Blair Steward
The consultation never ends when a spin doctor raises you. Not the kind who manages political crises or corporate scandals, but the kind whose entire existence revolves around manufacturing reality one lie at a time. These are the pathological fabricators who claim NFL careers that never existed, military honors that were never earned, and business successes that were only in their minds, all easily disproven with a simple Google search, yet delivered with such conviction that the outside world often believes them.
The child living in this manufactured universe is constantly juggling two starkly different realities: the one spun by their household’s chief architect of fiction, and the actual world everyone else inhabits. This constant balancing act is not only exhausting but also disorienting. More often than not, it’s a journey of complete isolation.
In the world of spin doctors, truth is malleable. Facts bend to fit narratives. History rewrites itself to suit present needs. When you accidentally let slip to a neighbor that no, actually, your household authority figure never played professional football despite what they just claimed, you witness something unsettling. Sometimes it’s fury. How dare you contradict the carefully constructed story? The rage comes swift and disproportionate, as if you’ve committed treason against their mythology. Sometimes it’s genuine confusion, as if the line between reality and fiction has blurred so entirely that they’ve lost track of which version they’re supposed to be living.
These moments of accidental truth-telling become landmines in a child’s life. They are forced into the role of an unwilling accomplice, learning to monitor not just what they say, but also what others might reveal. Family gatherings become elaborate theater productions where everyone must stay in character, supporting the spin doctor’s latest version of events. The child is left with a moral dilemma, forced to choose between actively participating in the deception or remaining silent. At the same time, lies are told with stunning confidence to teachers, coaches, neighbors, and anyone else within earshot.
The spin doctor’s romantic relationships follow a predictable pattern. Every girlfriend, every partner, every new person who enters their orbit shares one crucial characteristic: they believe the stories. They nod along to tales of glory days and missed opportunities. They accept explanations that don’t quite add up. They marvel at the spin doctor’s supposed accomplishments, offer sympathy for their alleged injustices. To the spin doctor, this isn’t love. It’s validation. Affection becomes synonymous with acceptance of their alternate reality.
Watching this pattern repeat itself teaches the child something disturbing about how the world works. They see that charisma can triumph over truth, that confidence can overcome facts, that people often prefer an entertaining lie to a boring reality. The women who cycle through their lives all share this willingness to believe, this eagerness to accept whatever narrative is presented to them. It becomes a template for what the spin doctor considers love: unconditional acceptance of their fabrications, no questions asked.
Growing up in this environment often creates its inverse in the child. Where the spin doctor craves believers, their offspring becomes desperate for validators of truth. While the household authority collected people who bought into their fabrications, the child grows up furious that reality never had its day in court. They become bothered and no, haunted. By how rare their situation seems, how few people can relate to the specific hell of being raised by someone who never met a truth they couldn’t improve upon with fiction. Their desperate need for validators of truth becomes a constant struggle, as they struggle to explain their unique upbringing to others.
This fury at the absence of truth runs deep. It’s not just anger at being lied to. It’s rage at watching lies be rewarded, celebrated, and preferred over reality. The child watches their spin doctor receive admiration for fictional accomplishments while their truthful accounts of events are dismissed or minimized. Truth becomes not just undervalued, but actively punished when it conflicts with the preferred narrative.
The isolation compounds the problem. When you try to explain your upbringing to others, you sound paranoid or dramatic. “My parent lies about everything” seems like teenage hyperbole until you start providing specific examples. Even then, people struggle to understand the scope and consistency of the deception. They assume you’re exaggerating or that surely there must be some truth mixed in with the fiction. The idea that someone would lie about easily verifiable facts, such as playing professional sports or holding specific jobs, seems too bizarre to be believed, adding a heavy weight to the child’s struggle.
For these children, affection looks different than what they witnessed growing up. Love means someone listening to their truths and validating them. It means having their actual experiences acknowledged rather than swept aside for more compelling narratives. It means never having to wonder if the person who claims to care about them is operating from reality or some elaborately constructed fantasy. Most importantly, it means being valued for who they are rather than for their willingness to believe impossible things.
