Why some people lie

I have been thinking a lot about lying this week. These thoughts started, when we had a part-timer staff girl Kelsey over to our house this week. I often feel like I don't get the whole truth from this girl. This is evening really made me think about honesty.

We were watching HGTV's Fixer-Upper. I started by asking, "Have you ever seen this show?" Her response was, "YEAH I LOVE IT, I WATCH IT ALL THE TIME!" She went on and on about how much she loves this show.
As we were watching, it became very clear that she knows nothing about this show. She didn't know that it took place in Waco. She didn't know who Clint was, she was so shocked that the island was a different color than the kitchen cabinets, she thought that Chip and Jojo only had 1 kid. All these indicators that she didn't know this  show at all.


I was calling her out on her lie. She then said, "I only watch it in the background."
Lying about something like being a loyal fan of Fixer-Upper, is really minor. There is actually no harm in lying about that. But if you are lying about something dumb about liking a show, it makes me question your character.

In the year I have known this girl I have gotten so many conflicting answers from her, one day she will go on and on about how she loves people, she always needs to be surrounded by people, the next she will talk about how her dream life would be living all alone on an island.
The other night, she told me that she went an entire month without interacting with anyone, She LOVES being ALONE! I pushed this, she tells me that in this month she was with her mom and sister, and of course her friends if they invited her to something, but  didn't invite anyone to anything, so she was ALL ALONE that WHOLE month. I don't think this girl understand what it means to be all alone.

In the past I have asked her about honesty, she told me that she is always honest, even if she is going to lose friends over being honest, she will do that, because it is so important to her."

When I get comments like that they stick with you. They feel ironic because every conversation I have with her that lasts more than 10 minutes, I always hear a lie or an opinion of hers that contradicts what she has told me in the past.

Does Kelsey know that she is always lying? Is that her thing? To see how many false things that, she can say to me? Or is there more going on there? Is something else making her tell me false things?

Instead of being annoyed with all the lies she tells me, the Fixer-Upper situation makes me think that so much more is going on than that she is just a liar.

She struggles to fit-in. So I think she just says whatever she thinks she needs to say to connect with me. I express that I LOVE Fixer-upper, she wants to me like me, so she tells me that she LOVES it too! Even though in reality, she has never seen an episode all the way through. I think she is always thinking about how others think about her, so she says and does whatever she think needs to be done to be liked. This in the end, backfires. People like me struggle to be around her because they hate being lied to in every conversation.

I have been thinking about how to help this girl for over a year, and I really do not know how to help her build in character and integriy. I feel like she is so lost in her identiy, in the lies that she says and how she sees herself amounst others that there is no reaching her.

I wish I understood all that was going on in her head as she speaks. I wish I knew how to help her out. I hope that someday someone helps her with this and gets past her lies.