Lying Part II

 

“When I left your office last time I was thinking that I’d go home and confess to my Mom that I really hadn’t wanted to kill myself,” David begins immediately. “But that’s not what happened. My Mom had called my Dad and he was there when I got home. He wasn’t happy. He asked me what kind of shit I was pulling, why I had to scare my Mom, that he knew I was just bullshitting and I better knock it off and he wasn’t paying for any wimpy therapy. My Mom jumped in and said she would pay for it, that if her son even had a fleeting notion of killing himself, she was going to be sure he got help. My father exploded. Told her she was an idiot. That she was making me a Momma’s boy and that he didn’t want anything to do with either of us. Then he stormed out of the house.”  

“Wow! I’m sorry David.” 

“I was shaking. I did tell her I liked you and that I promised I wouldn’t kill myself. I asked if she’d really pay for therapy, even if Dad refused and screamed and yelled. She said she would, but I was scared all week it wouldn’t happen. But I’m here!” he says with an almost-smile. “My Mom gave my father the cold shoulder all week and my father hardly said a word to me, but something must’ve worked.”

“And how did all that make you feel?”

“Scared, really scared.”

“I certainly can understand that. But I imagine you must have felt really angry with your father. And how did you feel about your Mom sticking up for you?”

“I was surprised.” Pause. “I guess I really scared her last week,” he says with a sly grin.

“So you’re pleased that you scared her, helped get her in your corner.”

“Oh no, I wouldn’t say that. I don’t want to scare my Mom.”

“Maybe part of you doesn’t want to scare your Mom, David, but I wonder if that’s completely true of all of you. You said last week you were angry at your Mom for always going over to your Dad’s side. But this was one time she didn’t. You won. You told her you wanted to kill yourself and that did it! She was staying on your side.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s true.” Pause. “But that makes me feel bad.”

“I think you do feel bad about being angry, David, particularly at your Mom. That’s why I said last time that I thought your lying was a way for you to express your anger. It’s a way of getting back at her for not always being in your corner.”

“Oh! Now I get it.” Pause. “But it’s not like I feel angry and then deliberately decide I’m going to lie to my Mom to get back at her. Usually I lie to make her feel better.”

“But is that really genuinely making her feel better, David? If you got an A+ on a paper and told her you got an A+ on a paper that would be genuinely making her feel better. But if you got a C on a paper and told her you got an A+ that would be putting one over on her, telling her she can’t make you study more or do better than you want to and that you resent the pressure she puts on you.”

“How did you know that? How did you know that I resent the pressure she puts on me?”

I smile. “I didn’t know that, David. I was actually just making it up but I think it’s pretty common for adolescents to resent the pressure their parents put on them.”

“I guess,” he says, sullenly.

“What’s going on David?”

“What?”

“I don’t know, you sounded unsure.”

Silence.

“Oh. Do you think I’m lying to you? You think what? That your mother told me that she put pressure on you to do better in school?”

Silence.

“I guess that’s a problem with lying, David, you end up assuming that everyone lies to you too. I promise you, I will never, ever lie to you, even if telling the truth is difficult or hurtful. Therapy necessitates openness and honesty and that’s hugely important to me.”

“Okay.”

“Sounds like that means ‘okay, I’ll try to believe you.’ Let me also say, David, that if your Mom or Dad ever contacts me I will tell you that they did and will tell you what they said. And I’d tell them I was going to tell you before they spoke to me.”

“Really? That sounds pretty good. So there would be no secrets?”

“No, no secrets. Oh, I should say if you told me you were going to hurt yourself and I believed that was a real possibility, I would contact your Mom.”

“I get that. That’s okay. I’m not going to kill myself.”

“I’m very glad to hear that.”  

Suspicion

I have been seeing John for a little over a month. He is a reluctant patient: removed, distanced, openly skeptical that therapy can be of help. “I’ve tried it before. I can’t see how talking makes a difference. So what if I understand myself? It doesn’t mean that will make me different.”

John, now 60, grew up on a Midwestern farm with an alcoholic father and a depressed mother, neither of whom had the time nor inclination to pay attention to their son. John always knew he wanted out; always knew he wanted more. And he succeeded, at least financially. He started out acquiring small, undervalued properties and parlayed it into a now huge real estate fortune. Personally, however, John has been far less successful. He’s been married and divorced three times, has no relationship with any of his children, and spends most of his time alone, working or following the stock market. My sense of John is that he is protecting himself from knowing the extent of his own childhood neediness, erecting a fortress around him that neither he nor anyone else can penetrate.

At the end of today’s session John takes out his checkbook and says, “Let me pay you for last month.” He stops, looks at me and asks, “If I pay you in cash, will you reduce your fee?”

I’m startled. The session is over. No time to ask what this question means to him; what he’d think of me if I said, yes; what he’d think of me if I said, no. “I’m not comfortable with that,” I reply. He nods, writes out a check, hands it to me and leaves.

I am bothered and discomforted. Although I have other patients to see, John intrudes into my thoughts for much of my day. Why did he ask me that question? Is it just that he sees himself as a shrewd businessman, bargaining over his fee as he would a piece of property? Does he feel that everything and everyone is for sale? Was he testing me? And then a strange thought occurs to me, was this a set-up? Was he hired by someone to entrap me, to see if I’d be willing to take cash and not declare the income? What a crazy thought, I tell myself; a paranoid thought that’s completely out of character for me. 

