Be it for a paranoid delusional condition or someone simply wanting to start drama, the second you reinforce a lie, you have just subjected yourself to a trap.
The only way out of that trap is then to tell the truth.
Pretty simple concept right?
What happens when someone makes a claim, and that claim turns out to be false?
You can then identify that person’s claim as a lie.
Now, what happens if you reinforce that lie?
Instead of having healthy boundaries or taking any corrective actions on your part or on behalf of your organization, church or community – you simply do nothing with that person’s lie.
Knowingly!
You’re now stuck in a trap.
In order to undo that lie, you now have a choice: Either you tell the truth or you add another lie on top of it.
Take the case of the pastor who enables a lie from a ‘damsel in distress’. Once she has lied once, the smartest thing to do is to take corrective action and set some type of boundaries for that individual.
So what happens when the pastor simply buries his head in the sand and does nothing in regards to this person?
The next time she comes back to him, she’s now labelled herself an ‘advocate’. However, the pastor didn’t do anything the first time she lied.
Now, he’s got to bury his head in the sand even deeper and tolerate the liar.
The pastor has given the individual a learned behavior that it’s ok to lie.
The liars lie is now tolerated.
The effect of being able to discern the truth is now starting to wear off on the pastor.
Now the person comes to the pastor again bolstering that the sky is falling.
At some point here, the pastor has been told over and over and over again that the individual is lying, the pastor has seen screenshots of the person lying in chats and texts, and the pastor’s staff has even seen the individual lying to police.
But, the pastor has now established a pattern.
Knowingly or inadvertently, the pastor has now established that he will blindly and purposefully reinforce the person’s lie.
What happens if this behavioral pattern continues for months and months then those months turn into years and years?
The person who lied isn’t necessarily the one responsible although that is a problem.
It’s the one who enables the lie who now becomes responsible.
The person who has enabled the lie has now reinforced the person’s capacity to lie some more – and the cycle continues & continues & continues.
So what does the pastor do now?
At this point he’s now in a trap of his own doing.
The only way out is to tell the truth.
However, telling the truth now presents a really big problem.
It’s the same problematic cycle that plagues any organization, non-profit, or church.
The second you decide to stop enabling the liar, you’ve now exposed that person’s integrity for all their prior claims. And it becomes harder and harder and harder to know how to react and have those boundaries or exercise any type of corrective action.
That moment that the lies become too much to handle, what does one do?
It’s a bit like feeding the neighborhood cat over and over and over again only to find that the neighborhood cat has fleas & has now infected your dog, your kids bedding, the house’s carpet, your own cat, and now the fleas are all over your own house.
Once Pastor Rick finds out that he has surrounded himself with people willing to liie to him, what is he going to do?
Here’s Katy Reames (a member of Pathway’s safety squad lying to police)
Here’s Adrianne lying to our local Burleson Police Department
Here’s Cleburne Administrative Lieutenant Shane NinjaCop Wickson Pathway Church’s Safety Squad leader appointed by Rick Owens lying to police
How many other times has this happened?
How many years has Shane NinjaCop Wickson been the head of Pathway’s Safety Squad?
So how many other times has Shane NinjaCop Wickson been put in charge of covering up for someone else’s lie?
Why is Pathway’s Pastor Rick Owens blessing certain people’s actions which are a blatant lie?
What other acts is Pathway Church willing to hide?
Why is there a pattern of dismissing blatant things that happen and replacing them with one person after another person who enables a lie?
How many years has the Reames family been manipulating reality into lies to cover for other members of the church?
Since Pastor Rick decided to appoint exactly and specifically whomever he wants to Pathway’s Safety Squad, why did he choose such specific people?
How many more times is this pattern going to happen?
It’s a bit too late to say, No I didn’t do it
There’s too much evidence that is literally time & date stamped showing that repeating and covering up others lies has already been done.
It’s too late for the church to say, No that’s not what happened. Here let us think up another lie to cover the first one. Quick, get the squad together and let’s get one of them to lie again.
It’s too late for that to happen. Rick has already lied. Shane (Pathway Church’s Head of “security”) has already lied. Katy has already lied.
Those are not backwards fillable lies that anyone can deny. Those are real facts, with real people recording reality, police records, dispatch calls, and more.
It’s not possible for Pathway Church to go backwards. Well, it is possible for them to add another lie to cover another lie to cover for a liar to cover for another liar.
But it’s not possible for them to go backwards and say, “Nope. We didn’t validate Ms. Conaway’s violation of the Judge’s Court Served Restraining Order.”
Nor is it possible for Pathway to say, “No. We would never knowingly & blatantly carefully and selectively choose to have known liars on our Safety Team. That would never happen.” It’s too late for that type of response.
It’s already done.
The fleas have already infected the house.