Other pragmatic concerns are We did
Speaker 3: a study looking at psychotherapists, and the majority of psychotherapists
Speaker 3: indicated they had worked with someone who they considered to
Speaker 3: be a pathological liar, but in the absence of this label,
Speaker 3: they end up giving another diagnosis. And so when you
Speaker 3: do that, you're somewhat misdiagnosing and then maybe even arguably
Speaker 3: ineffectively offering a treatment. And that's the last piece of
Speaker 3: this too, is that if you can identify a formal diagnosis,
Speaker 3: then you can set forth research to look at what
Speaker 3: is the most effect of treatment for this.
Speaker 1: Where Caroline is left today is that she's kind of
Speaker 1: living with two different realities. There was her perspective of
Speaker 1: what her life was and what her family looked like
Speaker 1: and what she thought her family looked like, and on
Speaker 1: the other track, there's the life that Joel was doing
Speaker 1: behind the scenes, and she now has to kind of
Speaker 1: integrate those two realities because she has to look back
Speaker 1: on major memories and wonder what was real, what wasn't real,
Speaker 1: And so when I look at someone like Caroline, or
Speaker 1: if I'm Caroline, I don't even know where to start
Speaker 1: on rebuilding trust or understanding the world in which I live.
Speaker 1: That's why I f this topic fascinating because he lied
Speaker 1: to her for twenty years.
Speaker 2: Our research shows that most people are really good at lying.
Speaker 2: It's a pretty easy thing for most humans to pull off.
Speaker 2: And I think we go through the world trusting everyone
Speaker 2: as being honest with us, and especially those people who
Speaker 2: are close with us. But it's important to remember that
Speaker 2: they're probably not being fully honest with us all the time,
Speaker 2: even the people who are the very closest people in
Speaker 2: our lives. If we catch someone close to us telling
Speaker 2: us a rather minor lie, it has the same effect
Speaker 2: as these bigger lies that we're talking about in this case,
Speaker 2: where we start to question, well, if they lie about this,
Speaker 2: what else are they lying about.
Speaker 3: It's a natural proclivity, I believe to go back and
Speaker 3: start investigating. And one of the pieces about the advice
Speaker 3: I'd say too is to not necessarily let that overcloud
Speaker 3: or overshadow places where you did have good experiences.
Speaker 1: But it's easier said than done.
Speaker 3: Sure, I think another part of that is really commitment
Speaker 3: to where do you want to be now and where
Speaker 3: do you want to go forward? And I imagine anyone
Speaker 3: who's been lied to for a very long time that
Speaker 3: is going back. You know it's going to impact trust
Speaker 3: of other relationships or at least you know. The analogy
Speaker 3: I use as walls. You know, when you've lowered your
Speaker 3: wall and you've been vulnerable and you've gotten crushed, the
Speaker 3: walls are going to come up, probably higher than before,
Speaker 3: and you're probably going to have a hard time letting
Speaker 3: people in because you've seen what people can do to
Speaker 3: you and you're developing these new beliefs that if I
Speaker 3: let people in, they will crush me, they will lie
Speaker 3: to me, they will take advantage of me, and those thoughts,
Speaker 3: those are hard to guard against. Right, But you are
Speaker 3: making decisions about what it is you want to do,
Speaker 3: and maybe you do want to keep the walls up.
Speaker 3: But there's a consequence of that too, and it's not
Speaker 3: letting people in who may not do that to.
Speaker 1: You, right. I mean, I imagine your brain is helping
Speaker 1: you create that story for a sense of safe because
Speaker 1: your world has just kind of been taken away from you.
Speaker 1: Or your perception of what your life was like has
Speaker 1: been taken away. As much as you want to beat
Speaker 1: yourself up, people who lie all the time are very
Speaker 1: good at it, you know.
Speaker 2: We do see that people who are really practice at
Speaker 2: lying get good at it. And one of the things
Speaker 2: we see is for people that lie prolifically, they have
Speaker 2: this diminished fear response when they're lying. So probably if
Speaker 2: any of us were lying, we'd be really nervous about
Speaker 2: being caught, you know, because for a lot of reasons,
Speaker 2: like it would destroy our reputations and cause ruptures in
Speaker 2: our relationships. But but people who lie a lot and
Speaker 2: do it every day, that fear response subsides, and so
Speaker 2: they can lie and their emotional reactions are going to
Speaker 2: be about the same as if they're telling you what
Speaker 2: they had for dinner last night. There's just not much there.