At the end of my day, I’m finally free to explore the possible meanings of both my patient’s question and, more importantly, my own thoughts. It’s clear that my patient has profoundly affected me. He has intruded himself into my mind in a way that has resulted in my thinking inordinately about him, as well as thinking in an unusually suspicious manner.

So what might have happened here? My assessment of John is that he is consciously aware of his own distrust, but totally unaware of his own neediness. In therapy, the boundary between patient and therapist can be fluid, such that the patient can unconsciously prompt the therapist to experience feelings the patient himself may not be aware of. Today’s interaction with John left me feeling suspicious, like John himself, as well as preoccupied with him, raising the possibility that John may have unconsciously communicated to me his need to have me both think about him and feel as he does.    

But I’m not an empty shell that a patient can just put feelings into. What was my contribution to this interaction? Although I am not aware of being consciously tempted by John’s proposal, I also know that I too have an unconscious and, by definition, the unconscious is unconscious. Perhaps an unknown part of me was tempted, felt guilty and then needed to punish myself by imagining that I would be caught and punished for my transgression.   

In our next session, although I doubt John will gain much awareness from the discussion, I raise the issue of why he asked if I’d lower my fee for cash and how he felt about my declining.

He shrugs. “It never hurt to try. Thought it could be a good deal for both of us.”

“But is this about a deal, John, or is about a relationship?”

“I pay you, don’t I?”

“Yes, you pay me. And we’re still two people relating to each other, sometimes about really important and painful feelings and experiences.”

He shrugs again. “No big deal.”

Last week’s experience comes into my mind: John denying his need, while “taking over” my mind. “That’s where I’d disagree, John. I’d say you are a big deal, so that anything that pertains to you and anything that happens in this room is of utmost importance.”

John stares at me quizzically. I’d guess he’s not sure he believes me. I’d guess we have a long, long way to go. 

Why Am I Coming?

“Why am I coming here?” Albert says as soon as he sits down. A depressed, distanced 58 year old man I have seen for two months, Albert is a difficult person to relate to.

He continues. “Nothing’s going to change. I’m never going to find a woman to be with. My two sons are going to continue ignoring me. I’ll never have friends and if I do they’ll always want something from me. It’s never going to change.”

Aware of feeling some anger at this litany of complaints I ask, “Do you feel angry when you say all that? Do you feel angry at me for not being able to make those things change?”

“What’s the point of being angry? They’re just not going to change.”

My anger inches upward. “Anger doesn’t necessarily have a point. It’s something you feel. Are you aware of feeling angry with me if I can’t help you change what you want changed?”

Albert shrugs. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

I have to agree. Time to change course.

“You’re right, Albert, I can’t bring women or friends into your life. I can’t change how your sons treat you. But are there things inside you you’d like to change? Things that perhaps make it more difficult for you to relate to people or for them to relate to you.”  

“What kinds of things?”

“Well, you don’t seem to present yourself as someone who’s warm and friendly. You seem aloof, removed, perhaps angry, suspicious.”

“I have reason to be suspicious. When you make the kind of money I’ve made you have to know there are all kinds of gold-diggers out there. It’s not like my ex-wife didn’t take me to the cleaners. And my sons were always hitting me up for money. That’s all I was good for as far as they were concerned.”

“I’m not saying you don’t have reason to be suspicious or that you haven’t been taken advantage of, but I wonder if now you don’t use those reasons as an excuse, an excuse to keep yourself away from people, an excuse to protect yourself from being hurt, an excuse so that you don’t have to be vulnerable.”

“Damn right! Why would I want to be vulnerable?”

Feeling as though I am hitting my head against a brick wall, I say, “Because unless you’re vulnerable, unless you allow yourself to get close to people you live a very lonely, isolated life.”

“That’s how it’s always been,” Albert says, some of the edge gone from his voice.

Taking some hope from this change in voice tone, I say, “Tell me how it always was.”

“I already told you. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, a farm in Iowa for God’s sake, with parents who barely spoke English. I wore these clothes my mother made me because we were dirt poor, got laughed at school, did horribly, played hooky. It’s a miracle I ever got through. But I showed them. I showed them all. I made it bigger than all of them put together!”

Albert is back into his anger, the brief softer quality, gone. This time, however, I find myself feeling sad rather than angry. “Albert, for a minute, when I first brought up your living a lonely, isolated life, you seemed to soften just a bit, perhaps to be more aware of your sadness, but then as you talked about the deprivation and pain of your childhood, you went back into your anger.”

“So?”

“Well, that may be the question you need to answer, Albert. When you say, why should you come here, my answer is that you need to come here so that you can work on getting underneath some of your angry defensiveness to the sadder, more vulnerable person underneath. But that’s something you have to decide if you want to do. Do I think if we worked on that and you could find that more vulnerable person underneath that you would have a more fulfilling life? Yes, I do. But, again, that’s something you have to decide.”

After a few moments of silence, Albert says, “I don’t know.”

“I believe you,” I reply. “I imagine you feel quite torn. Your defensive anger has in many ways worked effectively for you for a lot of years. We can see how it goes. I know I said you have to decide, but it’s really not a decision. It’s more of a process, a process that ebbs and flows and we’ll ebb and flow along with it.”