What You Need To Know About Lying to Your Therapist

 

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Divorce leads many people to therapy as they try to make sense of the past and move forward into the future. 

Clearly seeing reality is a waystation toward the goal of enhancing your wellbeing. As you might imagine, lying to your therapist impairs both your and your therapist’s ability to see that reality. If you’re like most people, you’ve probably lied to your therapist.

In their book, Secrets and Lies in Psychotherapy, the authors report that between 84 and 93% of clients lie to their therapists, often about multiple things. This isn’t terribly surprising since research has shown that the average person lies once or twice a day.

Consider your honesty on a first date. Odds are, you may be less than totally truthful. You may paint your job in a more positive light, talk about relationships with your children in a slightly more glowing way, or tell an anecdote about something, embellishing the details to make it more humorous or interesting. 

These are all normal lies told for the sake of impression management, to make us look a little better, appear somewhat more accomplished or take a conversation from merely interesting to scintillating.

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Want to Move Forward in your Life? Shift your Focus from ‘Why’ to ‘What Now’

 Where you decide to go next is far more important than how you got here.

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There are innumerable issues that bring people to therapy and coaching. Folks usually want to feel happier, more confident, less angry, and the like. Before diving into making changes to improve their situation, answers to the “why” questions are frequently top of mind, as in:

Why do I get so angry with strangers, or procrastinate on important projects, or turn a positive moment into waiting for the other shoe to drop?

Much as I hate to admit it, those questions often can’t be answered definitively, even after weeks, months and sometimes years of exploration. How would we know if we did get the “right” answer to the source of your anger issues, procrastination or worrying?

A closely related set of “why” questions pertain to the motivations of others. We can spend hours investigating why your wife cheated on you, why your daughter drinks too much or why [your question here].

The thing is, not much is certain when it comes to what motivates us. For a variety of reasons, we can’t even answer the “why” question about ourselves (e.g., Why did I think it was a good idea to go to law school because two years in I’m bored to death?) much less about someone else.

Why, you ask (hahaha)?

Consider how you might answer a question about yourself now, vs how you answered it one or two years ago, vs how you might answer it two years from now. As the end-of-history illusion demonstrates, our understanding changes over time, as do our narratives about our lives, even though this is very difficult to imagine.

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Terminating Therapy: Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

I'm not saying you have to go to therapy after your divorce. But in case you do, here are some things to keep in mind about sticking, or not sticking, with your new BFF. From my latest YourTango post...

A client comes in to see me. When I ask how long she's been depressed, she replies, "Probably my whole life." The odd part is not the lifetime of depression. Sadly, I hear that more often than you might think. The odd part is when we meet a second or third time. I learn my client is considering dropping out of therapy, because, she says, "I don't think I'm getting any better."

 

Here's the thing...while therapy is supposed to, and usually does, instill hope for the future, if you've been depressed your whole life, can you really expect to feel significantly better in a week or two?

According to a recent book, 20% of the time clients drop out of therapy early, most often because they have unrealistic expectations. The most common is that dramatic, sustained change will happen after the first session, or two. The unusual and sometimes confusing nature of the therapy process itself can also drive clients away.

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7 Reasons You May Be Anxious About Getting Help…But Don't Be!

If there was ever a time you might want to consider getting some professional help, post-divorce is certainly that time. But people often have anxiety about moving forward to coaching or therapy. My article is about why you should not let your worries stop you. It starts like this...


Many of us love the holidays. Perhaps an equal number loathe them. Either way, they're filled with stress. Visiting one's dysfunctional family, or not seeing said family, giving or receiving the right gifts, being with a challenging partner or feeling alone, these are just a few of the issues that come up for us this time of year.

A surprising number of my psychotherapy clients tell me they worry that they won't have enough to talk about to fill the 45 minutes. My coaching clients sometimes have concerns about how well they're using the time. Many clients come to me saying how long they've waited before finally making the call to schedule an appointment.

These are some of the specific concerns I hear and the reasons they should NOT keep you from getting some help:  

1. My issues are boring. Starting therapy or coaching does not mean you are entering a contest for who has the most interesting, exotic or unique life. Your difficulties, be they holiday concerns, boyfriend problems, problems with your sister, boss or children, are the stuff of therapy and coaching. Yes, people all over the world are fighting for freedom, suffering injustice and the like, but I'm there to guide you through your procrastination, insomnia or panic, not to end world hunger. 

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