The adult children of spin doctors often find themselves almost compulsively honest, as if making up for a lifetime of being surrounded by fiction. They fact check everything, sometimes to an exhausting degree. They value authenticity in ways that can seem intense to others. They’re drawn to people who admit their flaws, acknowledge their mistakes, and live in the same reality everyone else inhabits.
Perhaps most damaging is the spin doctor’s relationship with wrongness. They don’t do it. In their universe, they are perpetually correct, perpetually the hero, perpetually misunderstood rather than mistaken. The words “I’m sorry” require an admission of fault, but fault doesn’t exist in their carefully curated reality. When confronted with evidence of their lies, they don’t apologize. They double down, create new lies to support the old ones, or shift blame to the person doing the confronting.
This leaves their children emotionally battered in ways that are difficult to explain. How do you describe growing up with someone who never acknowledges mistakes, never takes responsibility, never apologizes for the chaos their fabrications create? How do you explain the particular exhaustion that comes from being the only person in your household tethered to actual reality?
Children need their authority figures to model accountability, to show them how humans handle being wrong. Instead, they learn from the spin doctor that being bad is so catastrophic that reality itself must be altered to avoid it. This creates adults who struggle with their imperfections, who either become paralyzed by the fear of being wrong or, conversely, become obsessed with truth telling as a form of rebellion against their upbringing.
The spin doctor’s environment is inherently controlling, although it may not appear to be traditional control. Instead of rules and restrictions, there’s something more insidious: reality itself becomes negotiable. Children learn they cannot trust their own experiences because those experiences will be rewritten, reimagined, or dismissed entirely if they don’t serve the spin doctor’s narrative.
This psychological manipulation often escalates to other forms of abuse. When someone has already decided that truth is optional, boundaries become suggestions. When reality bends to their will in small ways, it’s not an enormous leap to expect it to bend in larger, more harmful ways. The child who grows up questioning their memories becomes an easier target for future manipulation.
The gaslighting is constant yet subtle. It’s not the dramatic “that never happened” of movie villains. Instead, it’s the gradual erosion of confidence in your ability to perceive reality accurately. Details get changed in the retelling of events. Your emotional responses to situations get reframed as overreactions or misunderstandings. Your memory becomes suspect while theirs is presented as infallible. The most isolating aspect of being raised by a spin doctor isn’t the lies themselves. It’s how few people understand what that kind of upbringing does to a person. Friends might laugh about their parents’ “tall tales” or “fish stories,” but they’re not talking about the same thing. They’re not describing the systematic dismantling of truth as a concept. They’re not talking about growing up in an environment where reality itself was considered optional.
This rarity creates a unique kind of loneliness. Support groups exist for children of alcoholics, children of narcissists, and children of divorced parents. Where do you go when your specific trauma involves being raised by someone who lived in a completely fabricated version of reality? The closest categories don’t quite capture the experience of having truth itself be negotiable in your household.
The children of spin doctors grow up hungry for truth in ways that are hard to articulate. They become fact checkers by necessity, validators by survival instinct. They learn to spot fabrication from miles away, not because they’re naturally suspicious, but because they’ve been forced to develop those skills to maintain their sanity. This hypervigilance around truth can be exhausting, can make relationships challenging when others don’t understand the intensity of their need for honesty.
Healing from this kind of upbringing means learning to trust your reality again. It means finding people who value truth over narrative, substance over story. It means understanding that love doesn’t require you to believe impossible things or pretend that lies are the truth. It means recognizing that your memories are valid, your perceptions are trustworthy, and your version of events matters even when it’s less exciting than the alternative being offered.
Most importantly, it means recognizing that you’re not alone, even when it feels that way. The children of spin doctors are out there, still learning to value truth, still grateful when someone listens to their reality without trying to improve upon it with fiction. They’re the adults who almost cry with relief when someone says, “That sounds hard,” instead of “Surely they meant well.”
The spin doctor’s consultation may never officially end, but it doesn’t have to define the rest of your life. Sometimes the best response to a lifetime of fiction is a stubborn commitment to truth, no matter how much less exciting it might be. Sometimes healing involves surrounding yourself with people who prefer reality to fantasy, who value accuracy over entertainment, and who understand that love means accepting someone as they truly are, rather than as the character they’re pretending to be.
The truth may be ordinary, but it’s yours. That’s worth fighting for.
Blair Steward 