Psychology.
Your Therapist Knows When You're Lying.
The value of knowledge and experience in lie detection.
Years of working with people in their most vulnerable state will teach you a few things about identifying deception, and a background in behavioural and neurobiological psychology will tell you why it’s happening.
Humans and lying are both far too complex to simplify with a few body language tricks. However, body language can help to signify incongruencies between what has been said and what one might be thinking or feeling.
Lying isn’t always a conscious intentional act, there are situations in which a person’s subconscious neurobiology, biases, and coping mechanisms prevent them from evaluating actions and situations realistically.
If you often complain about what others have done to you, it's likely a therapist will dig deeper and find out whether or not you’re capable of evaluating your own contribution to said problems.
Don’t let that stop you from letting rip on your life experiences, a good therapist knows your situation to the best of their knowledge and can identify when someone is needing to wholly express themselves.
If you constantly defend the behaviour of someone that is clearly causing you harm, your therapist will pick up on the control vibes and work on your core strengths and boundaries.
Therapy is great for airing out all your issues, but the ultimate goal is to help you work through them, manage them better, and hopefully develop skills to prevent similar problems in future.
Lie detection is more intuitive than objective, experiments found that automatic cognitive processes are activated when someone is lying whereas truth concepts are activated when someone is telling the truth, suggesting that lie detection requires less conscious mental processes than observing the truth.
Liars provide less information than truth-tellers and are less likely to elaborate when further information is required as indicated in two experiments conducted at an international airport where truth-tellers provided more information, could expand on that information, and offered checkable details.
The best lie detectors can pick up on a person’s emotions over their words and have background knowledge of that person’s patterns.
In the end, the most valuable information you can provide to your therapist is the truth. Bearing in mind that truth is different for everyone, unless we’re dealing with clear facts, the information given is always going to have a human and subjective component.
So, when you’re actively and intentionally lying to your therapist, consider the impression you're making about yourself rather than the information you provide because that will place your therapist in a much stronger position to support you and your mental health.
Thanks for reading.❤
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