My dad is a compulsive liar. Some of what he lies about is silly, some not so much. After dealing with this for 30+ years I'm reaching a breaking point. It's basically death by a thousand cuts. Help me figure out how to not get so riled up about this.
This might sound petty, but it's related to an ongoing problem with my father and I'm not sure how best to address it. I'm going to start with the most immediate example and go from there.
I recently started pursuing commercial voiceover work, and after extensive work with a vocal coach, recorded a demo in a professional recording studio that specializes in VO production. My demo consists of five short "spots" reflecting different companies/industries to show range. The recording process involved me doing multiple takes of each piece of copy, with me, my coach, and the engineer deciding which take was the best (and sometimes combining multiple takes). After that, the engineer took about ten days to edit the demo, order the spots in a sequence that flowed well, and added music and sound effects. It came out beautifully, and I'm really proud of it and grateful to my coach and the engineer. I've posted the demo on all of my social media channels, as my coach suggested.
My dad lives across the country, and he, his longtime girlfriend, and her two sons and their respective spouses just did a Zoom birthday party for his girlfriend. (For simplicity's sake, I will refer to her as my stepmother, as that is how I think of her, and her sons as my stepbrothers.) My older stepbrother said that he really liked my voiceover demo and was impressed by my ability to "move seamlessly from one voice to the next without stopping" and my dad passed this info on to me.
That's obviously not how the process worked - the demo is not one long take of me doing every spot back-to-back, it's comprised of five separated takes of five spots (maybe more if they spliced multiple takes together for one spot). The professionalism of the final product has just as much to do with the skill of the engineer as it does my ability to read advertising copy. Obviously, people not familiar with recording VO wouldn't necessarily know this, so I told my dad to convey my thanks to my stepbrother but also explained my feelings about the significance of the engineer's role in the final product, and my dad's response, literally, was "Who cares?!"
I care. I am a musician and have spent tons of time in recording studios. I have an album coming out in the next few months in collaboration with a producer/engineer, and my longtime music partner is, addition to being a guitar player, also a recording engineer. I feel that engineers are unsung heroes in the recording industry, and it's important to me that I acknowledge that the reason why anyone thinks I sing well or deliver VO copy well is largely because I have had to good fortune to work with talented engineers. I explained that to my dad (using less words - basically I said that I feel it is disrespectful to take full credit for a professional VO demo sounding professional without acknowledging the significant contribution of the engineer - not to mention the time I spent with my vocal coach). Again, my dad said "Who cares?! Stepbrother] was impressed by you, so you should just take credit for the whole thing!
This irritated me.
I recognize this is a dumb thing to be irritated about. I could let this go. I've let many, many things like this go with my dad in the past, such as:
- Lying to people about what I do for a living in front of me, getting mad when I don't play along with the charade, and telling me "it doesn't matter" when I call him out
- Telling people I handled my mother's cancer and death so well at the age of 12 that I didn't need counseling (actually. I have C-PTSD because of this and it wasn't diagnosed until I was 33 years old so I developed a lot of maladaptive coping mechanisms to stress and interpersonal relationships that have had a significant impact on my quality of life)
- Saying that if I told anyone I have bipolar disorder (I do, diagnosed when I was 20, runs on both sides of my family) he would deny it if asked directly
- Lying to me, my stepbrothers, his family, and most of his friends about whether or not his relationship with my stepmother was or wasn't platonic - stepbrothers and I got confirmation only after they'd been together for 7 years, his family still doesn't know, and he says if I tell anyone he will disown me. (My stepmother is cool so I don't understand the need for secrecy, and honestly them playing coy about this topic has made them much more of a topic of extended family and friend gossip than they would be if they just owned up to it. My stepbrothers and I are both confused about this.)
- Lying to people that I had a 4.0 GPA in college (I didn't, my bipolar symptoms were coming to a head and my academic performance was erratic, A's and B's in some subjects and mostly C's the rest of the time, one D, and outright failed three classes my freshman year which resulted in my being put on academic probation. I managed to graduate on time in spite of all of this because I sought treatment for my mental illness (my dad did not support me) and I'm proud of that, but if I tell anyone and it gets back to him, he will deny it).
- Lying to everyone that the reason why I was put on academic probation had to do with my PCOS diagnosis and not mental illness. I'd been diagnosed with PCOS years before and this excuse made no sense because no one gets thrown out of school for a semester because of PCOS.
- Making sure that everyone knew that the reason why I'm fat is because I have PCOS, which included graphic descriptions of some of the more embarrassing side effects of PCOS (this isn't a lie so much as TMI to ensure that everyone knew that I was fat because of a disease and not because he had somehow failed to parent me properly - he believed and still believes that my weight reflects poorly on him)
- Lying to people that in my first job out of college I was on the hiring committee for my boss (no, my boss hired me, also this is ludicrous, why would a 22 year old art student who was a temp be involved in the hiring process for a director of finance?)
