Existential Psychology

Best Way To Deal With Lying

By  | 

If someone has been lying to you and then, for whatever reason, finally decides to tell the truth, your first instinct is probably righteous indignation. You want to get on their case, you’re frustrated you were actively misled, you might feel like they deserve to be punished, and certainly that they deserve to be called out.

Catching someone in a lie is one thing, but it’s wrong thinking to be upset when they finally tell the truth of their own volition. All of us are liars, to ourselves and to others, at least some of the time. What varies greatly is what we choose to lie about, and this usually has to do with our personal vulnerabilities. How can you be upset with someone for trying to protect some vulnerable aspect of their existence by massaging the truth when you have done the same countless times?

If you think of lying as, at least in many cases, a mechanism to protect the psyche from emotional pain, your attitude almost invariably shifts from judging to compassionate, even when you catch someone in the act. But especially if they come clean of their own volition though, it’s an act of courage and an act trust, of exposing some vulnerability whose depth you can’t really fathom since all of us are moved to protect different aspects of our lives based on our constitutions, upbringings, and perceived shortcomings.

It makes a lot more sense in this context to support someone for telling the truth now rather than punish them for having lied before. You want to create an open space for further truth opportunities, not show them that telling the truth will be met with recrimination. The best way to deal with lying is to first entertain the possibility that its function is protective in nature, and second to always support and encourage the truth when it comes out.

Related posts:

  1. Tragedy And Self-Actualization It’s a tragedy to be forced to suffer through a bad situation, through abuse, neglect, abandonment, loss. People become resentful, they wonder “Why me?” What they usually don’t realize is that there is a far greater tragedy than the specific set of circumstances they suffered through, and this is allowing themselves to become people they […]...
  2. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy For Trauma Not all victims of trauma end up manifesting symptoms of PTSD but they do end up facing consequences in one form or another. You can’t be exposed to death or threatened death, serious injury or threatened serious injury, or sexual violence or threatened sexual violence without having the experience exert a profound impact on your […]...
  3. Unprompted Lying In some archival footage a newly risen to power Adolf Hitler gave his first public address as chancellor of Germany to a packed stadium of adoring fans. The film is an opportunity to view the incongruity between the expectations of people and the reality of a situation. There were numerous societal forces at play that […]...
  4. 5 Ideas To Help Deal With Humiliation   1. It happens to everyone sometimes Feeling humiliated usually means feeling isolated and singled out, so as cliche as it might sound, the simple act of taking a step back and realizing you are not alone lowers discomfort and will make you feel better. The spinning wheel landed on your this time, but it […]...
  5. Emergency Situations We all have our private, subjective interpretations of objective reality. This fact is unavoidable but what is avoidable is considering our own subjectivity to be objectivity. Many of us take our experiences as simple truth, not even really worth comparative analysis, neglecting the cognitive behavioral insight that there is always a vital intermediary stage of […]...
  6. Lying To Your Therapist You’ll hear a lot of people brag to friends about lying to their therapists, about fooling their therapists into believing this or that false narrative. On the surface withholding or distorting information is all about power. From this type of client’s point of view there’s a game of cat and mouse going on. But who’s […]...
  7. Faulty Thinking And Distress Your conscious thoughts are not what cause you distress. It’s the conclusions you come to about yourself, others, and the world based on these thoughts that cause you distress. It’s an endless feedback loop actually where you have beliefs, then some activating event, then a thought, and then a value judgment on that thought, all […]...
  8. Being Made To Feel Worthless There are lots of signs that point to an abusive relationship. The one we want to talk about here is not as visible but probably the most indicative. It’s being made to feel worthless. Consciously or unconsciously, that sense of worthlessness is what abusers are always trying to instill in their victims. We say consciously […]...
  9. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder There has been a great deal of disagreement about what constitutes trauma and how to categorize the symptoms that result from it. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is in the anxiety disorders section of the DSM-IV TR,  but PTSD appears to be much more diffuse than just anxiety. People also exhibit symptoms of dissociation and depression, for […]...
  10. How To Deal With People In Distress The idea of perception being more responsible for determining an outcome than the activating event is central to cognitive behavioral therapy. It certainly holds true for people in distress situations. In the vast majority of cases the activating event does not warrant the anxiety feelings generated or the resulting frantic behavior. The usual responses to […]...
  11. Burdened With Painful Emotions And Emotional Detachment Human beings are burdened, or blessed depending on the point of view, with a complicated emotional apparatus. This means taking the bad along with the good, the unwanted feelings along with the wanted feelings. It means being hurt deeply many times over the lifespan. But it’s those early childhood traumas, the early emotional distress, that […]...
  12. Just Show Up A cognitive behavioral truth about activities that are intellectually, emotionally, or physically draining is that sometimes contemplating doing them causes you more distress than actually doing them. You can’t stop ruminating about what a pain in the ass something is going to be. You inflate the difficulty in your own mind to a point where […]...
  13. You Are Capable of More Than You Think The comfort zone. It’s just so comfortable. But if you stay in yours you can say goodbye to growth, goodbye to further self-actualization. Staying within the parameters of what you already know provides the benefit of certainty but at a price. You can think of existential anxiety as a monster who patrols the boundaries of your comfort […]...
  14. Helping Kids Deal With Tragedy We are going to talk about some psychological ideas and tips for helping children deal with tragedy. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, where many children were affected, it’s important to create a safe space to help your kids process what happened, as is the case after any tragedy. Here is a good, […]...
  15. Defining Trauma When clinicians diagnose PTSD they traditionally look for a specific traumatic event or series of traumatic events called stressors. The clinical criteria also takes the subjective perceptions of the person into account, which is logical because only 20% of the population subjected to the Criterion A event develop symptoms of PTSD. This shows that the […]...
  16. Be Honest About Needing Your Own Space A lot of people in romantic relationships are desperate for their own time, for their own space, but something stops them from securing it, from asking for it. That something is more often than not the unspoken feeling that wanting time apart is equivalent to disliking the other, undervaluing the other, betraying the other. But […]...
  17. Empty Nest The empty nest syndrome is really a problem of meaning. People tell themselves that they’re feeling weird because they’re missing their children, and of course they are missing their children, but the hard to pin down psychological and emotional distress they’re experiencing stems from a different source. This source is the existential anxiety produced from […]...
  18. Just Being Honest When some people make a comment and say “I’m just being honest,” if they were really being honest with themselves they would probably have to admit that they are actually just trying to be cruel and have found a plausible rationalization to make themselves feel okay about it. Honesty is worthless when it is used […]...
  19. Destruction Of Your Being I recently had a conversation about existential anxiety with a smart guy who made a comment that will be useful for explaining a stumbling block that impedes understanding for many people. We often write about anxiety being the threat of nothingness, either real in the form of death or symbolic. But it can be kind […]...
  20. Krumboltz Theory Of Career Counseling John Krumboltz posits a theory of career counseling that stresses social learning as its key ingredient. He says that “People with differing genetic characteristics are exposed to infinitely varied learning opportunities (or lack therof) as a result of the social, cultural, and economic circumstances that exist at the time and place where they  live. The […]...
Related Items