Before you confront your addicted loved one (about their lies), WATCH THIS VIDEO!

If you're dealing with someone who has an addiction, then let's face it, you're going to be dealing with some lying. And there's a way you should go about that that's helpful and a way you can go about that that's not so helpful. Which is why in this video, I want to give you three major pitfall traps that I want you to be really careful of when you're dealing with someone who's lying and you're deciding how to respond to it. For those of you who are new here, welcome to Put the shovel down. This YouTube channel is all about helping you take your life and your family back from addiction so you can live the life that you want to live. Now, everything I'm going to say in this video can apply to pretty much any situation. This really isn't specific to addiction. It's just that if you're dealing with someone that has an addiction, you're going to be dealing with this situation probably lot more than most people. Now, I have some other videos that are all about how to tell if someone is lying, and I'll link them up at the end of this video. But this one's not so much about how to tell that someone is lying. This one is about how do you respond when you think or you feel like or maybe you even know that someone is lying to you. Now, one of those other videos where I talk about how to tell if someone's lying, I talk a lot about your gut feeling. Now, I am a believer in the gut feeling. And I do think sometimes we have that feeling and we just know something's amiss. And I definitely think you should listen to it. But there are some limitations to how much you should listen to that feeling. So before you go and call someone out based on your gut feeling, I want you to take these things in consideration. You see, the thing about the gut feeling is that, I mean, overall, I think it's usually pretty correct. It's telling you something maybe isn't right or is amiss. But in general, that feeling is really just telling you something vague and not specific. And where we can get ourselves in trouble is we can jump the gun. We can kind of know deep down that someone's acting sketchy or that someone's not telling us the whole truth. But it's very easy for us to jump to a conclusion and decide we know what that missing piece is, or we know what it is that they're hiding, or we know which thing it was that they lied about. But the thing of it is, is the gut feeling, which is a radar I do believe in. Isn't that accurate. It's kind of like it tells you something else. Let's look a little deeper into that situation. It doesn't really tell you exactly what it is. And I see family members make this mistake all the time because they get that feeling. It's not that their radar is wrong, but more that they decide you're lying about where you were, or you're lying about who you're with, or you're lying about how much money it was. And a lot of times you're going to guess wrong. And when you guess wrong, when you're calling someone out for the lie that they just told you, now you've got yourself in a trap because now you've accused them of something they didn't do. Now that's fairly warranted, given the situation, but that's for another video. Anyways. When you do that, when you accuse them and you say maybe the one wrong thing, then the next thing you know, the person that you're talking to is going to derail you and deflect and that one little thing is going to become a whole other side argument, which is then going to branch off into another argument and another argument. Which brings me to my point number two, and that is to say, if you're going to call someone out for something maybe not being completely true, then do it in a slightly more vague way. Now hang in there, because in just a second I'm going to talk to you about how to know whether or not you should call it out. But for now, I want you to know, if you're going to call someone out, then just say something more along the lines of, something's just not sitting right with me, or, I don't know, I'm having a hard time with that. Can you tell me more? Or if you have a good relationship with the person, then you can use a little humor. You have to kind of know your relationship well enough to know if that's going to fly or if that's going to start argument. I do that in sessions all the time. I'll be like, you're going to have to try harder because I'm just not even believing you. I'll say very frequently, nice try. I'm not even believing that. Now, obviously that's a really direct thing to say, but I don't say it in a way that's designed to try and start a fight. Another way you can do that is to put a little humility statement on the front, which is, I know I could be wrong, because I'm wrong a lot. But I just have a bad feeling about it. Like, I feel like maybe this story is missing a piece of information or something. Like, can you tell me some more? So you're calling it out and you're saying that, hey, I know this ain't the whole story, but you're saying in a way that's a lot less likely to start a giant fight. Now, I know that when you're dealing with someone who has an addiction problem, sometimes no matter what or how hard you try, it's going to start a fight, because they're trying to start a fight. Because starting a fight is one of the ways of deflecting when you get backed into a corner. I've got a whole video about that, and I'll link that one at the end for you just in case you want to see it. But if they do keep arguing with you about it, you don't have to, like, dig into this giant power struggle to prove that you're right and they're wrong