I definately agree that the reason one lies or leaves out pertinent information is to maintain a good image of oneself to the therapist. It’s hard to say, “Guess what other horible thing I did, or my significant other did to me and put up with it… etc.”

If you ever have to get a government security clearance, you might want to lie to your therapist. To get the clearance, you need to disclose all your medical records. I don’t want uncle Sam knowing I smoked a little kief in college. Some folks don’t want uncle to know they’re sexual orientation either. These shouldn’t disqualify you, but it makes for a drawn-out senseless issue. But, then again, uncle Sam just wants to know if you lie.

Why does our past have to haunt us for so long? That alone is psychologically damaging.

“Your therapist won’t judge you, …”
You’ve obviously haven’t dealt with having a personality disorder on your record.

“All they will do is use it to find a way to better help you and help you move forward.”
It’s more moving you back to the waiting list. There are more deserving patients.

Holding back certain information is necessary at times just to get care for a larger and more immediate problem.

I am very glad that you did this follow up article as I find it still very useful. I think lying is just a natural part to who we are. We all will and in a sense have to with hold certain information. If we all walked around an open book, well nothing would be the same. While a therapist is someone you are supposed to be an open book to, it still takes time to turn and read the pages. They key is time (then when you feel it won’t work switch) but with holding/lying will all resolve its self in time.

Thank you for the follow-up article.

I have a follow-up question: under what circumstances might a therapist lie to a client?

I agree with Katherine Kruska. I think part of the process from the point of view of the patient is also the need for approval. Much concealing or outright lying could be done for selfsteem reasons, even when there’s no unconcious denial.

I like this follow up article a lot. I think one of the most important aspects of trust in the therapy relationship is the personality of both client and therapist.

The second most important is the therapist’s ego. Can he/she refer someone out when they really don’t have the skills to help them? Sometimes I think psychologists who are traditionally CBT and short term therapists see a challenging ‘case’ and take it on (ego talking)…they can do more harm than good in this respect.

Can he/she discuss counter-transference responses as part of therapy? One of the big reasons that I couldn’t fully trust my therapist is because I would experience reactions from him sometimes.

I felt both the positive and negative reactions. When it was positive he would validate my thoughts when it was negative, about 99.9% of the time he tells me I have it wrong or he would say perhaps he was having a bad day etc.

He is getting better at this. It has hurt my progress at times and I am getting better at calling him on it so we can talk about it.

Lastly, I think therapists often think they are providing a safe environment but some who have personality issues etc. need more than one session per week or other contact here and there.

I have been amazed at the blatant abandonment of some therapists. You see this when there is a suicide attempt or hospitalization that could’ve been avoided if the T took the darn phone call or called back.

There is a way to construct ‘contact’ so that it is appropriate and helpful to both therapist and client. Many are so stuck in their theoretical orientation/ego or counter-transference that they hurt their clients.

Lie to my so-called “therapist”? Of course I lied to her. Twenty-nine years ago I was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt which resulted in a cardiac arrest. I was assigned to a psychiatric nurse for one-on-one therapy. Being a naive 25 year-old I innocently began to describe the isolation, poverty, and post traumatic stress syndrome which made my life a nightmare. She responded by shouting, “BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT, BULLSHIT! Realizing I wasn’t going to be released unless I fulfilled her needs I made up a story about having a boyfriend who died of Hodgkin’s Disease after I encouraged him to delay seeking treatment so we could go on vacation together. What else could I do? She was the therapist and I was the psychiatric patient. Who would take my word over hers? As mentioned, this was twenty-nine years ago. If I ran into her today and she was choking I would say to her, “I know how to do a heminlich maneuver but I’m not doing one on you. The world would be a better place without you. I’m going to savor your death.” And then I would.

Elizabeth’s is a fantastic posting.

Doing pseudo-therapy to escape an abusive therapist is called LaChancing.

I was a secretary on an inpatient psychiatric unit and there was a psychiatric social worker whom I could hear through the thin partition separating our office screaming insults at patients. The patients described her as an “emotional rapist.” Eventually they got together and began warning new patients to the floor that this woman was out-of-control and abusive. They told the new patients what to say to her so they wouldn’t set her off and so they could get released as quickly as possible. Eventually one patient smuggled a small tape recorder into a session, recorded the abuse, and got her fired. I wish I’d had to courage to speak up, but I needed the job.

