What clients lie to psychologists about

“I had nothing to hide: with the help of a psychotherapist, I wanted to get off the ground and finally solve my problem,” recalls 34-year-old Marina. – But at the first meeting, awkwardness just fettered me. It took five or six sessions before I could confess what was really bothering me.”

Feeling embarrassed, crying, feeling irritated, desperately insisting on one’s own, “forgetting” to say the most important thing or deliberately lying – such behavior is natural during the psychotherapeutic process. We asked our experts to tell us what customers lie about most often – and explain why this happens.

about too personal

Having ventured to see a psychotherapist, we still do not really understand how this stranger will help us improve relations with our parents, get rid of fears, part with illusions, and heal spiritual wounds. We know him too little, so we simply keep silent about many things. “The client has the right to choose for himself what is more useful for him to discuss today,” emphasizes systemic family psychotherapist Anna Varga. “He has the right not to talk about what he cannot or does not want to tell yet.”

The willingness to open up to the therapist depends on the degree of trust. “And it’s hard to trust someone we don’t know,” agrees psychoanalyst Marina Harutyunyan. So embarrassment is completely natural. Many shy away from talking about sensitive topics.

Once a woman came to my colleague’s appointment, having previously stated that she had sexual problems. And then she just didn’t talk about it! He warned that he was unlikely to be able to help if she was not frank. Then she replied that she was going to see a doctor, and she saw … a man.

We involuntarily try to win over the psychotherapist, to appear before him in the most favorable light. Until the stereotype of relationships is overcome, we are likely to “edit” the information that we report about ourselves – of course, in accordance with our ideas about attractive features.

This may be due not only to the model of female-male interaction, but also to the fact that clients unconsciously put the therapist in the place of a “parent”, a “judge”. And they persistently try to build their positive image.

About life circumstances

Each of us perceives the same events differently. “A woman talks about a family conflict: her husband is terrible, but she is beautiful,” Anna Varga gives an example. – Then he starts talking, and the roles change: he becomes beautiful, and she becomes terrible. There is no intentional lie here, just everyone sees what is happening in their own way.

Talking about ourselves, we involuntarily distort the facts, presenting them in accordance with our assessments and views. We are looking for meaning in what is happening, we make up our own chain of causes and effects. For example, we see the source of our failures in childhood events.

“It is impossible to find out how true this is – childhood is in the past. Yes, it doesn’t matter. Each of us has our own concept of what happened, Anna Varga explains. – A person may consider that he was traumatized by life in the parental family, and build the entire future strategy on this. You can deal with him in those old circumstances, or you can try to find a resource for changes in them, help the client understand what the experience gave him, how he coped with it, what he learned about himself. The second option seems to me much more constructive.

About my feelings

“What do you feel about it?” the therapist asks. While trying to be truthful, we may still not be fully aware of our feelings. “For example, a client tells how much he is offended, and he clenches his fists,” explains Anna Varga. “Obviously, in addition to being offended, he is also angry.” The therapist can directly say this based on their observations (clenched fists, tense voice, flushed face…).

“It is important to discuss with the client what he thinks about his feelings,” explains Anna Varga. – For example, a person is afraid and despises himself for it. Relying on feelings of the second order, it will be easier for him to cope with the direct experience that prevents him from living.

In psychoanalysis, a special manner of communication is used: the analyst rarely asks direct questions, so here the person is more likely to keep silent about something than to lie directly. “If, when answering a question about feelings, he tells a lie, this will certainly be justified by something, and it is important for a psychoanalyst to understand what,” says Marina Harutyunyan. “But this will take time and, of course, a very careful attitude towards the patient.”

About relationships in a couple

Some clients are deceitful on purpose. For example, in family therapy, one of the two lies to the therapist, because otherwise it will be revealed that he has already lied to the partner before.

“I am ready for understatement, interpretations, but not ready for direct lies,” Anna Varga admits. – For example, a young couple comes in who has not had sex for almost two years. At the same time, the woman wants a child, and the man talks about some difficult experiences that slow him down, about internal barriers … I see a 29-year-old guy in front of me who avoids sex, but otherwise life with his wife suits him. And a woman who feels guilty and does not know what else to do to change the situation.

In this case, I ask partners to come to me separately. It often turns out that he has a mistress. Of course, he asks me not to tell his wife about this, and since I myself created such conditions (shared them), I am forced to keep a secret. But we discuss with him what prevents him from changing the situation, how he imagines a favorable future for himself and for his wife. Perhaps the man is just afraid to tell her that he wants to leave.