and that you know they're lying. In fact, it's almost more effective if you just leave it vague and you just say, yeah, okay, maybe you're right. I don't know. I just have this bad feeling about it. Okay, I'll work through that. And so what you're doing is you're not really, like, leaving any room to argue about it, but you're also letting it hang out there that, yeah, I'm just not going to believe this. Now, the third thing I really want you to think about has to do with making that decision about whether or not you want to call someone out for lying. And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, amber, I want to call someone out for lying every single time I do that, because that's a terrible thing to do. Here's the deal. Everybody lies. And people lie for a multitude of different reasons. And one of the things that's going to cause you to trip up and make a mistake in how you're interacting with someone is letting your ego get in the way. Just because you know someone's not telling you the whole story doesn't necessarily mean you should call it out. The only reason that you should feel like you have to call it out every single time is really about your ego. It's about making sure that that other person doesn't know that you're gullible sometimes. In fact, a lot of times, I choose to let someone think I'M gullible. And when I do that, I'm being very strategic about it. Let me give you an example. Whether or not someone drank 7 beers or 10 beers is really irrelevant. Why in the world would you want to engage in an argument with them about how many beers they drink? When you're doing that, you're being led by your ego. And I know why you get into that. Because the person's gaslighting you and they're lying to you and you just get dug in and just want to prove that you know what you're talking about and that you know that they're lying. But like I said, it's not very helpful and it doesn't really get you anywhere. What's the difference anyway? In fact, it's just kind of like a good rule of thumb not to argue too much over a quantity of something or how many times something happened. Oh my gosh, I can't tell you how many times I see families. You know this. Well, I only did that twice. Well, you said I did it three times or whatever. And then like I said, the next thing you know, you're deflected off into this other argument. Now, there are actually some times that I do choose to call my clients out on something. One of those times is if I'm trying to dig a little further in, then I might say something like, I have a sneaky feeling about. Or occasionally I'll say, little birdie on the street told me this little piece of information. It's just kind of like a little nudge. Do you want to give me a little bit more? And a lot of times that does the trick. Now, another time when I'm a little more likely to call someone out isn't so much like one of those, like direct kind of lies, but it's more like when they're telling me this story and they're trying to convince me that someone else did this really bad thing to them or something was unfair, I might want to call that out because that's not so much of a calling out a lie. It's more of a calling out maybe like a distorted thinking or a not the whole truth kind of story. I'll say, well, didn't this happen right before that? Like, sometimes people come in and they say, my parent, my mom, my dad, my wife or whatever, she did this. She said all these mean things. I'm like, okay, but what happened right before that? And so I'll keep digging until I get the whole story out of them. And like I said, that's not so much about me trying to prove to them that I know something that they don't want me to know, but more about I really want that person to know something a little bit deeper. That's kind of one I want you to be careful with, though. But I want you to be really careful with that one. That's something I do as a therapist, and I probably wouldn't do that nearly as much in my regular life as I do in the therapy office. But most of all, what I really want you to get from this video is that you should think strategically about when and how and why you want to call someone out for lying. So before you do it, think, think in your head, why am I wanting to call this out? What purpose will it serve? Will it get me closer to my bigger, overall, more important objective? If it's not going to do that and it's just going to start an argument and you're not going to get them to admit it anyway, and you're only doing it to prove your rightness, then it's probably not worth doing. Now, I know that's a big ego hit, but it should help you at least a little bit in the background to know that, hey, you're not falling for it. You're not being duped. You know exactly what's happening. You're making a strategic choice when to call it out and when not to call it out. You know, families are always worried when I see their loved one. They always want to tell me, oh, they're a charmer and they're a scammer. And I'm like, okay, good. That's what I like. I like them. They're my favorites. Because you know what? I'll just let them think that they're charming or scamming me or that I believe everything that they're saying, when in fact, most of the time, I'm five steps ahead of that. I've already heard from their family, their friends, all that kind of stuff, so I kind of know what's up, But I'm making strategic choices on how to deal with it, which is exactly what I want you to do, because the goal of this channel is to keep you five steps ahead of addiction, and part of that is making strategic decisions and not letting your ego get in your way.