- Lying (along with his older sister and brother, and their kids) that their younger sister passed away in January not due to COVID-19 but due to a heart attack, despite the medical examiner declaring her cause of death to be "cardio-respiratory failure due to untreated COVID-19" like it bloody SAYS SO on the ME's report but the three of them have decided lying is the way to go and when I asked my dad why there is a giant family conspiracy to conceal the cause of death my dad said "Who cares, it doesn't matter." My aunt who passed lived in India where there has been a recent surge of COVID cases. I think it does matter.
- Lying that my boyfriend went to a fancier college than he actually did. (I went to a Fancy Pants Name Brand SLAC in a Very Liberal Part of the Northeast and it has done NOTHING for me in terms of my career/networking/whatever; my boyfriend went to Mid-Tier State School in Vaguely Backwater City in Vaguely Redneck State and up until COVID he had a spectacular career, outearned me nearly threefold, and actually got a better, more well-rounded education than I did in college because he was motivated to get his ass out of Vaguely Redneck State whereas I slogged through college just trying to graduate on time without falling into a major depressive hole because the thought of being in college for more than four years filled me with existential dread and anxiety
Basically, my dad lies about anything, from the superficial to the rather quite serious. He's a compulsive liar. If there is an opportunity to lie, he will take it. I suspect he takes credit for other people's work at work. He claims that my late mother's writing skills were so incoherent that he had to basically write all of her law school papers for her while she dictated her thoughts to him and so he feels he should get to say he has a law degree and also that he was smarter than her (Morgan Freeman's voice: he wasn't). My godmother (who went to law school with my mom) has confirmed that this is a BIG FAT LIE and the only trouble my mother ever ran into was spelling issues due to undiagnosed dyslexia. She ended up with an immensely successful career and was a partner at a massive, prestigious law firm before her cancer diagnosis; her paralegals proofread anything she wrote to ensure it was spelled correctly (this was pre-spell check)
My dad lies CONSTANTLY and if the lie is self-glorifying, he will lean into the lie further. Worst of all, he wants me to lie about myself too, and when I'm not around, lies on my behalf, which leads to embarrassing situations when I talk to someone who has been told a lie about me and I am unaware of said lie until that moment and then have to set the record straight or somehow change the topic.
I am fucking sick of this. The VO demo thing is a stupid thing to be this angry about. I get it. But at the same time, it is a small example of a larger pattern of my dad being a lying liar who lies, and after 30+ years of this I cannot take it anymore.
My dad is the kind of person who takes boundary-setting or any critical feedback of his behavior as a personal attack akin to a physical assault, so confronting him about this is useless and just leads to High Drama. I don't want to go no-contact; I don't think this stuff merits that drastic a response, and I would miss my stepfamily tremendously if I did that. He is also my only living parent, and I would like to try to have some sort of relationship with him, though I am disappointed that the relationship we have isn't based in any sense of authenticity. His lies about me in particular make me feel like he's not actually proud of my actual achievements and instead they need embellishment in order to be truly worth being proud of. Worst of all, he believes his own lies. When caught in a lie, he will say it doesn't matter, or get very defensive, or very angry.
How can I reframe this situation so that when I see/hear/experience him lying (outright or by ommission) about me or about things that are important to me or about things in general I don't get this riled up? This is super stressful for me and I know I can't change him so I need to adjust my own attitude. There's something so depressing about just declaring "oh, my dad is a compulsive liar, whatevs", though. My boyfriend and my godsister both believe that my dad is somewhere on the narcissistic personality spectrum but I'm not sure, and obviously we can't know without some sort of psychological assessment, which won't happen because he doesn't believe in therapy. This is not old age-related behavior or a sudden change that should be investigated by a doctor; he has been compulsively lying for over 30 years (see example from my mom in law school).
Any thoughts welcome. And yes, to reiterate yet again, I get that being this angry about the VO demo is dumb - that was just the most recent example of a frustrating pattern, so I would appreciate not being scolded for being angry about something dumb; I want to know how to not get so angry in these situations in general when my dad is not going to change.
I should perhaps add that when I was a child my father was emotionally abusive towards me and my mother, and this continued after her death. He used to break household objects and punch walls. He never hit me or my mom, but when he was angry this is how it would manifest. When asked why he broke thing] his response was "because I needed to get your attention". He doesn't do this anymore (things vastly improved when I moved 3000 miles away and also my stepmother does not put up with this shit) but it is perhaps pertinent in understanding why he gets under my skin; I do not feel emotionally safe around him. |
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