How to Handle a Client WHO LIES

A common problem we face as Therapists are clients who lie during session, and I want to talk about why them lying might not actually matter at all in how we progress with them in therapy.

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Have you ever wondered what to do in a therapy session when you suspect that your client is not being honest, and their deception is getting in the way of the clinical goals? Well, today I’m going to tell you exactly how to handle that.

Now, this past weekend, I had an amazing experience. There’s this organization called the Erickson foundation that’s run by a guy named Dr. Jeffrey Zeig, and it’s based on the work of Milton Erickson. And I have been a fan of Dr. Zeig, I’ve been a fan of Milton Erickson. I’ve been a fan of this organization for so long. And like 20 years ago, I wrote down a professional bucket list and wanted to speak at this event. And now I speak at this event, like every year, and it’s amazing.

They asked me to do the keynote about Solution Focused Brief Therapy, which I did. They asked me to do a workshop about this approach, which I did. And then they asked me to sit on a panel with other well known psychotherapists in the field. And they wanted us to address lies and deception in therapy. And I was like, oh, this is going to be interesting.

So I logged into ZOOM to get into the panel and it was me and the other panelists, and we’re getting ready to, you know, go live and start talking. And the guy who was moderating, he was like, “What order do you guys want to go in?” And I was like, “I don’t know, I don’t care, I’ll go last, that’s fine.” So they agree for me to go last.

And then I said, “It’s probably good I go last because I’m betting my response is going to be different than all of yours.” And the moderator said, “Well, what would your response be?” And I said, “I actually don’t think it’s any of our business if the client lies.” And they all went, “What?” And then the moderator was like, “Oh, okay, yeah, this is going to be a good panel.”

So then, boom, next thing you know, we’re live. And everybody’s explaining when I suspect that there’s somebody in the session lying to me. And clients lie about stuff like how much alcohol they’re using or not, how much drugs they’re using or not, how much are they still having an affair or not, that sort of stuff. And they’re all explaining like, I can tell a client’s lying by this, or if I get a hunch that a client’s lying, I separate the couple and I work with them individually or that kind of stuff.

And then it gets to be my turn. And I said, “I don’t think it’s any of our business whether or not the client is telling the truth or not.” I actually don’t concern myself one bit in session at all if the client is telling me the truth or not. My singular focus, and my singular purpose is to ask the client questions that help them to illuminate and achieve the outcome that they want to experience as a result of seeing me.

And here’s an interesting thing about what promotes lying, or what triggers people to lie. People get triggered to lie because they feel unsafe. People get triggered to lie because they are concerned of what you’re going to do with that information.

So if I’m doing a problem focused type of therapy, and I’m trying to figure out what triggers you, and what’s wrong with you, and what are your flaws, then people tend to hide those things.

But if I’m doing therapy and the first thing I ask you is, “What are your best hopes from this therapy?” People very quickly start saying, I want to be happier. Why? Because asking about my hopes is far less unsafe than asking about what’s wrong with me.

Does that make sense?

We have safety things in place, we have safety mechanisms, that when someone is coming after what’s wrong with us, we want to hide those things. So why don’t I concern myself? Because I don’t think I have to. When I’m doing Solution Focused Brief Therapy, I’m asking the client about the outcome that they want to achieve, and that causes us to have a very honest dialogue.

I also believe that if the client is lying to me, they have a perfectly good reason for doing that, and I have to earn their trust. So as a consequence, I literally spend zero time in my therapy sessions wondering or worrying about whether or not the client is telling me the truth. There have absolutely been times where we were doing therapy, and two or three sessions in the client disclosed like, yeah, in the beginning I wasn’t really upfront about this, this, or this. But now I’m ready to talk about it.

And I think that’s exactly how therapy needs to be. Because I have to earn your trust, I have to earn your ability to tell me the truth. And that process can’t be hurried by me thinking, I suspect you’re not telling me the truth. So I’m going to try to figure this out. I’ve got to earn that.

