Why therapists lie

When it comes to lies of omission, he says context is key. If that same client decides to omit he had sex with his ex-partner, that may be important to my understanding of why he blew up at his co-worker. It's certainly understandable why he may want to omit that detail; however, similarly to a lie of commission, the knowledge can change my view of how his issues began to manifest and how we may best work together in treating them.

Motives for fibbing typically vary. If someone is lying about the therapy itself—e. Clients may also lie about getting more from the therapy than they are in order to please their therapist, adds Dr.

But, if someone is lying about their state of mind, Dr. Schwehm says they may be doing so in order to present their best self to their therapist, or because they're lying to themselves, trying to make themselves believe they're okay.

Repercussions related to the truth may factor in, too. In fact, much of what causes fibbing in the doc's office is rooted in fear. Will I be judged or embarrassed? What will my therapist think of me? Some of the lies were mundane. Clients would lie about why they missed, or were late to, an appointment. But many lies were directly related to topics that therapists would want the client to be open about.

More than half of clients minimized how badly they really felt. Many of the lies reported by clients in this study might have been driven by embarrassment or shame. For example, almost half of the clients surveyed reported lying about at least one sex-related topic. Just over a quarter of respondents said they had pretended to do homework or take other actions suggested by the therapist. Therapists recognize the importance of the therapeutic relationship in facilitating healing, and often work to intentionally build that relationship.

In doing so, we may not realize all of the work our client is doing—including lying—to build and maintain a positive relationship with us.

But the findings from this study suggest that clients may not see therapists as being meaningfully different from any other person with whom they want to build and keep a positive, accepting relationship.

Clients appear to make many of the same moral choices about lying to therapists as they would about lying to anyone else. That is, a desire to tell the truth might be outweighed by other considerations , like protecting oneself from embarrassment or avoiding conflict. So framing these lies as bad or hurtful acts seems unlikely to help. It denies their positive motivations, and may only deteriorate the relationship by leading clients to feel bad about lying. Therefore, therapist dishonesty may in fact be a necessary tool for the sake of therapeutic tact and protection of the client.

Our findings offer initial insight into the virtually unexplored topic of therapist dishonesty. With this knowledge, clinical training in psychotherapy has the potential to expand to include techniques to work with therapeutic lying, including considerations of when lying is clinically justifiable, discussions of how therapists can manage their feelings when they have lied or concealed information, and how therapists might anticipate and deal with the potential clinical consequences of this behavior.

To expand on our preliminary findings, our lab plans to conduct follow-up surveys to investigate motivations, justifications, and perceived consequences of therapist dishonesty. Jackson, D. Therapist dishonesty and its association with levels of clinical experience. Psychotherapy Bulletin, 53 4 , American Psychological Association. Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct. American Psychologist , 57 , Audet, C.

Client perspectives of therapist self-disclosure: Violating boundaries or removing barriers? Counselling Psychology Quarterly , 24 2 , Blanchard, M. Counselling Psychology Quarterly , 29 1 , Curtis, D. International Journal for the Advancement of Counselling , 37 3 , Farber, B. Self-Disclosure in Psychotherapy. Hanson, J. Should your lips be zipped?

Counselling and Psychotherapy Research , 5 2 , Henretty, J. The impact of counselor self-disclosure on clients: A meta-analytic review of experimental and quasi- experimental research. Journal of Counseling Psychology , 61 2 , McWilliams, N. Psychoanalytic diagnosis: Understanding personality structure in the clinical process.

If you want to go out and sink boatloads of money into that, be my guest. My parents have been seeing a therapist about 3x a week for a year, they each have an individual session and then a couples session. Recently they wanted a divorce and felt driven apart by the things he was telling them individually.

They went to see him together and he denied sayig those things. Can someone tell me why he would do this and what it achieves? He sounds incompetent. Hi Joe, I love your website! I have been seeing a therapist for four months and he has lied to me at times. It is silly things like where he went to college all that info is online bragging kind of things. My two adult children are just a few years younger then his two and if I mention something that my kids have been up to, I feel he responds in a somewhat competitive way.

Otherwise I like him. I feel uncomfortable confronting him on these issues. I just found out that my therapist lied to me. It took some time to build up trust and then I became attached to her. In my opinion, the attachment enabled me to open up and share my true feelings with my therapists. I also have to admit that I held my therapist in high regard. I eventually became sexually attracted to her I am not gay and explained this to her in a letter.

She never responded to my letter. After seeing her for almost two years she left the practice and told me on our termination date that she was changing careers and was no longer going to be a mental health therapists.

Fast forward to two months later and I find out that she has opened her own business. Prior to my last therapy session, she already had obtained her business license.

I am completely fucked up right now and will never trust a therapist again. Once again I feel rejected and abandoned. I am also starting to feel hopeless and lost. To add some additional facts, approximately 3 months prior to making the decision to leave the group practice, my therapist provided me with advance notice.