Speaker 3: And the other part you mentioned is Blaine, you know,
Speaker 3: you can beat yourself up, Like you said, what did
Speaker 3: I not see?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Hindsight's twenty two? How did I not see all these things?
Speaker 3: And maybe you see them much clearer now. You know,
Speaker 3: most of us, you know, don't want to catch those
Speaker 3: awful things. We don't want to be confronted with that
Speaker 3: even if it's true. And so I think you know
Speaker 3: that aspect too is helping someone deal with beating themselves
Speaker 3: up for not being super light detector. But there is
Speaker 3: an initial impulse to not necessarily want to know that
Speaker 3: the person's lying because what that brings about or the
Speaker 3: consequences of what they were lying about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and especially within the context of you know, romantic
Speaker 2: relationships and marriage, is if I'm going to call my
Speaker 2: spouse out for lying, does that mean we have to
Speaker 2: split up? And it gets really complicated and scary really quickly,
Speaker 2: And it's just so much easier and less frightening to
Speaker 2: just turn a blind eye to that thing that's giving
Speaker 2: rise towards suspicion.
Speaker 1: Can people who are pathological liars change? Is there a
Speaker 1: path for them to move about life in a more
Speaker 1: honest way if they want to work on it.
Speaker 3: I think people always have the opportunities to change, and
Speaker 3: change is kind of the business we're in in one
Speaker 3: of those really cognitive behavioral therapy. You know, it's aspects
Speaker 3: like modeling honesty even when it's hard, So trying to
Speaker 3: encourage people to be honest even when it's hard, Really
Speaker 3: having those tough conversations, showing that you're willing to have
Speaker 3: tough conversations with people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think a lot of it is just the
Speaker 2: intention to change. Lying is really a social strategy that
Speaker 2: people adopt and cultivate and reinforce over decades and decades.
Speaker 2: And it's just like any behavioral pattern, whether it's you know,
Speaker 2: alcohol consumption, smoking, using sarcasm, anything that you've been doing
Speaker 2: for decades. It's hard just to flip the switch and
Speaker 2: turn it off. But the key and the first step
Speaker 2: in Drew and I both hear from these people periodically,
Speaker 2: is people decide they finally want to change. They finally
Speaker 2: hit some point in their lives where they realize that
Speaker 2: their patterns of laing are causing such upheaval and turmoil
Speaker 2: that they really have a strong desire to change. I
Speaker 2: think we can all become more honest than we are
Speaker 2: right now, but we have to make that a goal,
Speaker 2: we have to make a priority. And if we just
Speaker 2: take one moment every day and think, how can I
Speaker 2: be more honest about this situation with someone who I
Speaker 2: care about that I'm interacting with, we can move that needle,
Speaker 2: and each day, as we practice that habit, we start
Speaker 2: to see some change, and the change might be gradual.
Speaker 2: But I assume if everyone made an intention to be
Speaker 2: more honest every day, if they looked at themselves a
Speaker 2: year from now, they find they've made some considerable progress.
Speaker 1: If you want to hear more of this conversation and
Speaker 1: see it in video, check out our brand new substack.
Speaker 1: Just head to Betrayal dot substack that's sub stac or
Speaker 1: just go to subsack dot com, search beyond Betrayal and
Speaker 1: hit subscribe. You can find Curtisonhart's book Big Liars on
Speaker 1: the American Psychological Association website, Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Betrayal season four. If you
Speaker 1: would like to reach out to the Betrayal team, email
Speaker 1: us at Betrayalpod at gmail dot com. That's Betrayal Pod
Speaker 1: at gmail dot com. Also, please be sure to follow
Speaker 1: us on Instagram at Betrayal Pod and me Andrea Hgunning
Speaker 1: for all Betrayal content, news and updates. One way to
Speaker 1: support the series is by subscribing to our show on
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts. Please rate and review Betrayal. Five star reviews
Speaker 1: help us know you appreciate what we do. Betrayal is
Speaker 1: a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group,
Speaker 1: in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced
Speaker 1: by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Fasin. Betrayal is hosted and
Speaker 1: produced by me Andrea Gunning, written and produced by Caitlin Golden,
Speaker 1: also produced by Carrie Hartman and Ben Fetterman. Our associate
Speaker 1: producer is Kristin Melcurie. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry
Speaker 1: and Jessica Krincheck. Story editing by Monique Leboard, audio editing
Speaker 1: and mixing by Matt Delvecchio, editing by Tanner Robbins, and
Speaker 1: special thanks to Caroline and her family. Betrayal's theme is
Speaker 1: composed by Oliver Baines. Music library provided by my Music
Speaker 1: and For more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.