Better to Lie

FD tells me he's tired and has go to bed by eleven because he has to get up at three to go to the office to finish some charts. A quality review insurance representative is going to review his charts to make sure he's really a good doctor, not a fake in a lab coat.

I groan because (a) it's so insulting and ridiculous that someone from an insurance company will be reviewing the notes of a physician old enough to be his or her father, and (b) because I am pretty sure I have another two hours of wake time in me.

"I'll come up and read while you sleep. Gimme a couple of minutes. I'm not tired."

Meanwhile someone mentions that hot apple pie would be so nice, which sounds like a fabulous idea. I'm in, don't mind making one, we have apples.

"But we have no flour. Chaval,*" I say.

FD is out the door in a flash, returns in a few minutes with three sacks of flour, two white, one whole wheat. He's not taking any chances this will happen again anytime soon. "Goodnight, honey," he says and heads upstairs to retire.

I make the pie and wait around while it bakes, watch a Parks and Recreation with our above average physics major son. This doesn't beat hearing him talk about pendulums and gravity, but it'll do. Around 12:30 I'm beat, head upstairs for bed, leaving the kid to turn off the pie. It's almost done, but so am I.

FD is at the computer playing Scrabble.

"I thought you had to go to bed! You're getting up in a few minutes!" I exclaim.

He doesn't exactly answer, mumbles something like, Yeah, yeah.

I'm asleep in seconds.

In the morning, before he heads off to work (he's already been to work and back to finish the charts and made synagogue rounds) I take him aside.

I tease: I know why you didn't go to bed early.

FD: Huh? Why not?

Me: Because you didn't want to go to bed without me, right?

FD: Uh, no. That wasn't it. . .

Me (displeased with this response) : There are times, you should know, that it's better to lie.

Hit the cymbals.

FD: Huh? Nice pie?

therapydoc

This is the perfect place to say, chaval, soft "ch", rhymes with duh-doll, Yiddish for too bad, because it really is a shame when you want to eat something sweet but will have to do without and go to sleep instead.

The Deception Detector

Sometimes I talk to nice young men and women about what they're looking for in a partner and the idea of honesty pops up as a good thing.

But no one seems to know how to go about finding out if the person that they're dating or going to date is honest or not. And these days, if you meet online, you're at a real disadvantage. The picture, to begin with, is almost always a lie.

But maybe that's not fair. An old picture isn't such a big lie. That's not the kind of deception I'm talking about here.

Years ago I wanted to write this book, The Deception Detector. I think there is a book on the subject at Borders now if you want to take a look, but I haven't read it, so I can't recommend it. In fact, there's a book about every conceivable psychological/relational topic, and if there isn't, and you write it, it'll get published.

So here's what you have to do to find out if a person has a predisposition to deception.

Let's just use him, for the sake of convenience. We could have said, her.

You go out to dinner. You really have to be able to see him. You sit across from him You playfully ask, So when you were a kid, can you remember the first time you lied to your parents? Or the first time you did anything you weren't supposed to do?

He'll probably tell you. People love to talk about themselves, and when they're talking about what they did as children, they assume you know they're different, now. So no matter what he says, you act like that's fine, after all, kids do lie to parents to differentiate, and to teachers to survive. And you indicate that. That it's all right.

After all, it's not necessarily a sign that this is how a person will behave as an adult. Personality is determined by the resolution of the deception. Deception is really passive conflict. It's not the act so much, as how it's resolved.

Then you ask him, So tell me more! When was the next time?

And you're fascinated, of course. It is interesting, isn't it? This is the job, by the way, of dating, getting to know someone, finding what's interesting about him or her.

So you keep asking and get all the stories. And while you're getting the stories, find out how each act was resolved. Did parents find out? Did teachers find out? Did each lie lead to another or was there a time when everyone talked about it and the liar thought to himself, This is silly! Why am I doing this? I'm lying to myself, too!

When that happens, when we look at ourselves and think, I could hold my own in a truthful argument, we start telling the truth. We risk looking bad.

It's a lack of confidence and the certainty that we'll lose something that makes us lie. And of course, fear of exposure and maybe abuse. Lying is the opposite of intimate, so it works nicely if you want to screw up your relationships.

Or did he learn, This is smart. I get farther in life this way. This totally works.

You have to find out. If that moment of truth never happened? It won't with you, either.

therapydoc

Lying Down

I once had a patient who told me this dream. He dreamed about me.