Great idea and professional on her part. I am thankful that she prepared me for her departure. On several different occasions, I mentioned to my therapist that I would be willing to pay her cash if she decided to continue to as a mental health therapist.

At our last session, on November 28, she clearly pointed out that she was changing careers and moving into academic counseling. I once again told her that if she changed her mind I would like to continue seeing her and would pay her privately. Fast forward to January 2, , I found out that she opened her own private practice. She received her business license to open up her own private practice on November 21, , seven days prior to our last session.

I sent her an e-mail confronting her on the issue and letting her know that I had always been honest with her and placed so much value on our client-therapy relationship. I let her know how hurt, grief stricken, rejected and abandoned I had felt. I let her know that I felt emotionally damaged by her.

Her response is that she never intentionally lied to me and that she needed a Plan B to fall back on since she could not find a job in the academic field of counseling. During our last session, she knew I was not ready to terminate our relationship and I was in a precarious state not doing well at all.

She provided me with some referrals and that was it. I am completely devastated, lost, sad and hopeless. The other day I was thinking about different ways to kill myself and imagining the effect this would have on my family and daughter.

I still feel no desire to live. I feel unworthy. I feel as if all these emotions and feelings are a direct result of my therapist lying to me. I feel as if she basically rejected me. At this point I do not know what to do. I am lost and realize I need help but I lost all faith in the therapeutic process.

I am trying not to think about what has happened and focus on the positive things in my life but it is so hard to do. My question to you is how can I trust a therapist again and buy into the whole therapeutic process? My therapist continues to deny lying to me and sent me a harsh response saying she is no longer going to justify herself to me and she has no control over what I chose to believe.

I did not respond to that e-mail and I guess I just need to move forward. Please help. Your therapist lied by omission; she could also have let you know that she had opened her practice. As for your last question, you need to be extremely careful when you choose your next therapist. Interview several people. See how they react to your account of what happened with your last therapist.

Make sure you get to know the therapist before committing. I think my therapists lies to me. I told him in session what was distressing me. He continued by saying he consulted a colleague and shared his advice with me on how to look at the situation from a different perspective.

Hi Dr Burgo. I am an attorney and have been in therapy for a few months. Before starting one of our sessions my therapist told me that she herself went through a divorce and jokingly said that she has since been a bit wary of us lot in the legal profession. I am uncertain as to why she had lied about something like that especially since I did not enquire as to her marital status.

I googled for possible reasons why therapists do this and came upon your blog. I thought it might have something to do with the therapy. She does not know that I checked on her or read her thesis. I just find it strange that she thought it necessary to lie about something like that. I just let it slide but I am curious. Maybe she was widowed in her second marriage and divorced in her first.

A few years ago I started suffering hallucinations. In my treatment I started with a community health center. I stopped treatment as unproductive. A friend of mine undergoing therapy at the same clinic said one of their therapists claimed I was suffering from a personality disorder and am very manipulative.

I will cop to the manipulative bit. I make it clear I was there for help, not keeping secrets and have given verbal permission. But I do find it disturbing that I was apparently diagnosed with a personality disorder and not told, when I specifically asked about my diagnosis.

Of course that is relying on the word of another patient…. Are there times when lying about something as basic as a diagnosis is appropriate? How can my other health care providers and my insurance company deal with this without us being on the same page? It took quite a while over one year for the children to disclose what had been happening and she passed on that information verbally to me and my partner.

She sent a letter to our solicitor saying she would do this, so we sent her a cheque for her time. She also requested a meeting with my partner. We went to see her yesterday and she was hostile from the moment we walked into her office.

She told me that she had a meeting with my partner only and that I was to leave. I questioned this as I had sat in on quite a few occasions when she was updating my partner about the children.

She raised her voice and told me that I had never sat in before. After a few minutes my partner came out arguing with her, our therapist told my partner that the children were never her clients and that my partner was. She denied ever knowing that there was a court case going on which we verbally told her in the first session. Any advice on what to do in this case? Report this to her licensing board.

Go after her license. I caught my therapist and her assistan in a huge lie I am terribly mad and it makes me want to quit therapy in a heartbeat I feel like she does Not care about my feelings before and after this! She swore to me she didnt take clients who were closed family members and I found out my close cousin is also her patient my therapist knew this will terribly pissed me off specially because she swored first hand she would NOT do that one word LIAR!

I hate going I do Not want to see her again this and plenty of other damage has been caused by her! This is very wrong in my book! Thanks for having written this article. My therapist has lied to me several times. Very awful trying to know whar to do next. How does it make me feel? So, how it makes me feel is, well, Iguess its like the hope of trust being a part of me has gone away, and I went there with a one more try to hope and trust, even if only asa maybe.

Anyway, thanks for reading this if you did. Because most people, in fact, do not like being told what to do. I remember the fury and betrayal I felt when I found out a therapist was lying to me. I learned a major lesson about honesty in psychotherapy. That is whenever I find out a therapist has lied to me, my job is to fire them immediately.

