You don’t stop the lie. You stop the enabling.
Reinforcing a pattern of lies is like a two way street.
You don’t have a problem on a one way street where someone tells a lie.
Your goal is to stop the reinforcement of the lie.
You have to be the more mature individual in the relationship and say, “I will not reinforce or shore up your claim. It is a lie. There is a pattern of lies. Through various avenues those lies have been recorded, documented, videod, screenshotted, verified to be lies, and I will not enable that type of behavior. I will not give you any type of dopamine releasing satisfaction of enabling that lie. Feel free to lie, but you are not allowed to do that to me.”
You see when you stop the positive reinforcement of the lie, then that puts the other person in the position of really finding out if they are going to continue the lie or actually stop the behavior in-and-of-themself.
When a pigeon is given a blue dot to peck and they receive tasty treats, the bird will continually peck the blue dot to receive that reward over and over and over again.
Can you stop the bird from pecking the blue dot? The ‘bird’ in this scenario being a victimhood claimant who repetitiously claims a lie which is not true.
The bird yelling The sky is falling the sky is falling is NOT your concern.
Your concern should be releasing those tasty treats of enabling to the person. You control you, remember?
Watch the cause / effect relationship here:
What happens when you stop releasing those tasty treats to the bird each time they peck the blue button?
You’re not stopping the bird from the blue-button-pecking-behavior. You’re stopping the ENABLING of the reward for the inappropriate behavior.
When you stop feeding the bad behavior, then the bird/person has to come to a choice:
Do I keep pecking this same blue button to find some tasty rewards?
Does the bird/person then go on to find another ‘blue button’ somewhere so that they can peck on that to see if tasty rewards are the effect?
Does the person simply realize that ‘pecking a blue button’ (or the bad behavior) will no longer result in receiving the ‘tasty treats’ (the enabling of the victim hood status).
Those three are all scenarios that are dependent on the “other” person.
Whatever they should choose to do is their choice.
They can go on to find another avenue to claim and holler that the sky is falling the sky is falling- until the person finds someone else who will listen to them.
They can simply stop the undesired and inappropriate behavior of claiming things that are not true.
But those choice will only come when you stop enticing, enabling, and reinforcing the wrong behavior.
Since people love to play the victim role, it’s not up to them to stop. It becomes a habitual addiction that they sometimes can NOT keep within their own control. Put bluntly – they can not STOP themselves.
It is up to you to stop ENABLING.
You tell the other person that you will not be the one who enables a false claim. You will not be the person who calls the police, lies to the police, then collects other ‘birds’ to reinforce the bad behavior in a whining protest when the “tasty treats” don’t appear. You will not be part of a church where the pastor has surrounded himself with those willing to ‘peck blue lights’ until they find a satsifactory reward for themselves and for the church. You will not participate in any spreading of lies to find others by saying, “Hey everyone: The trick is to find a blue light and peck on it until you get a pleasureable reward. Everyone, leave now – go quickly – find all the blue lights you can and just keep pecking away until magic rewards show up.”
That’s not good. It’s not smart. It doesn’t work. And, lest we forget, making false claims is not only illegal, but highly damaging to real victims, and taking away from the integrtiy of the person and any organizations, churches, non-profits, and community causes which blindly enable.
When you validate before you escalate (healthy boundaries) you then protect the individual / church / organization / whomever… from several things:
They themselves / church .org whomever / will not be at risk of losing their own integrity. + the individual or group of individuals then realizes that they can not receive blind enabling (which contradicts all factual reality) by simply pushing your buttons.