Betrayal - S4: BONUS EP 1 — Pathological Liars

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

Curious about the psychology of pathological liars, Andrea talks with two leading experts. For more from Dr. Drew Curtis and Dr. Christian Hart, check out their book Big Liars: What Psychological Science Tells Us About Lying and How You Can Avoid Being Duped. If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal Team, email us at [e-mail] and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod. To access our newsletter and additional content and to connect with the Betrayal community, join our Substack at betrayal.substack.com. You can listen to new episodes of Betrayal Season 4 completely ad-free and 1 week early with an iHeart True Crime+ subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. one. I often ask myself now, did I know the true Yan at all? Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. From iHeart Podcast, before social media, before cable news, there was Alan Berg. He was the first and the original shock choc. That scratchy Reverend kind of way talking to people and telling them that you're an idiot and I'm gonna hang up on you This is live wire the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg And he pointed to the Denver phone book and said well, they're probably two million suspects

Listen on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Don't let biased algorithms, or degree screens, or exclusive professional networks, or stereotypes. Don't let anything keep you from discovering the half of the workforce who are stars. Workers skill through alternative routes rather than a bachelor's degree. It's time to tear the paper ceiling and see the stars beyond it. Find out how you can make stars part of your talent strategy at tearthepaperceiling.org brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council. Hi everybody, I'm Erica Lance from the Turning River Road. I'm excited to share that you can get access to all episodes of seasons 1, 2, and 3 of The Turning 100% ad-free,

and access all episodes of The Turning River Road one week early through the iHeart True Crime Plus subscription. To celebrate the summer season, we're offering a 30-day free trial to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel. This offer is available for a limited time, so don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today. ["True Crime Plus Theme"] Hi guys, it's Andrea with a bonus episode.

This season on Betrayal, we're telling the story of Caroline Brega. After two decades of marriage, she discovered that her entire life was a mirage. Her husband Joel, an honorable cop, was anything but. For years, he'd been spending his time on the clock having sex in his police car. On top of that, he'd had dozens of affairs. For Caroline, this betrayal was not just about what Joel did. It was about the lengths he went to to cover it all up. Our marriage has just been lie after lie after lie. Day after day, Joel deceived her. He lied about where he was, who he was with, and what he was really up to all those long nights on duty. And even during his investigation

by the Colorado Springs Police Department, when he signed a document guaranteeing honesty, he continued to hide the truth. To me, this is the most disturbing piece of the entire case. The fact that you lied, the fact that you were willing to put this on a third person is absolutely horrific and constitutes a violation of your oath in office.

While reporting on Caroline's story, our team has been fascinated by the idea of liars. People who refuse to be honest, even when their back is up against the wall. We wanted to understand why people lie, and how someone like Joel could have kept lying for so long. So we tracked down two of the world's leading experts in deception. Drew Curtis. And my name is Chris Hart. They're both psychology researchers and professors.

Together, they wrote a book called Big Liars, what psychological science tells us about lying and how you can avoid being duped. They've spent years studying pathological lying, so I asked them to define it for me. Most people are honest most of the time, but it's a small percentage of the population who tells excessive amounts of lies. So there's these groups of prolific or big liars who tell lots of lies and those lies don't always put them at some disadvantage. And then there's

a smaller subset of individuals who would say are pathological liars where their lies do disadvantage them typically in their relationships, causing them distress and so forth. You guys say in your book, Big Liars, that lying at its core is the attempt to persuade. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you mean by that? Oftentimes our goals and ambitions are in alignment with other people, but there's always a certain degree to which that's not true.

And so we're always navigating that tension between satisfying our own goals and trying to match someone else's goals. But I think ultimately we all find ourselves bending the truth and sometimes outright lying when we feel like that's our best option at persuading other people to essentially do what we want. People are coming to the show

because in some ways they relate to either Caroline's story or Ashley or Stacey's story from like past seasons. And in a lot of the cases, they were with someone that deceived them for their own gain. What kind of resources could we give to anybody who's trying to help someone who cares about the liar? Where do you start? Where do you go

to help advocate for them to get help? Is there actually a path forward for these individuals? What you're saying makes me think of two pieces to this. And one is, how do we overcome deception within our relationships or betrayals that are coupled with deception? One of the challenges with deception is that it really damages trust. And so the restoration of trust is kind of at the seed of this. But you're right, there's not a lot of help.

