"Family is my highest priority"

Many people say that family is their highest priority. Many of them are being dishonest about that claim. This is because they act in ways that contradict their claim that family is their highest priority, and they never did the work necessary to reach the conclusion that family is their highest priority. 

For example, many people do lots of work to solve problems at their job, but they don't do that same level of work regarding their family. Or they do lots of work regarding their diet, but not their family. 

So like with their job or their diet, they do things like document their work sessions. They document what they plan to do, how it went, and what they plan to do going forward. They document each session and they review past sessions to help them refresh their memory so they can find trends regarding their work. And they do none of this for their family. They have emotional yelling "discussions" while not documenting any of it. They don't write down their problems, their perspectives, the other person's problems or perspectives. They don't review past discussions (since they were never written down) to look for trends. 

So they don't actually prioritize their family over other stuff. Their actions tell you what their priorities are. Their words only tell you what they would like their priorities to be.

These ideas were inspired by Elliot Temple's ideas on lying, some of which can be found in his essay Lying.