Compulsive stealing and lying

Compulsive stealing and lying is explored through two linked accounts: a correspondent’s history of taking things and inventing stories, and Sugar’s memories of having stolen herself. Their connection turns a request for advice about confession and self-forgiveness into a reflection on responsibility, loneliness, and whether a person must remain defined by conduct that has changed.

The Correspondent’s Account

For many years, the correspondent stole compulsively, with the frequency and extent varying over time. During many of those years, the correspondent was taking a combination of psychotropic medications for depression, anxiety, and insomnia. Looking back, the correspondent believed the medications made it harder to resist the impulse, but did not treat them as a complete explanation: the urge and occasional theft had also occurred before medication began.

The acts were varied and arose in ordinary settings. The correspondent describes taking a pair of jeans from a friend, a book from another friend, and flower pots left on the porch of an empty house. On one occasion, money was taken from the wallet of a future mother-in-law. The correspondent recalls trying to argue internally against taking the object but ultimately failing to stop the action. The account also includes compulsive lying: exaggerated stories seemed to emerge without deliberate planning. Theft and fabrication therefore appear together as recurring behaviors, though the letter does not claim that they had identical causes.

The correspondent links the pattern, tentatively, to a complicated psychological history and an abusive childhood. The mother had repeatedly characterized the correspondent as a liar, cheat, and thief. The correspondent wonders whether the behavior partly enacted that accusation and whether taking from or deceiving others was, at some level, a way of bringing about rejection. This is offered as a possible interpretation, not a settled diagnosis. The correspondent also accepts personal responsibility and expresses intense shame about having betrayed people who were trusted.

Change, Responsibility, and Fear

By the time of the letter, the correspondent had stopped stealing and had been off medication for about six years. The impulse was said to be rare and manageable, and the correspondent was certain that taking from anyone again was not going to happen. That change did not erase the emotional consequences of the past: the correspondent feared that friends and loved ones might discover the thefts or lies and reject them, and struggled to reconcile present conduct with the remembered acts.

The central dilemma is whether accountability requires admitting each offense to the people affected. The correspondent believed those people would reject them if told, while also feeling remorse and wishing the past could be undone. Reading about self-forgiveness and returning to therapy after years away had not brought relief. The account thus separates a firm intention not to repeat the behavior from the still-unresolved question of how to live with it, and whether disclosure would repair harm or chiefly expose the correspondent to feared rejection.

Sugar’s Parallel History

Sugar answers by disclosing that she, too, had stolen things and experienced urges she could not readily explain. Her examples range from a compact of blue eye shadow taken from a great-aunt in Philadelphia and a sweater taken from a school friend to fancy-wrapped soap from strangers’ bathrooms and a small white-dog figurine. The range of these objects makes the behavior concrete without suggesting that their material value accounts for its hold on her.

By the time Sugar met a boy who had taken a camera case at her yard sale, she had not stolen for years. She says that she had kept herself from acting on the urge since age eighteen, although an intermittent desire to steal remained. The old acts still troubled her: she had not intended harm, but worried that she had caused it. The boy’s explanation for his own theft was loneliness. Sugar recalls that his candor startled her and made her recognize something of her own experience in his answer. She cannot give a definitive explanation for why she stole, but considers loneliness the most fitting account she has encountered.

Sugar extends that possibility to the correspondent without presenting it as certainty. She imagines that an emotional emptiness connected to the correspondent’s relationship with their mother may have led them to take objects and invent stories in an effort to fill it. In her reading, those actions did not resolve the underlying lack, but the correspondent has since begun to heal. Her advice is not to retrace the past through compulsory confession: she doubts the people who were stolen from need to hear a belated admission, and emphasizes that the objects no longer matter as much as the correspondent’s continued torment over them.

Forgiveness as Repeated Practice

For Sugar, self-condemnation can become part of the story a person tells about who they are. She questions whether permanent self-punishment makes someone better, and suggests that refusing forgiveness may sustain a cycle resembling the old compulsion: the person remains attached to the identity formed by the wrongdoing even while wanting to escape it. Her own difficulty in writing about stealing underscores the conflict. She had written about other actions she considered bad, but theft seemed harder to disclose because it conflicted with the person she wanted readers to perceive. She nevertheless includes it as part of her history and says she has forgiven herself.

That forgiveness did not arrive as a permanent, effortless resolution. Years after she stopped stealing, Sugar sat alone beside a river and began picking a blade of grass for each remembered object, dropping each blade into the water. As she released them, she repeated to herself that she was forgiven. The ceremony connected specific memories—the eye shadow, soaps, dog figurine, and sweater—to a physical act of letting go. She describes the result as a feeling that, through repetition, began to become believable.

Sugar also makes clear that the ritual did not prevent later struggles with the past. Forgiveness had to be renewed, again and again, until it could take hold as a credible account of the self. The ending returns to the boy and the camera case, which remained on the yard-sale table when Sugar closed the sale. She held it out and offered it to him; the account gives no further outcome. The gesture leaves the question of wrongdoing beside a small opportunity for response, while the larger advice rests on changed behavior and continued self-forgiveness rather than endless self-punishment.