And to make this clear, pathological lying is not currently recognized as a formal diagnostic entity in the DSM. For those unfamiliar with the term, the DSM is a manual for mental health professionals. It lays out diagnoses recognized by the medical establishment. And Dr. Curtis is saying that pathological lying

is not something clinicians can formally diagnose. And so that leaves a lot of people helpless, you know, who might reach out to me or Chris or experts saying, hey, can you help me? Why do you think that this isn't a formal diagnosis in the DSM? It's surprising to me because some of the most prolific writers in psychiatry and psychology identified pathological lying,

and it comes with different names. And that's one of our hypotheses is that maybe it was too fragmented. We called it all these different things, and maybe it didn't cohesively come together. The other part of this is a lot of the research on pathological lying and the case studies were late 1800s, early 1900s, but after about 1915, there's really not a lot of writing on it until maybe the 1980s. So as the DSM was really being developed in the 50s, it doesn't necessarily make its way in there.

But I'm hopeful. I've been working with some colleagues, psychiatrists from Yale and Columbia, and we're working actively to get it recognized. How would saying concretely this is a diagnosis help the individual or help other people. Like, why would that be important? One of the most important reasons is just a standard label by which we can

communicate as professionals, but also communicate with patients. You know, so you think of any kind of disorder like major depressive disorder. When we say that all clinical professionals understand the cluster of symptoms that come with that, but then also people who receive that diagnosis, they can associate that label with the symptoms they already feel. So it gives a standard language for people to communicate. That's kind of at the very basic aspect of it. More pragmatically, looking for like insurance reimbursement.

So insurance is not going to reimburse treatment of something that what are you treating when you're not treating anything that actually exists or that's formally recognized. Other pragmatic concerns are we did a study looking at psychotherapists and the majority of psychotherapists indicated they had worked with someone who they consider to be a pathological liar but in the absence of this label, they end up giving another diagnosis. And so when you do that, you're somewhat misdiagnosing and then maybe even arguably ineffectively offering a treatment. And that's the last piece of this too, is that if you can identify a formal diagnosis,

then you can set forth research to look at what is the most effective treatment for this. Where Caroline is left today is that she's kind of living with two different realities. There was her perspective of what her life was and what her family looked like and what she thought her family looked like. And on the other track, there's the life that Joel was doing behind the scenes. And she now has to kind of integrate those two realities because she has to look back on major memories and wonder what was real and what wasn't real. And so when I look at someone like Caroline or if I'm Caroline, I don't even know where

to start on rebuilding trust or understanding the world in which I live. That's why I find this topic fascinating because he lied to her for 20 years. Our research shows that most people are really good at lying. It's a pretty easy thing for most humans to pull off. And I think we go through the world trusting everyone is being honest with us and especially those people who are close with us. But it's important to remember that they're probably not being fully honest

with us all the time. Even the people who are the very closest people in our lives. If we catch someone close to us telling us a rather minor lie, it has the same effect as these bigger lies that we're talking about in this case where we start to question, well, if they lie about this, what else are they lying about? It's a natural proclivity, I believe, to go back and start investigating. And one of the pieces of advice I'd say too is to not necessarily let that over cloud

or overshadow places where you did have good experiences. But it's easier said than done. Sure. I think another part of that is really commitment to, where do you want to be now? And where do you want to go forward? And I imagine anyone who's been lied to for a very long time that is going back, it's going to impact trust

of other relationships, or at least the analogy I use as walls. When you've lowered your wall, and you've been vulnerable, and you've you know, the analogy I use as walls, you know, when you've lowered your wall and you've been vulnerable and you've gotten crushed, the walls are going to come up probably higher than before and you're probably going to have a hard time letting people in because you've seen what people can do to you and you're developing these new beliefs that if I let people in, they will crush me, they will lie to me, they will take advantage of me.

And those thoughts, those are hard to guard against, right? But you are making decisions about what it is you want to do. And maybe you do wanna keep the walls up, but there's a consequence to that too, and it's not letting people in who may not do that to you. Right. I mean, I imagine your brain is helping you

create that story for a sense of safety, because your world has just kind of been taken away from you, or your perception of what your life was like has been taken away. As much as you want to beat yourself up, people who lie all the time are very good at it, you know? We do see that people who are really practice at lying get good at it. And one of the things we see is for people that lie prolifically, they have this diminished fear response when they're lying. So probably if any of us were lying, we'd be really nervous about being caught, you know, because