And I want to tell you a really funny story that happened. I say funny, not “haha”, but it was something that really resonated with me. It happened with a client many, many years ago, early in my days of using Solution Focused Brief Therapy. And I too wondered like, how do you know if the client’s telling the truth? How do you know if the client’s being honest? I wasn’t yet at the place I am now.

I was working this client. I can’t remember if it was a couple or not, but I remember the guy very clearly and he came to therapy. What are your best tools from our talking? What’s the first thing you would notice that would let you know that everything is getting better? And like a traditional Solution Focused therapy session. I saw him, I don’t know, five times or so. I think his wife did come to a few sessions, which is why I can’t remember if the whole point was couples therapy or whatever. But anyway, I did meet him and his wife.

So after three, four, five sessions, he comes back and tells me everything is great, my life is completely transformed and this is going to be our last session. I don’t think I need to come back. Like he said. He just starts telling me all these things. And then he said something that really stuck with me.

He said, you’re an amazing therapist. That’s not the part that stuck with me, but he said, you’re an amazing therapist, you want to know why? And I said, man, thank you so much for saying that. I really appreciate it. I’d work really hard to be good at this and I would love to hear what you think about what makes me successful.

And he said, you’re impossible to lie to. And I thought that was a strange thing. And I’ve never heard anybody say that to me before. In fact, I’ve been lied to lots of times in my life. So I was like, what makes you say that? And he said, I’ve been in therapy lots of times and most of the time you go to therapy and the first thing the therapist asks is what brings you in today? And tell me about your childhood. And whenever someone asks you those kind of questions, tell me about your childhood, you have to think, how much of my childhood do I want to disclose? Am I ready for this person to know this? And by the way, that’s a really great example of why clients lie.

If I, Elliot Connie, well known psychotherapist, 48 year old functioning adult, if I went to a therapy session, that therapist said, tell me about your childhood, I’m not sure I would immediately tell you about how horrible some of the experiences I had with my father were. I don’t know if I would immediately be comfortable going there. The first thing I have to decide is, do I trust you enough to hear this information? And if I give you this information, what might you do?

So this guy is basically saying that, like, you know, I’ve been in therapy before and they say, what brings you in today? And tell me about your childhood. How often do you drink, smoke, use drugs, like all these things? And he said, those are real hard conversations. I don’t enjoy them. He said, with you, you’re really hard to lie to because from the very first question you would say, “What are your best hopes from our talking?” And I found myself thinking, wow, this guy just asked me about hope. And somehow telling you about my hope made me more hopeful. So instead of wondering, can I trust this guy with this thing? It was like, oh, I want to tell him about my hopes because it makes me more hopeful.

But then the other thing, and this is the part that really stuck with me. He said, those other therapists, I knew, they were asking me about my problem, trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I didn’t know why you were asking me these questions. And in order to formulate a lie, I have to know what you’re trying to get so that I can intentionally give you something else. Right?

With you, I didn’t really know where you were going, so I can’t really tell a lie because you only lie when you know what someone is after. So then you intentionally mislead them. With you, I didn’t know what you were after, so I couldn’t then intentionally mislead you. And I just was like, wow, this really highlights the impact of doing Solution Focused work on a client. They feel safer, they get more hopeful, and thus they don’t have to hide things. And even if they did, there is no point in me trying to figure it out. My only job is to earn their trust.

I’m not telling you no client has ever lied to me. I am telling you that when the lies come out, it’s because the client decided that I was worthy of their trust. And that is the whole point in therapy.

So when I said this on the panel, everybody was just shocked that I was saying it, but I was so confident and resolute in what I was saying that I could see in the comments section (this is a thing that happened online), I could see in the comments section, everybody was like, oh, my God, I’ve never thought about that that way.

And that’s what made me want to make this video for you. So. So what do we do when we think a client is being deceptive? Or what do we do with clients who are lying? Nothing. It’s none of our business anyway. Peace.