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Story 1. Episode 2. The Cost Of Untruth · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome back.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kim Lee from the Children's Consultancy.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: And this is part two of the story that is entitled Living with Untruth.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: This episode is called The Cost of Untruth.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: But before we begin, I want to make something clear.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now the themes that is discussed in this episode, just like the last, are drawn from patterns repeatedly observed over many years of clinical work and across numerous families.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: So they're not really intended to describe any particular individual or family.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: They reflect common systemic themes and processes.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: And these emerge when unresolved, hurt, avoidance, and competing narratives become embedded within relationships.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: It is really quite saddening to see that despite all of the information available, some families remain locked in relational states which are ingested by children.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And people don't really seem to recognize this until the children themselves become symptomatic.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: And by which I mean they start to display behaviors which are seen as the problem when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, the behaviors are problematic, but the deeper truth lies in what those behaviors reveal.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one of the most painful things I've observed is that families rarely collapse because of one person's cruelty, for example.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: More often they slowly unravel because truth becomes subordinate to stories.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Stories about who is right and who's to blame and who has suffered more and things to do with who has been misunderstood.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: And over time, these stories can become so powerful that reality itself just disappears.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: And if it does try and re-enter, it's unwelcome.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: So frequently, both adults will occupy the position of victim, and according to one, they have endured years of neglect, coercion, criticism, and disappointment.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And according to the other, they've been misunderstood, unappreciated, controlled, and denied their own needs.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, neither of those narratives is entirely false or indeed true, because pain rarely lies, but it does distort.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: And often unresolved pain seeks relief by locating responsibility somewhere outside of ourselves.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And this isn't deception in the conscious sense, it's more a defense against shame and grief.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Defense against the unbearable thought that perhaps we too have contributed to the suffering around us.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so responsibility becomes externalized.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: If he was a better father, then the children wouldn't have these problems.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: If she was a better mother, then the children would feel more secure.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: So somehow the fault ends up belonging to others.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: And they say, if only my partner changed, if only my children behave differently, if only the school understood, and so on.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: And gradually everybody becomes a persecutor and everybody else becomes a victim.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the tragedy is that while adults are fighting over the stories, children are adapting to realities that nobody is naming.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so often one child learns that love and safety are achieved through pleasing others or staying quiet.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: And they can become anxious overachievers and become responsible beyond their years.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: They become sensitive to everyone's feelings and maybe terrified of getting things wrong.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Another child may carry the distress very, very differently.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Their emotional suffering becomes visible.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Emotional outbursts, aggression, school refusal, violence, and other behavioral difficulties.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: They may develop anxiety, depression, self-harm, withdrawal.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: They may move into groups of other similarly disenfranchised children.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, we have the possibility and sometimes the probability of criminality.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so eventually the professionals arrive in whatever form, all of them working hard and all of them trying to help, yet sometimes, despite enormous effort, little changes, because symptoms are being addressed while truth remains defended against.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Again and again the advice is given.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Work together, protect the children from conflict, stop recruiting allies, listen to one another, take responsibility, and yet hold positions very often feel safer than painful truth.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And what fascinates me is that over time, reality, and this is important, reality begins to ask questions, not accusations, but questions, because there are anomalies.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Things don't hang together.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Things said don't correspond with actions.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And professions of love that may occur seem to coexist alongside behaviors that wound, claims of protection alongside decisions that harm, statements that don't fit outcomes.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now the observing mind notices these things, not because it seeks villains, but because reality has a stubborn quality.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually outcomes speak more honestly than narratives.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: And this is perhaps one of the hardest truths of all, because the stories adults tell are often unreliable, not because people are evil, but sometimes they can be incredibly selective.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: They can essentially cherry-pick an aspect of an event and completely omit the context.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: And based on that one piece of information, a judgment is formed.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: This person said this, therefore they are, and so on.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: And this becomes a repeated narrative.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so therefore it becomes a truth.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: It is not the truth, it is a truth.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: But it becomes a truth by which the individuals live.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the problem with that is, if it's not self-evident, is if we put children into the mix, it might become their truth as well.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: And once it becomes their truth, then it lies in conflict with their own experience of the adults concerned.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: Is my father really a controlling, unreasonable person?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Are they really causing harm?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because that is what I'm being told in one form or another.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: And in some cases, it's verbalized.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's communicated and it can be communicated by both parents.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: When one parent criticizes another, either in front of the children or in private to the child, it is highly destructive because it is asking the child to compromise and it's asking the child to form an alliance with the person who is making the complaint.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: That kind of behavior is horribly disruptive, and it creates the most awful conflict inside children.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so truth does emerge, but not through arguments, through consequences.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Some children become so disruptive, so damaged that their symptoms become overwhelming.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: For some children, that's anxiety, perfectionism, emotional collapse, relationships that they just struggle to trust, managing their emotional states, being perhaps angry, and demonstrating that anger in other situations.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: So children become the repositories for truth or the truth that adults can't face.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the most important question isn't who was right and who started it and who suffered more, but it's something much simpler.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: What has happened to the children?
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: So what happened to the little girl who learned that she had to excel to deserve love?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: And what happened to the boy whose distress became so overwhelming that the agencies became involved?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: What happened to their trust, their innocence, their understanding of love?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because children remember what adults deny, and eventually outcomes expose what narratives conceal.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: Truth doesn't require perfection.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Truth only asks for accountability, not punishment, shame, or humiliation, but the courage to say, yeah, this belongs to me as well.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is a consequence of how I am and how I've been.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: So without that level of accountability, just suffering just travels downstream and children inherit debts they never created.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why psychological reality matters so much.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Not because truth is comfortable, but because truth prevents pain from being handed to the next generation.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the the again and again I talk about trajectories.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: I talk about what is what is happening in in the lives of children, what their difficulties are informing us of, where those difficulties are likely to go.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it it is it is really painful to see those things come to an uncomfortable and entirely unwanted fruition.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Very recently, in a family where historical conflict has occurred, I noticed that there was a reference in a session to the possibility that the young person might be self-harming.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's a direct correlation between this and the family context.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes hold unbearable conflict, and self-harming is a way of expressing the conflict.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Or do something else.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: But it was predicted.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: And not by me, but it was predicted.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'm really concerned about is people listening to those predictions, not just from me, but people learning.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: We do this work in a way that doesn't just look at the past, but we look at the future.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: And what we want to do is to is to try and help parents to see the future for their children and for their grandchildren.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because children take these experiences into adulthood and into the way that they parent.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean that they'll necessarily replicate them, but the damage that they hold will be touched by children because that's what happens.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so it is very hard to encounter these things to try and offset them, and not without a sense of failure.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's you know, at a logical and rational level, I know that I haven't failed, but at a human level it it really does feel like failure and loss, a loss of an opportunity.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I think, well, you know, maybe maybe it will balance out, or maybe things are just gonna have to get worse before there is a crash.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: But it is the last thing I want for families, and particularly for children.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: The children in this story, well, the story isn't finished yet.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how it will end or how it will develop, but what I do know is that the backdrop is is one of chronic chronic acrimony and conflict, and I wish I could have done more.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so I leave you really with the question I found myself asking countless times over the years, not who is to blame, but what's happened to the children, because their lives, more than any story, more than any grievance or argument, will ultimately tell us the truth.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: And truth, however delayed, actually is patient and eventually it speaks.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: And when it does, it can be very painful.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.