"I was driving you somewhere, you were in the back seat. I don't know why I was driving you somewhere, but I deliberately went in the wrong direction. I didn't want to take you where you wanted to go, and I didn't want you to know that we were going in the wrong direction. I was deliberately misleading you."

Fascinating, isn't it?

I always push people to give me their interpretation first, then I'll discuss the other alternatives. He continued:

"I try to hide from you. I hope I can mislead or deceive you, not let you see the real, horrible me."

But of course we talked plenty about the real horrible person, and he's not horrible at all, simply a little disabled.

And he worked pretty hard in therapy. We had designed a treatment protocol, a difficult therapy, honestly, and he resisted it and I knew that. But he agreed with it and wanted to do it, and for the most part did do it.

I think maybe I'm perceived as much more exacting than I really am. That could be because I do call people on their stuff (if it won't hurt them, sometimes I'm totally fine with a person lying to me, as you know from reading other posts).

We talk all the time about compliance or lack there of, especially since a treatment plan is designed with the patient's input. At one time we both thought it would help.

But if a person doesn't want to work on the plan, or if the plan is too hard, then that person is tempted to hide or to lie about what he or she did outside of treatment between visits.

Some people call that lying resistance, but I call it good communication. When they 'fess up, which usually doesn't take long, we have much more to talk about. Nobody really wants to keep up a charade. It's very boring and unproductive and we talk about the process.

Not working a plan tells me more that a person is either burdened or it's too difficult or both. And that's okay, we can dial it down.

Now the dream? The cool thing about dreams, as I've said before, is that they're ALL about the dreamer. If you're the dreamer, then everyone in the dream is you. The therapist in this man's dream is him, not me, because face it, I'm at home in my bed, not with him. He looks a lot like me in the dream. He's the driver and he's TherapyDoc.

So if you dream that you're hiding from your therapy doc?

I would say that means that you're hiding from yourself. A little silly, no?

copyright 2007, therapydoc

The reality of lying

I don't know who brought this to my attention first, it might have been either FD or Empath Daught but one of them told me that my grandson, E., who is 4 years old has been lying.

They're a little concerned.

I let stuff like this pass through me, sort of like my body's not really a solid but a vapor and information passes right through, hardly registers. My family complains, sometimes, accuses me of not paying attention, but it's not that.

I hear it all right.

I'm just sort of a tolerant sort; it takes a lot to ruffle me. And when it comes to kids lying, it really is a So what, More power to them.
There's a post on this blog about kids lying and you can look at that too, if you like, but it's really a very simple thing.

A kid will start to tell a story. (Remember, kids are new to words and the process of talking to communicate the thoughts in their heads, well, it's all new!! )

They'll start talking and their sentences get longer and longer, and the creative parts of the story rank more and more attention, and their telling ultimately has very little to do with reality, and the story indeed, in the end, is quite far from the truth.

See, kids see the option to make a story a better story and they choose the better story.

To kids, editing really gets in the way! It's so boring to them, what actually happened. Editing to the truth is so limiting! Children understand this.

Even adolescents understand this. They're a lot like very little kids in that way. That's why it's best, when you catch kids in a lie, even when you catch adolescents, to try to thread back to the source of their thinking. Why did they say that? Why did they choose those particular words?

How incredible the fiction!

But be esteeming here. Give them credit. Rate them well. Good story. Credible. Three stars. Or perhaps, Four stars. Sometimes a story is a FIVE STAR STORY! Tell them!

But if it isn't, you can say,

Not bad, not a bad explanation, but it could have been better, seriously. If I were to write this fiction (you have to think up something now) I would have changed it like this. . . made it really good. You think this is good fiction? You're capable of so much more. Work on this, dear.

Mainly, why be so upset with kids for the way they present reality? The thing to keep in mind is that the way they present their reality to you personally may say more about you than it does about them.

Kids write for their audience.

Is it fair or even nice to deny them a chance to make you happy?

Of course not. Now, if you're really interested in your kid, then you are interested in your kid's reality, what it means to him, why he (or she) put it in those particular words. Sure, if it's about you, then you need to discuss that.

Isn't that what you really want, to understand where your kid is coming from? So you wouldn't want to stifle communication with an aggressive approach like You're lying!

It just seems a little mean to me.

More productive would be, Fascinating!

It's the same basic approach with adults, you know, although we would love to hold them to a different standard. Note I say different, not higher, for I think that talking creatively is the essence of having a sense of humor.

With adults, however, the standard is different. Another post, not for today.

But stifling a kid's creativity? That's beyond me, honestly. Passes right through.

No lie.

Copyright 2007, therapydoc