No discussion, no warning, no nothing. And I will certainly not listen to them attempt to defend themselves. If they want to accuse me of resisting, bolting, running away, etc. They would be wasting their time since I would no longer be able to believe anything they say. Besides all that talk about resistance is nothing more than therapists attempting to duck personal responsibility and blame their clients for everything and anything that goes wrong.

What about a lie in order to protect the client? I firmly believe that the therapist I was working with is telling a lie. It was reported to me that this therapist had to take a step back away from clients and she had to end working with me. I honestly believe that she is still seeing clients and she did not cut down as she had reported to me.

I think that she did that because she did not want to admit she did not want to work with me. I realize I can be a difficult client and have been refused treatment by many therapists over time. They either quit or just plain can not work with me. I understand that my diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder is a hard one for therapists to deal with but, I also know how committed I am to getting better.

What ever that may look like. So have therapists here ever lied to their clients in order to protect them? She definitely has harmed me by her very quick decision to just leave like that. I caughty therapist in a lie which is what brought me here.

She told me she would change a process, did not, and then used my trauma as the reason I must be upset vs apologizing for providing false information. I confronted her with this as an unfair approach to masking the real issue — she was not honest. How to move forward? I have had several therapists during my life. Whenever a therapist lies and manipulates I am done with them.

I have had wonderful therapists who may not always have the answers to certain issues. I truly respect honesty about what they work with and what they do not have experience with. I just recently joined a support group where the therapist felt threatened by my knowledge and experiences.

I have been thru this a couple of times. So when I tried to talk with her to see if we could come to some kind of understanding. Instead I got evasion, manipulation, discussing me with her boss with trying to make my history a problem. I saw right thru all of this and she totally lost control when speaking to me. I just was absolutely floored by her behaviors. The only word that came out of my mouth was WOW!

She was to insecure and had emotional issues of her own that were blaring. He and I started with separate therapists because he is quite abusive, not physically for years, but the emotional abuse has been intensely worse.

I told my therapist from the beginning that he has manipulated several therapists in the past, that he is excellent in impression management and has turned them against me. This has resulted in him getting sympathy and validation from therapists, while scapegoating me. He gets them to rationalize or justify his behavior, turn it around so I was the abusive one and behind my back, got one to put myself and my kids in harms way. He really wanted to stop doing this and a lot of it operates under his level of awareness.

The recent therapists were made aware upfront that he does this. My husband had me join him at first to talk to the therapist about what has happened previously. My therapist is his supervisor. After a while I told my therapist the abuse was getting worse, he was keeping secrets and sharing no information with me at all.

Pretty soon we started having joint sessions with both our therapists so mine could be my advocate because she knew the intimate details. During the joint sessions I noticed I was feeling something was very wrong, but not sure what. He was talking about how I hurt him by using things said but twisting them out of context. They both started shaming me for what were normal reactions to horrific betrayals and things he did that traumatized me.

They are supposed to be experts in trauma. I could not defend myself as when this stuff happens I get sort of paralyzed.

He then cries victim to anyone and everyone. They then start telling me when I objected to his version of how instances of abuse went or denials that it happened and they kept forcefully insisting his perception was valid. Told me I that I just needed to be right and it was my problem. I was sobbing, my health going downhill, functioning was impossible, my kids were scared for me. I thought they would believe me since I was so distraught. Then I was criticized and shamed for how I had no regard for his feelings by bringing up how I felt, that I wanted to die.

I dissociated and was in shock. The month since, I have been worse off than ever in my life. My husband recorded his last session with his therapists which was right after the previous one. I know the therapists were both gaslighting and invalidating me after several weeks of being in a fog.

Does anyone know what I should do? I need to clarify that my husband secretly recorded the private therapy session with his therapist, because he too thought what they did was horrible and hates that he has a part in this.

They were talking about and reading the conversation, as it was all in texting. She actually was very nasty and rude to me and said that I was crossing a line by texting her. I have asked her for help with this before and she was happy to tell me how to talk to my kids about things in a way that would not harm them. I mentioned that I was asking her for a referral because I was traumatized by therapist, her colleague. She was so hostile when I told her I needed compassion and this was affecting my kids, her patient.

She hated me and decided I was a sociopath early on which led her to treat me contemptuously. The truth, I am not a sociopath, I unknowingly had many similarities to her family member whose obituary was published in another state the week before treatment began. This was published under her maiden name and there is no way I could have known this information. The similarities spooked her and the best I can figure is she thought I knew and was tormenting her.

I received wrongful treatment, she abused the transference and I had a serious relapse of mental illness. I continue to have severe depression and suicidal ideations. I went from being upper middle class to losing my marriage, home and financial security. Misuse of therapist responsibility and lying can have long term serious consequences for both parties.

I will never understand why she clung to a lie when the truth would have led to respectful and growth inspiring changes for both of us. I loved her, she taught me hatred, bitterness, and resentment. One day there may be forgiveness, right now that is not a feeling I can offer.