BPDFamily.com

When I met my stbxh 15 years ago, he worked for an airline and told me he had once been a pilot but had been "grounded" due to unexplained blood clots.  He's been on blood thinners ever since I knew him so that seemed believable.  I just discovered yesterday that the whole pilot thing was a lie.  He was hired to clean planes and never was a pilot.  He kept that lie going for the whole 15 years with stories about his days as a pilot.  Blows my mind... .what other big things did he lie about I have to wonder? 

Wow! Probably Everything!

How's it feel to know the truth? I'm sure a bit shocking. 15 years is a long time to believe something like that. Its gonna take time to swallow. ... .but I think you just received a Pearl !

Be safe and take care of You.

Johnny

Honey, I've learned so many lies over the past few years.

They are pathological. Even "I love you" is a lie.

 I'm glad you found out the truth.

PW

I think the worst part is that I am NOT the kind of person who would be impressed by something like that.  I honestly don't care what a person does for a living, rather, I care who they are as a person.  It's shocking to me that he so invented himself in an image he thought I wanted him to be and that he thought it was necessary to make stuff up like that.  It's shocking to me that he kept that lie going and it never came out.   I spent time with his family and it totally could have been something that came up in conversation. 

I truly feel like I got out by the skin of my teeth.  He spent the past year convincing me he was getting help and would change to be exactly what I needed.  Well, what I need is a real relationship with open communication and no lies.   

My uBPDexgf is a therapist. That is not a lie. What is a lie is that she is probably with a man (again) and has probably told him she never met a man that she was compatible with the ten years she was divorced from her exH (which isn't a lie, technically.)  What is a lie is her disavowing our relationship of the last ten years and hiding it her from all her family and friends because of her fear of being a lesbian and being Hispanic. Can't give you the why of that. So one day whomever she's with is going to be shocked, amazed, baffled by the lie she has perpetuated for all these years about our relationship and that she's been a closet lesbian her whole life.

I know you can attest that it makes the ground beneath you feel like it's roiling. And honestly, if he kept it up for 15 years, there are some other things he's keeping from you. Surely he would have gotten comfortable enough to be honest with you. That he didn't doesn't bode well, in my mind, that the pilot story is the ony one.

Yes, finding out a big lie like that can make us question everything, if we weren't already; it's hurts and it's bewildering from our point of view, and what helps is to realize why a borderline does it: because he has an unstable sense of self, lots of shame, and a low opinion of himself, so lying is mandatory because if you found out who he really is you would leave, back to the abandonment focus again.  We can jump up and down and scream 'just be yourself, let me in, really in' but that is not to be, not seen as a possibility.  Sad that, and we can leave, they're stuck with it.

There was an article on deception in the most recent issue of Psychology Today.  It's amazing what people can lie about. 

I had a somewhat similar experience. My BPDexgf lied about graduating high school. About a year after she supposedly graduated she called me up and told me that she hadn't actually graduated and that she'd been attending Lifeskills (not sure if this is true or not). I spent almost every day with this girl and considered us EXTREMELY close.

Here is the dialogue that followed:

Me: Why didn't you just tell me?

Her: I thought you would look down on me.

Me: I really wouldn't have. You should have just told me the truth.

Her: Are you serious right now? You should be ashamed of yourself for making me feel like I needed to lie.

And then there were the lies about other men. I of course caused those as well by not loving her enough.

Never received an apology or an admission of wrongdoing. It's absolute insanity. I think the most important thing is to do our best to not take it personally. Having confirmation that she lied just as much to others helped me.

Funny you should say "don't take it personally".  I can't seem to get past the idea that he actually may have thought I would think differently about him knowing the truth.  I'm absolutely NOT the kind of person who cares about the job of the person I'm with.  It's insulting. Yet at the same time, I know also that this lie (as well as the many others I'm sure I don't know about as well as the ones I do) were never about ME, but about his own coping skills. 

Knowing that these are their coping skills and that they will likely always lie about these kinds of things further proves that they will always be damaging to their partners. There will never be that complete connection with anyone else. When our final breakup was fresh, one of my worst fears was that she would find someone else and be completely genuine with them or was already genuine with someone else in the past. All of the evidence has shown me that she is simply incapable of being completely genuine. It makes me miss her much less. If I believed that she could be genuine (which I did directly after the breakup), I would likely still be clinging to hope.

I am quite prepared for the possibility that everything about her was a lie. Some things seem obvious now but ultimately I've never bothered to investigate. Whatever could be unearthed is best left alone and more important, it wouldn't change anything about the direction I've taken anyway. The only thing it would do is confuse and delay my progress. I let sleeping dogs lie.