for a lot of reasons, like it would destroy our reputations and cause ruptures in our relationships. But the people who lie a lot and do it every day, that fear response subsides. And so they can lie and their emotional reactions are going to be about the same as if they're telling you what they had for dinner last night. There's just not much there. And the other part you mentioned is blame. You can beat yourself up. Like you said, what did I not see? Hindsight's 2020. How did I not see all these things? And maybe you see them much clearer now. Most of us don't want to

catch those awful things. We don't want to be confronted with that even if it's true. So I think that aspect too is helping someone deal with beating themselves up for not being super lie detector. But there is an initial impulse to not necessarily want to know that the person's lying because what that brings about are the consequences of what they were lying about. Yeah. And especially within the context of romantic relationships and marriages, if I'm going to call my spouse out for lying, does that mean we have to split up? And it gets really complicated and scary really quickly. And

it's just so much easier and less frightening to just turn a blind eye to that thing that's giving rise to our suspicion. Can people who are pathological liars change? Is there a path for them to move about life in a more honest way if they want to work on it? I think people always have the opportunities to change and change is kind of the business we're in. And one of those really cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, it's aspects like modeling

honesty even when it's hard. So trying to encourage people modeling honesty, even when it's hard. So trying to encourage people to be honest, even when it's hard, really having those tough conversations, showing that you're willing to have tough conversations with people. Yeah, I think a lot of it is just the intention to change. Lying is really a social strategy that people adopt and cultivate and reinforce over decades and decades. And it's just like any behavioral pattern, whether it's alcohol consumption, smoking, using sarcasm, anything that you've been doing for decades,

it's hard just to flip the switch and turn it off. But the key and the first step, and Drew and I both hear from these people periodically, is people decide they finally want to change. They finally hit some point in their lives where they realize that their patterns of lying are causing such upheaval and turmoil that they really have a strong desire to change. I think we can all become more honest than we are right now, but we have to make that a goal. We have to make it a priority.

If we just take one moment every day and think, how can I be more honest about this situation with someone who I care about and I'm interacting with, we can move that needle. Each day as we practice that habit, we start to see some change. The change might be gradual, but I assume if everyone made an intention

to be more honest every day, if they looked at themselves a year from now, they'd find they've made some considerable progress. If you wanna hear more of this conversation and see it in video, check out our brand new Substack. Just head to betrall.substack, that's S-U-B-S-T-A-C-K.comcom or just go to substack.com, search Beyond Betrayal,

and hit subscribe. You can find Curtis and Hart's book Big Liars on the American Psychological Association website, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble. Thank you for listening to Betrayal Season 4. If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team, email us at betrayalpod at gmail.com. That's betrayal, P-O-D, at gmail.com. Also, please be sure to follow us on Instagram at BetrayalPod and me, Andrea H. Gunning, for all Betrayal content, news, and updates. One way to support this series is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts. Please rate and review Betrayal.

Five-star reviews help us know you appreciate what we do. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group in partnership with iHard Podcasts. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Faison. Betrayal is hosted and produced by me, Andrea Gunning. Written and produced by Kaitlyn Golden. Also produced by Carrie Hartman and Ben Fetterman. Our associate producer is Kristen Malkuri. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and Jessica Kreincheck. Story editing by Monique Laborde, audio editing and mixing

by Matt Galvecchio, editing by Tanner Robbins. And special thanks to Caroline and her family. The Trails theme is composed by Oliver Baines. Music Library provided by MyMusic. And for more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did it occur to you that he'd charmed you in any way? Yes, it did.

But he was a charming man. It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story here, because this ties together the Cold War with the new one. I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all? Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. From iHeart Podcast, before social media, before cable news, there was Alan Berg. He was the first and the original shock choc. That scratchy, irreverent kind of way, talking to people and telling them that you're an idiot and I'm gonna hang up on you.

This is Live Wire, the loud life and shocking murder of Allen Berg. And he pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, there are probably two million suspects. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everybody. I'm Erica Lance from the Turning River Road. I'm excited to share that you can get access to all episodes of seasons one, two, and three

of The Turning 100% ad-free, and access all episodes of The Turning River Road one week early through the iHeart True Crime Plus subscription. To celebrate the summer season, we're offering a 30-day free trial to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel. This offer is available for a limited time, so don't wait. Head to Apple podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today. When your car is making a strange noise, no matter what it is, you can't just pretend it's not happening.

That's an interesting sound. It's like your mental health. If you're struggling and feeling overwhelmed, it's important to do something about it. It can be as simple as talking to someone or just taking a deep calming breath to ground yourself. Because once you start to address the problem, you can go so much further. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have resources available for you at loveyourmindtoday.org.

This is an iHeart Podcast.