What does your lying mind feel like?

I can’t put myself in Trump’s mind. I’ve had narcissistic feeling (I was once Gulf Cost Florida’s greatest typographer), but have never felt an urge to lie frequently. And I’ve never been a heartless sociopath like the president. But I (somehow) believe that I can produce a valid internal experiment by imagining lying at all turns and sensing – about myself and in the world – what that must feel like.

I’ll imagine, for example, coming home and telling my wife that I was offered the position of Senior Clinical Supervisor, mentoring Counselor Interns, but that I turned it down owing to time constraints. Later, I tell her that this blog has had a million hits and in some professional enclaves is considered the go-to blog for matters of depth therapy. The Pessimistic Shrink hasn’t close to a million hits, and its reputation is pretty much anonymous, but my wife would never know this. I then tell her I am generating ideas for a book; that whenever I have a session break I fast-walk for the hour; that fellow clinicians always ask me for advice; that I floss every day; that I’m the guru of Reddit psychotherapy for my Dysthymia post; that I expect to write a psycho­therapy advice column for a journal when I retire.

I tell the first lie and I feel terrible. To tolerate the miserable pain of lying, I have to brute-force in my skull the belief that this is what would happen at work if I didn’t keep so under the radar. That’s to say, I have to enforce an ad hoc delusion. Sliding along, I tell the second then the third lie. I’m now feeling like I’m floating up in the air inside toxic, flatulent helium, not on the planet I’ve known. The ache of being a fake person is so intolerable that I go to live somewhere else, in my mind. I can’t at all be me. I justify feeling that I am totally isolated and unique and a person of superior differences. I see my wife, now, from a kind of transcendental plane, and I can’t really touch her anymore without this plane being part of it. The rest of the lies are given. I bury myself in a graveyard of the past. The new me lives in a reality that no one can see.

This is what becoming a liar would do to me. And despite my periscope of empathy, I can’t see how anyone who lives with chronic untruth, continual lie-telling, could feel anything other than this, or a variant of it. That would be someone so bent wrong from youth or infancy that all of life must be covert, manipulation and delusion to escape the fire of an unjust birth. That is a sickness so original that it has never seen anything else but senses, like a dream, there is Reality it must avoid at all costs. This is where I think psychopaths and Trump are.

How awful to live this way.