When someone let’s you down…

We’ve all been let down, right? And it can leave us feeling all range of emotions from slight annoyance to complete devastation.

It tends to leave us feeling unworthy of someone’s time, or lonely, angry, disappointed, and low self esteem.

Don’t let it!! No, the person who let you down, let themselves down much more than you.

Last weekend, I was going to go to the next county with some friends. I arranged to go some of the way by bus, and I fixed with another friend to leave my trolley in the foyer of his flats and be picked up from there by the friends I was going with. The guy with the foyer doesn’t have a phone, so I was to message him on facebook and he would meet my bus.

On the day, I felt a bit tired and out of sorts, so I cancelled with my friends and sent a message to the foyer friend. I kept checking to see if he’d opened it as I did not want him wandering around bus stops. He read it at about 5.30pm and replied ‘OK’. I was a bit puzzled, and replied that I was relieved I had not gone as I would have been stranded with my trolley. His reply was, ‘No harm done.’

‘No? I trust you less. I highly value the trust of my friends’ was my answer.

People who let you down rob themselves. They go down in your esteem, they lose your trust, they may not get a reference. It is nothing to do with you.

In the last year, ever since my sister was dying, people have let me down. While my sister was so desperately ill, I realised how much a vicar had been imposing his will on me and manipulating me. My realisation made me feel ill. With hindsight, his control of me is frightening. I had to get him out of my life. It has been so much better. He caused me anxiety, made me feel guilty, almost like an abusive marriage.

Others have let me down and they are people I need to continue to relate to. The dynamics don’t need to change that much if you both have the emotional literacy to talk about it. If that is not there, one just has be patient and hopeful that they can realise the hurt they caused. I have someone who was supposed to come to me for a holiday. She has let me down. I am related to her and love her, but need to wait for her to realise.

My biggest disappointment this year was Mike Ebsworth. He has always known my health was poor. To tell me I had set my sights on him to be my cleaner, cook, and nurse. He let himself down for thinking that’s all I wanted him for, when I had fallen in love him when he came back to see me, and me, for not being honest with himself.

Compulsive liars…

Have you ever known someone that you asked a fairly innocent question, like ”Did you ever have a beard?”, and much later you discover their reply was a lie? You wonder, why on earth would they have lied about that? What difference would telling the truth have made? And your opinion of that person slips a bit.

Mostly, telling you the truth, yes they had a beard, in fact a couple of times, wouldn’t have made a difference at all. They are just in the habit of telling lies. They might lie about where they used to live, and you don’t realise because they say it so easily, until someone else tells you where they lived and you just wonder why would they lie?

These people are compulsive liars, or pathological liars. They started to lie when they had low self esteem, and then it became a habit. They know they are telling a lie, they know that the lie may hurt you, but lying is such a habit that they tell the lies.

This is a mental illness. It needs counselling to explore when and why it started, and help to start telling the truth. People like this often have a narcissist personality. Examples are Trump, and Boris Johnson. They are players on the world stage. I would guess that Erdogan in Turkey is one, and Prince Andrew certainly showed signs of narcissism during that appalling interview. And very likely told a pack of lies. There is no c0ndition of not being able a sweat because of an overload of adrenalin.

So the pathological liar starts when self esteem is low, most usually during puberty, because that is when self esteem is most vulnerable. It might be after a trauma, or the death of a family member, particularly a parent. They start to lie because the truth doesn’t seem adequate, or maybe a sibling is doing better. Or they have idolised sibling when there is a wide age gap.

It’s difficult to deal honestly with this person. You don’t realise they are lying but something doesn’t add up. You refer to something they told you and there is no appropriate reaction. They have a mental illness that makes lying the easier option. Even when they know they will be found out. Or they don’t know you happened to see the email alert on the screen of their phone, and later tell you they didn’t get an email that day.