I have lied to my therapist about suicidal thoughts. But I didn’t have a plan or intent. Then if I did, I might not tell her because I work in the field and wouldn’t want to be an in-patient in this county. I would tell my best friend though.

Why do people lie to their therapists?
Therapists!!!
How about dental hygenists?
The joke in the office for decades and recently on TV goes as follows: “I go to an out-of-town dentist to have my teeth cleaned before I go for my scheduled appointment with my dentist’s hygenist. I can’t stand her disapproving question, ‘Have you been flossing regularly?’”

Insurance companies have the right to read notes taken by our doctors. Refusal by therapists to let insurers read our records could lead to denial of claims or could cause difficulty in obtaining life insurance or car insurance, security clearances and etc. It is safer to leave somethings unsaid. I do not want an insurer knowing things about me that only my therapist needs to know. The insurer’s concern is not my good but their profit. Thanks for writing the articles.

There’s another reason I don’t seem to ever hear much about: withholding significant information for fear that your therapist can’t handle it. It’s almost like trying to protect your therapist. I know it sounds really strange. What do you call that?

Good article!

Some of the readers’ comments are understandable about the legitimacy of needing to lie regarding certain things in order to protect themselves (such as sexual/gender issues and government jobs, Axis 2 issues, and abusive therapists).

My only beef would be to suggest instead of, “These are all legitimate and valid reasons for “lying” to your therapist.” to say “These are UNDERSTANDABLE reasons…” Some of the reasons cited would actually be goals/targets to be addressed in therapy such as building rapport and addressing maladaptive coping strategies such as denial, habitual lying, etc. Thus, they would not, by definition, legitimate or valid reasons in the long run.

Therapists are human and often very flawed, which may be the main reason they studied psychology in the first place. Psychiatrists (also therapists) are trained to drug patients and often do not “listen” for the truth which patients may be entirely oblivious to. Emotional honesty is not alwyas available to the patient or the therapist. Simply because someone has a degree and is called a therapist does not mean they are paragons on mental health themselves and often can be very abusive, dishonest and have hidden agenda’s regarding the manner in which they treat their patients.
Transference goes two ways and sadly, more often than not, the therapist reacts (or over-reacts) to their patients as often as the patient has transference issues with the therapist.
Back in teh 1970’s I was a student of pshychoanalysis and attended the 27th International Psychoanalytic Congress in Vienna where I was priveleged to meet many of the worlds top psyhoanalysts and with the exception of Anna Freud (sigmund’s daughter) and Erick Erickson (who was in fact an artist and only inadvertently fell into the role of psychoanalyst as contemporary with Freud, Jung and Adler) the mind set of most of the others was frighteningly void of emotional honesty and lacking the ability to see the trust, even when it was presented to them.
The result of that conference was that I returned to the states and hastily changed direction and became a journalist instead, where truth telling was also revered but more often a fact.
People’s lives have been virtually destroyed by mis-diagnoses, improper and hastily given lables which follow them their entire lives and are virtually impossible to expunge from the medical records even in the face of retrospective evidence of the impropriety of the diagnostic label.
One patient I interviewed had been diagnosed as paranoid and schizoid at the age of 16 by a “therapist” who was being paid by her parents. One of her parents had a hidden agenda and lied to the therapist to use that therapist to create dissidence between father and daughter, because of her own need to have an exclusive relationship with her new husband, absent interference from her new husband’s daughter, who was more easily able to see through this woman’s manipulative and saccharine nature.
There result was that the daughter was drugged, labeled and for the next 20 years bounced in and out of therapists offices, mental hospitals and virtually lost most (of not all of her life) to these misdiagnoses; suffered from life long iatrogenic disorders (those created by improper medical treatment, inasmuch as the psychotropic drugs destroyed her liver, kidneys and digestive tract) and only after finally divorcing herself from the therapists and pshyciatric profession, began to recover.
30 years later, this same step mother tried to have the daughter declared mentally incompetent in a probate court in order to take off with her husbands estate and deprive the daughter (who was named as principal beneficiary of her father’s estate) of her inheritance. At this time she was examined by an impartial psychiatric team . The Step mother was found to have had “early dimentia” (in other words it was the step mother who was nuts) and the daughter was found devoid of any evidence of paranoia or schizoid features (which only get worse with age, if they are present at all).
No amount of letters and dianostic test results were able to convince the original “therapist” to change his diagnosis and clear this poor daughter’s medical record so she would not have to be burdened with this incorrect label for the rest of her life.

