Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / How Fear And Shame Turn Truth Into A Mask

Transcript

How Fear And Shame Turn Truth Into A Mask · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kim Lee, Child, an adolescent psychotherapist.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Before I commence with this first episode entitled The Psychology of Deception, I just want to say a very big thank you to the people who have downloaded the podcasts.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: This morning I discovered that in just 30 days there had been over 2,000 podcast downloads, which I am staggered by and also very grateful.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time I was thinking why.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps it's because I'm trying to talk about subjects that I think really matter, and perhaps the download rate reflects that.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Interestingly, a consistent theme that emerges is that of those people who have been damaged in their relationships in one form or another.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: In addition, there are a considerable number of you who have downloaded the podcast to do with disorders, development, and ways of helping your child if they're struggling.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: So this in total tells me that I'm speaking to people who want to listen.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that is very gratifying.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now the shameless plug.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: The In Relationship, the Parent's Psychological Journey audiobook and ebook will be available on March 30th.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's currently in recording.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: The manuscript is finished, and that means it listeners will be able to hear.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's going to be about six hours worth of my understanding and thoughts.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: And now episode one.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: In the preceding introductory episode, I tried to describe that the series was not about making caricatures out of people who are emotionally deceptive, or indeed the people on the receiving end.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is important because it's very easy when you're wounded and you carry the wounds of these kinds of experiences to switch into an attacking state entirely understandable.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: The problem, though, is that that's a state in which you can become stuck.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so the purpose of this series is to try and untangle the dynamics, the psychological structures.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the language may be a bit clinical, and I will endeavor to explain that as I go along.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: So when we talk about deception of this kind, we're not talking about lying specifically, but the deeper emotional and psychological processes that lead people to hide, distort, or reshape reality within relationships.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because deception rarely begins as a single decision, it usually begins as a feeling.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now the emotional roots of deception grow from fear, fear of being seen, judged, of losing love, or of not being enough.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: And when a person feels unable to tolerate how they might be seen by another, they may begin to present a safer version of themselves, one that feels more acceptable, more controlled, or less vulnerable.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: And at first, this may look like small things, avoiding certain truths, leaving things unsaid, or softening reality.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: But over time, the gap between what is real and what is presented widens considerably.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: For many people, deception is closely linked to shame.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Shame is not simply guilt about behavior, it's the painful belief that if you truly saw me, you would not accept me.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: And very often such people will have a history where they haven't been accepted, and where when the true self was seen, they were rejected, which of course reinforces the belief.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: So when shame is strong, the mind often protects itself by hiding parts of the self.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: And true reality becomes uncomfortable and truth becomes threatening.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Very often such people will be highly defensive, and at times they won't hear what is said to them, they will hear what they believe about themselves.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: But not all deception is driven by fear.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's driven by control.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: And in certain relational patterns, controlling reality becomes a way of maintaining emotional power.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Information is withheld, truth is reshaped, and perception is negatively influenced.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: And over time the relationship becomes unbalanced, one person holding the narrative, the other person trying to understand it.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: When the mind begins to relive its own story or believe its own story, it becomes so embedded that the person deceiving begins to believe their own version of events.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: And this isn't always conscious.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: The mind often reshapes or reframes reality to reduce discomfort.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: The person may feel internally consistent, even when the external truth is quite different.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now we in endeavoring to understand deception doesn't mean that we can excuse it.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: But it helps us to see that deception is rarely random.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: It reflects emotional vulnerability, defensive patterns, and sometimes unresolved fear.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I think what really matters here is that if we look beyond the behavior of the person who is emotionally deceptive, what we see is a psychological substructure which predates your involvement with that person.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I say again very often, people who behave in this way will have a history of doing so.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: They won't say that they have a history of being deceptive.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: They may very well describe a history of being deceived.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: They will very often have a history of broken relationships, friendships.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: They will anticipate that things will go wrong because somewhere inside them is an internal belief, albeit not conscious, that they're not good enough.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: And no matter how hard one tries to demonstrate to that person that that simply isn't the case, and even go so far as to be explicitly accepting of, for want of a better phrase, the bad parts of the person or the parts they think about.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't work because the person is not able to tolerate that part of themselves or those parts of themselves.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so they have to develop defensive mechanisms, and defensive mechanisms are about self-protection.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Sadly, when those mechanisms come into action, they damage others, hence the history of broken relationships.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, we can't change people.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: We might try, but we simply can't.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a somewhat tragic quality about being in a friendship or relationship with someone who is stuck in this way because they can't see what you can, and they can't accept what you see, because there isn't a place inside them for that to reside.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: This internal conflict is incredibly difficult, but nonetheless that doesn't excuse the behaviors, it doesn't excuse the patterns of behaviors, and many people will tolerate them in the rather futile hope that the individual will change.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, that doesn't happen.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: What tends to happen instead is that such relationships end, and the person who is caught in this incredibly damaging paradox will go on to repeat the same pattern with others.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: In episode two, we will take a look at what happens when trust breaks.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for listening.