It often happens that a man deceives everyone, trying to suggest that he would have a great life with his wife and would not move to another room if she, for example, lost weight. A woman tries hard, goes to the gym, diets… and at some point catches him cheating. “He doesn’t tell me the truth either, although I give him such a chance,” continues Anna Varga. – Yes, and he came only because his wife insisted, and he wants to survive all this with the least losses, to postpone the moment of explanation. In such a family, because of the lies, no one will be able to get help from therapy.

About the diagnosis

The client may conceal a psychiatric diagnosis. Do not answer a direct question about the disease, even if he knows that he is ill, or guesses about it. The reason is simple – he is afraid of doctors, psychotropic drugs, madness. “You can help him only by working in tandem with a psychiatrist. And my task as a psychotherapist is to convince him that we intend to act for his benefit, ”says Anna Varga.

The parents of children with special needs or diagnosed with mental retardation also conceal the diagnosis. “They often say this: we won’t tell the diagnosis so that you treat the child with an open mind,” regrets child psychologist Tatyana Bednik. “But behind that is the fear of admitting the real problem. Unconsciously, parents hope that everything will work out and the child will be healthy.”

About family secrets

Parents who bring their children to therapy often hide what is really going on in the family. They do not talk about alcoholism, drug addiction, or suicide cases. And they do not tell about it not only to the psychotherapist, but also to the child. “My mother came to my appointment several times with a request to limit the meetings of her son with his father,” says Tatiana Bednik. – I said every time that the boy needed to communicate with him. And only after a while in the process of therapy it turned out that the father uses drugs, and the mother is simply afraid to leave her son with him.

It’s hard to really help when parents don’t want to cooperate. “Here you can only relieve emotional stress, support the child, but you won’t be able to change the situation,” concludes Tatyana Bednik. “Children do not exist separately from adults, their honest participation is necessary in working with a child.”

What We Don’t Know About

Having dared to start psychotherapy, we want to change something in our life, in ourselves … but this is precisely what we resist. Sigmund Freud was the first to describe resistance – “the resistance to making the unconscious conscious”*. It occurs at the moment when our words or actions bring us closer to the most important (often most painful) experience or memory. We may not be aware of resistance, and then it manifests itself, for example, in being late for a meeting with a therapist or skipping sessions.

“A person who comes for help has two conflicting motives,” says Marina Harutyunyan. – The first is the desire to heal, that is, to change yourself by changing or refocusing your outlook on life. And the second is the desire to maintain the status quo, because the new, the unknown is alarming. Resistance necessarily manifests itself in the process of deep psychotherapy, because here something is revealed that the conscious “I” does not want to accept.

Freud also came up with the method of free association: during the session, the client can say whatever comes to mind, without evaluating or choosing words. But if he speaks freely, then perhaps he fantasizes and invents something? “Here he has every right to do so,” Marina Harutyunyan clarifies. – Something in your story can be softened, something can be said in a veiled way – but all the same, these details in the process of analysis should form a single picture that will help to understand what exactly the person is resisting and what really worries him.

For example, if at a certain moment he is unable to say something or feels that he has an “empty head”, then we are at the point where a direct statement (behind which there is a painful feeling, thought) is impossible for him. So, through the analysis of resistance, we can try to reveal what is hidden in his unconscious. And work with that to really help the person.” Or rather, it would be more correct to say that, having better known himself, he would be able to help himself.

“I was able to confess”

Nina, 39 years old

“When we made an appointment, he asked not “What is your name?”, But “How to address you?” and I called myself by a different name. Arriving at the first session, I immediately announced that I would call myself. He agreed to this too. Then I asked, “What should I talk about?” He answered the question with a question: “What would you like to talk about now?” Suddenly, I remembered how I almost drowned as a child.

We discussed my relationship with my mother, my husband, and then, at about the fifth meeting, he said: “I want to confess something to you, are you ready to hear my confession?” I was surprised – after all, I was going to and could not decide! But she agreed. And he, clearing his throat, continued: “During our conversations, I have a strange feeling, something like a split. It’s as if there’s something behind your words that I can’t grasp.” There was a pause. We were both silent. And then something seemed to push me from the inside, and I threw myself into cold water: “Actually, I wanted to tell you about something else! I steal. Perfume, rags. I got caught several times. So far, no one knows about it. But I’m scared to death that one day I’ll end up in the police.”

I stared in horror at my interlocutor, expecting to hear: “You deceived me, go away, I can do nothing for you.” But he said something else: “Thank you for being so frank with me. This is a serious confession, and I see that in order to make it, you needed to gather all your strength. And then I burst into tears – from relief, from shame, from everything at once. Oddly enough, at the end of that meeting, I told him my name and left the phone – now that he found out the worst about me, I stopped being scared.

^* Z. Freud “Small collected works” (Azbuka, 2011).