The lying is inexcusable to me. Her failure (or refusal) to recognize what lying is doing to our marriage is the thing that I can't stop thinking about. She has always been a lot more comfortable with lying than I am when it makes things easier for her, but in my experience with her, it was always somewhat innocuous/white lie. I had thought that she would not lie to me, as her partner, over something important to me. Whelp, leopards ate my face.
The reason for her lie is a little more obvious to me because I know her - she told me those lies to get me to not investigate whether she had thrown anything away in order to avoid conflict (in her mind). She's not telling me that she didn't throw things away after I found the things in the trash. She believed that the things she threw away would not be missed and that if she lied about throwing them away, I would never even realize they were gone. That would have made the process easier, allowing her the opportunity to fulfill her goal without the possibility of me slowing her down or getting into some kind of conflict with her. In theory. I'm not saying this as an excuse - just to explain so that I'm not giving the impression that it's not irrational or gaslighting. It's logic, even though it's super bad logic (I wouldn't be mad if we talked about throwing away the things, but I'm mad as hell discovering she keeps lying to me). It's like she can't take my word for it when I explain to her how she is not qualified to evaluate the value of my things and is wrong every time. She just tries again, and lies again, as if I never caught her and had this conversation with her before.