WHY SHOULD THERAPISTS BE TRUSTED WHEN THE ROUTINELY ABUSE THEIR POWER? …should be the titled of your next article.

There is a book called TOXIC PSYCHIATRY, a must read for anyone who is contemplating getting psychiatric treatment or engaging in any contract with a therapist.

Talking to a complete stranger is safer!

One other woman I interviewed was having trouble sleeping and her primary care physician prescrived AMBIEN (the same drug that sent Patrick Kennedy off “sleep driving”.
This woman had the same reaction to Ambien. Was never counselled not to drink after taking it. Had gone to a christmas party and had a few sips of wine and then went home and tok her AMBIEN, only to find herself committed to a psychiatric ward a few days later when she awaoke from a coma, and labeled with a BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER and counselled to got AA meetings, when this woman was not a substance abuser, rarely drank, never used street drugs and had the “therapists” and psyciatrists believed her when she was telling the truth, they might have discovered the truth 9which is not known), that AMBIEN causes certain people to have very weird reactions and should never be taken before or after ingesting any alcohol.

There are many natural treatment for those symptoms labeled as psychiatric disorders. Some involve dramatic change of diet, use of supplements and use of homeopathic treatment.
Many labeled as manic depressive; or who suffer from depression, auditory hallucinations, or Obscessive compulsive disorders can divest themselves of all symptoms within weeks or months of homeopathic treatment and some dietary changes.

Sugar Blues was the title of a book written years ago, and documented that ingestion of too much sugar (refined carbohydrate) can cause major depression. It has also bee documented that food coloring and additives can cause “psyhciatric” symptoms.
Advers reactions to vaccines can and do cused OCD symptoms which can be relived by homeopathic remedies that are used to treat “vaccinosis”, which is a condition that results from impure vaccines and adverse reactions to them.
In short, the entire field of PSYCHO-THERAPY and PSYCHIATRY need to be seriously revamped, more closely monitored so that people who naively seek help and treatment for conditions that cause extreme psychic distress and human suffering of the worst kind, are not abused by the profession.
After what I have seen (having worked in several psychiatric hospitals), if I were forced to seek therapy or put in any of those institutions, I would lie in a NY minute.
If you are troubled, talk to a friend; learn about the effects that certain foods have on your moods; get counselling by a minister or priest; seek homeopathic or naturopathic treatment first and start to take responsibility for your own mental health. Copping out to empowering a “therapist” to make you get honest with yourself, can be a devestating and losing battle.

If you don’t have any friends, talk to a complete stranager, it’s a lot safer.

My inner child wishes to post this comment:

The Chronicles of Narnia are not just great fiction stories, but filled with symbolism of an initiatory experience, a spiritual evolution that takes place within those of Indo-European origin. This is part of their heritage, their birthright, part of who they are. How long will the field of Psychiatry rob these complex, gifted individuals of their Narnia experiences by doping them up and labeling them as Schitzophrenics?

I don’t lie to my therapist or one I saw when I was really sick. there have been some that I have withheld info from and some I quit seeing because they were frauds who just wanted me to change my spiritual beliefs. I resent that I was labeled BPD, when I needed help to cope with fear, legit fear; to talk about where it came from. I had a pastor who helped with that and many other issues. I was accused of being a hypochondriac because I followed the nurse’s orders to tell about side effects of my meds. I was accused of being disruptive when I came to the defense of another in-patient, and of having a bad attitude. I was just trying to get well.

In the past, I have lied to my therapist at times when we were getting close to issues that felt too scary to deal with. I would often admit that I lied later in the session, usually when there was less than five minutes left and I knew I wouldn’t have to deal with the emotions. Of course at the beginning of the next session he’d bring up the topic so my lying was really just a delaying tactic. This terrific man knew that and never accused me of anything, just used his gentle, persistent questions to make me think about what I was doing, why I was lying, and better alternatives. Today, I can just say whether talking about something makes me uncomfortable, uneasy, or even scared, which now I know that for me this is a signal that something needs to be dealt with rather than avoided.