Future Faking
When false visions are used to coerce your trust
In Something’s Not Right, I wrote about the ways deceptive individuals and organizations might coerce trust by forming what I call an alliance of experience - fabricating, exaggerating, or exploiting shared experiences to form a bond with you. These false alliances can be shaped around past, present, or future experiences. In this post, I cover a specific type of an alliance of experience called future faking and hope it will help you identify when you might be encountering this particularly subtle tactic of deception.
Future faking promotes a vision of a future experience that the deceptive person has no intention of leading you into. It’s a mirage appearing in the distance that offers you something you want or need.
Like most tactics of coercion, it usually requires some degree of relationship to be effective as the future faker must first identify something you desire, perhaps due to circumstances you find yourself in. And because this process may seem like a genuine effort at getting to know you, it can be difficult to discern if they’re sincere or just searching for material that can be used against you. Your world is quietly taken apart and sorted as they determine which parts are most useful for manufacturing a future vision you might buy into. They may mirror back to you hopes you express about your future - places you want to visit, people you want to meet, subjects you want to learn more about, goals you want to accomplish. Then comes the offer - a well-articulated promise of a future the coercive individual knows you will desire: a story you want to believe in. And soon an alliance is formed around a seemingly shared vision of a future positive experience.
Knowing how important this future is to you, the deceptive person might repeatedly and continually reinforce it - using it to lead you further into dependency and compliance. But as they exert more and more control over you, your identity and all that makes you unique and special, including visions of your future hopes and dreams, slowly vanish with the passage of time.
Like many tactics of coercion, future faking can be found across a variety of different social situations: dating relationships, families, politics, workplaces, etc. In my work and research on impression management used by church leaders, I’ve seen future faking described in reports of faith leaders accused of child sexual abuse and of using the promise of a future marriage to groom a victim.1 It’s a grooming tactic that should be discussed in safeguarding and abuse prevention training.
I’ve seen future faking used by organizational leaders who offer false visions of future change in exchange for present sacrifice from their followers. The leader increases workloads or denies requests for needed support by promising the measures are only temporary. Or the leader promises future advancement, pay raises, opportunities, or stability, but those assurances go unfulfilled with each passing year.
One of the challenges of being deceived by future faking is that by the time you begin to realize the future is not what you thought it was going to be, you discover you are already invested and cannot easily get out of the situation. Part of what might contribute to a sense of entrapment is a belief that the future promised to you is still possible if only you can figure out a way to make it work and perhaps change your expectations and behavior. The coercive person might tell you that you need to be more patient or trusting or gracious - gaslighting you until you feel you are the one shouldering the blame for the unrealized future and the one who must do more to bring it about.
The false alliance engineered by future faking can also produce powerful feelings of complicity within you. You know you might be blamed for going along, or shamed for being duped. And that sense of blame and shame can be powerful enough to silence you. One of the reasons I find it helpful to think of abuse as a type of theft is because it helps us understand how anyone can be victimized by the con artist and how easy it is to be duped before you realize what is happening. The blame and shame you might feel for being deceived should rest entirely on the deceiver - on the person who made it so that you could not see the truth.
Wherever there is future faking, there is loss. It is a form of theft carried out using the tricks of a con artist. The con artist engineers consent by tricking you into voluntarily handing over what the deceiver wants to rob you of. Something has been taken from you in exchange for a vision of the future, and it leaves you feeling used and fooled. One of the more common forms of loss I’ve heard people describe is the loss of time. You feel as if your investment of time has been wasted and you’ll never get that time back. There’s the loss of trust. How do you trust the next person or organization who describes a positive future with you? And then there’s the loss of what the future faker wanted to dispossess you of.
As with other forms of tactics designed to charm you (flattery, over-helping, favor-rendering, etc.), you might be able to spot future faking by asking if what’s being promised is unrealistic (sounds too good to be true) or premature (offered too soon to be sincere).
A second test is to see how the future faker responds to questions and concerns about the visions they offer. Are they willing to have honest discussions about their claims or are their statements empty with nothing of substance behind their offer?
A third test is to see how they respond to any non-compliance. Because the future faker wants something in the present, they might become agitated when they don’t get what they want and withdraw their future promises. This can be difficult because your circumstances might be part of what the future faker is exploiting. They know you are away from family and friends and offer connection. They learn you are struggling financially and offer future stability. They hear about your career goals and promise you their help. They set a trap at the intersection of circumstance and opportunity - seeing your current situation as a vulnerability.
Sometimes it can help to write these questions and answers out and to take an inventory of what you know to be true. A trusted friend or professional might help you make sense of any future faking so that you can see more clearly, receive support, and come up with a strategy to protect yourself. While I believe most people are not out to trap us with false promises, some sadly are. It’s okay to ask questions and pursue more information when you are unsure about the future visions another offers to you.
A pastor allegedly performed a secret marriage ceremony with an 18-year-old he had begun grooming when she was 14 years of age, and told her that he “expected his pregnant wife would die in childbirth and they could spend their lives together (source). A pastor arrested for sexual assault reportedly told the 16-year-old victim that he would marry her one day and take care of her (source). A pastor sentenced to five years in prison for sexually abusing a child under the age of 16 reportedly promised the victim he would marry her at a gazebo on the beach when she turned 18 (source). A church school employee and former principle was arrested on charges of lewd or lascivious conduct and sexual offenses against a student by an authority figure and reportedly told the 12-year-old victim he would marry her when she turned 18 (source).